Most food influencers have no expertise – it’s excruciating

Who is qualified to tell us where to eat? For the past few weeks, chefs, restaurant critics and food influencers have been in an uproar over this question. It kicked off when the influencer Jono Yates, better known as Only Scrans, appeared on the reliably juicy “Go-To-Food” podcast and suggested that restaurant influencers might need some kind of licence. His argument, broadly, was that we now have an enormous number of people presenting themselves as food authorities without necessarily knowing very much about food. I watched with particular interest because I have a foot in every camp. I’ve been a working chef for 24 years. I’ve written about restaurants and food culture professionally for newspapers and magazines for 20 years. And I am also, God help me, an influencer or content creator, or whatever we’re calling people who monetise their Instagram account. Influencers’ impact on restaurants is undeniable, and they have helped make food more accessible. But Jono’s right – many of them have never set foot in a professional kitchen and may only recently have had any real exposure to high-end cuisine. Shorts I appreciate how snobby that statement can sound. But as someone who has worked very hard to get to where I am – training at Leith’s, working at many a Michelin restaurant, launching my own businesses and writing columns in respected print media – it’s hard not to have my nose put out of joint by “experts” with no expertise. A few weekends ago, I’d been invited to eat at Kismet, the new Turkish restaurant that has opened bang in the middle of Borough Market. It was a Saturday and we were walking past, so we thought we’d chance our luck without a booking. That morning the lads from TopJaw had posted about it and there was already a queue, so we joined the back. By the time we reached the front, the whole restaurant was booked up for two months. An absolute triumph for the restaurant. A devastating shame for the clientele, but is it actually the win it seems? While the influencer effect looks good on paper, what happens is that the viewer now can’t get into the restaurant. But it’s all so fast-paced, so they wait for the next new hot place and lose interest in the place they’ve just booked. Often there’s a whole load of fans who move as quickly as these content creators can post. Very few new restaurants become stalwart in people’s lives. It’s all very Emperor’s New Clothes. Few people talk about the institutions that have stood the test of time, let alone revisit the same restaurant more than once. Nigella Lawson always goes to somewhere she loves twice in its launch – there needs to be more of this. Then there’s the relationship with PRs. Most restaurants pay for PR, and the publicist’s job is to get that restaurant as much important coverage as possible. Originally, that meant the key restaurant critics and food editors were always the first to be invited. Now it’s just as important to invite the creators who cover restaurants and food. And at some point it became apparent that some of these super-creators were worth paying. The critics, the old-school wordsmiths like Jay Rayner or Marina O’Loughlin, are paid for by their newspaper, meaning they can remain independent and tell the truth when reviewing. They are held accountable for their work by editors and editorial standards of whomever they are writing for, and by their readers. The relationship between restaurant PRs and some influencers is much more blurred. I try not to judge anyone for making money in this weird world; we’ve all got to make a buck. And I want to be clear that, as a writer, I enjoy lots of privileges and want to be clear that I will accept “invites” from PRs. But I don’t think it’s appropriate for any influencer to take money for a review. If you understand hospitality, you will know that it’s a dick move. Barely anyone in the industry is making any money at the moment, so unless it’s a big chain or restaurant group, you shouldn’t be taking payment from them. That’s not to say I haven’t ever. After Jono Yates made the statement about influencers, it became apparent that he had made a bit of content for Gordon Ramsay when he was at Burger King, something he admits to being paid handsomely for. I once did a collaboration with McDonald’s a few years ago. I was writing about sustainability and agriculture in food, and McDonald’s had started a new initiative with the launch of their plant burgers, where they were buying all the British veal and sending it out to pasture, then doing an ingenious plot rotation where they grew beans and peas for the fake meat burger too. It was genuinely revolutionary and I was very happy to be asked to promote it, something I never imagined I would feel as a liberal. The post was trashed, but I knew it would be. Most content creators don’t just shoot something and upload it. They are businesses and there are huge costs integrated into the running of them. But they do need to show responsibility and integrity in how they promote and talk about restaurants. An influencer’s review never considers the financial and physical drain most hospitality businesses are under at the moment – and you can’t support an industry if your intention is to trash it.