Media Tasting in the Future of Restaurants

Recently I’ve been invited to a restaurant to check out their food in exchange for a reel or short video about the experience. As I glanced at the restaurant’s social media page, I found many other videos by other creators talking about their experience too. I saw a few other food concepts having the same strategy of reaching out to creators and asking them to post about their experience at the place. I find that the content gets slightly repetitive over time as people talk about more or less the same few highlights. But I know from the restaurant’s POV, this is a quick win to gather quick attention, tap on micro audiences, and hopefully convert them into guests at the restaurants. It’s also a low-cost marketing strategy because the restaurant just needs to foot the meal bill, while creators love a free meal coupled with maybe a small talent fee. It’s almost as if it’s a page of reviews like we see on Google maps, but now it’s on their TikTok or Instagram page. Good reviews drive business so similarly, these recurring short videos of different people would make the restaurant appear as if it’s consistently attracting people dining happily there.

However I like to propose something better. Consider the restaurant Fallow. It’s a casual dining restaurant located in London among thousands of other restaurants. I’ve talked about them before in my videos as they make great edu-tainment cooking tips and restaurant behind-the-scenes. Though I’ve never been to their restaurant before, after seeing their videos, I’m actually curious about how it tastes and I want to try it when I go to London next time. Many other viewers also share the same thoughts from the comments I see in their videos. It becomes almost as if they’re no longer just a restaurant anymore. Not even a restaurant with a social media page. To me, they’re now a media company that runs a restaurant because of how influential they are in the cooking space and chefs, diners, and millions of people look up to them for western cooking technique in an approachable way. But it’s been a huge investment for them to make videos and they obviously have a crew behind them (I saw their job listing before for a social media person to make more videos for them). But is it worth it? I absolutely think so and I’m pretty sure a huge part of their restaurant success is attributed to their social media channels. They started another restaurant in London serving casual British food and is doing very well too.

So where I see restaurants could do more is to make videos about their food. Every restaurant is different and has its own niche, but there are so few restaurants out there with a huge social media following. British or french food is already taken up for Fallow, but there’s none that I’ve seen yet for Malay or Thai. For Chinese, we love Chef Wang Gang for his friendly cooking tutorials and he frequently shows viewers how to make the same exact dishes he serves in his restaurant, but at home. Fallow does that too, inspiring viewers who’re mostly at home to make good food at home.

I believe the future of restaurants is in the media space. Restaurants today already cannot rely on just foot traffic or physical advertising to attract recurring diners. They have to get onto social media and compete with every other business for attention. As long as people continue to watch social media, there will always be opportunities to grab their attention and convince them to come try the food.