FoodTok has replaced traditional restaurant reviews. Are we forgetting how to really describe food?
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Somewhere around Hour 4 of a daylong dive into TikTok and Instagram restaurant reviews for a piece I was researching a few months back, I clocked the 200th use of the adjective fire, as an influencer in a Jacksonville Jaguars shirt sucked crispy-fried chicken wing meat from the bone in his car outside a restaurant. He declared the wings “perfection”—one of several vague, hyperbolic descriptors that loomed large in the FoodTok word cloud I had created, alongside game changer, to die for, incredible, and vibe.
As the day wore on, the descriptors lost all meaning; I found myself paying far more attention to the sound effects. The guttural crackle of candied duck skin between some guy’s teeth versus the open-mawed crunch of chicharrón that sounds like shuffling a deck of cards. One woman smacked her lips between eye-rolling murmurs of “Wow” for her first “life-changing” bite of toro nigiri in Tokyo. And I believed her, mainly because I could see that glistening heap of fatty tuna too.
Still, as someone who enjoys good prose as much as a transcendent bite, I hungered for a little more than wow. Amid the cultural shift away from longer-form food writing and criticism toward stylized, 30-second reaction videos on FoodTok, does carefully composed, sense-based storytelling still matter? What do we collectively lose, and maybe gain, as sound effects and hyperbole subsume rich, descriptive text with phrases like really delicious and stanning for this burger, utterances that don’t exactly kindle the imagination?
Take this passage from the late food critic Jonathan Gold, on eating live shrimp:
I have consumed thousands of animals in my lifetime: seen lambs butchered, snipped the faces off innumerable soft-shell crabs, killed and gutted my share of fish. I had, I thought, come to terms with the element of predation inherent in eating meat—and I am thankful to the beasts that have nourished me. But this was the first time I had ever come up against one of the most basic of nature’s postulates: You live; your prey dies. In order to eat, you must first rip into living flesh … not by proxy, not from a distance, not with a gun or knife, but intimately, with your teeth. …
I bit into the animal, devouring all of its sweetness in one mouthful, and I felt the rush of life pass from its body into mine, the sudden relaxation of its feelers, the blankness I swear I could see overtaking its eyes. It was weird and primal and breathtakingly good, and I don’t want to do it again.
Sigh—now, that’s what I call wow.
Look, it’s plausible that this elder-millennial journalist, whose food-writing career came of age in the loquacious blogging era, is entering her yelling-at-clouds phase. Or maybe I’m just a snob. After all, the conversational, opinionated internet is more representative of how people actually talk. And research indicates that even in influencer-land, there’s still value in sensory descriptors—adjectives like crumbly and juicy increase engagement and sales of sponsored products—even when the audience has shown up mainly for video.
But the odd shred of evocative vocabulary here and there is not the same; I miss the imagination conjured when reading about something that’s by nature visually stimulating. Why call a poorly made piece of lemon sole mid, fishy, or gross when you could dispense a verbal walloping, as British critic Will Self did in his 1995 Observer review of the restaurant the Ark?
The poor fish tasted of despair, of skull-flattening gusts of some clinical malaise. It appeared to have eased itself onto my plate, using a sinister lime sauce as a lubricant, and lay there enjoining me to schizophrenically incorporate its misery. Which I duly did.
I do see glimmers of hope in the great writer-owned food newsletter revival now underway, à la upstarts like Gourmet, Best Food Blog, and Ravenous. But can these fragmented voices command enough collective attention back from the sea of foodie visuals constantly washing over the rest of us?
A lot of the internet content we consume comes not from subject-matter experts, but rather from regular people with an interest in some aspect of society and culture who are reacting to it. Because we find them likable or just entertaining, we tune in to what they have to say. Or perhaps they provide a chatty, opinionated conduit to a restaurant or dish we find compelling.
As writer, content marketer, and self-described TikTok addict Tamar Wittenberg told me, “I don’t think the value of food influencers at all lies in anything they have to say. I could watch it on mute for all I care. It’s all about: What can you see?”
This comment teleported me to watching Dave Portnoy’s wildly popular “One Bite” Barstool pizza reviews. I started muting his chatty backstory or NCAA March Madness betting tips, up until he finally extracted that slice of Neapolitan or New York–style pizza from its box. I needed to hear only the faint crackle of the airy crust at his first bite to determine if I’d want to eat it, though I grew fond of his use of undercarriage to denote crust strength.
What’s fascinating, and harder for this professional food writer to admit, is that food enthusiast videos are working because, well, they’re effective—maybe more than flowery text and pictures ever were.
“It’s a step beyond the whole blogging-slash-Yelp era of finding restaurants,” said Grant Barrett, a lexicographer and dictionary editor who specializes in slang and new words. “I can see that the food looks good and is well plated and interesting, that the design and ambience of the room are cool; I can hear that it’s not too loud in there.”
In other words, these videos do what writing used to have to do through expertise and evocative descriptive language: bring readers along and enable them to taste food without tasting it. As Barrett put it, “I don’t need the reviewer to masticate it for me anymore like a mother bird.”
But isn’t that the beauty of food writing? Those lines of gastronomic foreplay that kindle our collective appetites for life’s fleeting carnal pleasures? That, and the savvy of a professional who has eaten “thousands of meals, maybe in the best kitchens on the planet,” and knows the techniques behind said dishes that Jill TikTok or Joe Instagram might not, Barrett said. “You can see I’m torn, that I still want to respect the expertise.”
In late 2024, food writer Cathy Chaplin, author of Food Lovers’ Guide to Los Angeles and a former editor at Eater Los Angeles, wrote a sprawling piece (fittingly, her last as an Eater staffer, owing to roving layoffs at the digital food publication) that draws a direct line between food bloggers of the early aughts and today’s influencers.
As Chaplin reported, 20-odd years ago, earnest, pavement-pounding food bloggers widened the scope of dishes and foodways covered by local food media. They warmed the public up to trusting voices outside traditional experts, while the traditional experts rolled their eyes at these unprofessional upstarts. (Sound familiar?) During the ensuing years, growing public distrust in institutions and the media carved out even more space for the know-how of the regular guy, who nowadays leans into polished videos and opinionated, relaxed language.
“After interviewing the old-school bloggers—including the proverbial old person shaking their fist like, ‘Stay off my lawn!’—I very clearly saw this was a natural evolution of technology and how we convey information,” Chaplin, who started as a food blogger in 2006, told me. “We are [TikTok super-personality and restaurant critic] Keith Lee, and Keith Lee is us; he just figured out monetization.”
Chaplin has found genuine value in the restaurant-discovery aspect of TikTok, which dutifully feeds her hyperregional microinfluencer reaction videos of brand-new spots in and around L.A.
“They’re getting places across my radar and early enough that I can go before there are crazy lines,” she said. “I appreciate that part of the internet. Once a place blows up, I’m kind of less interested in what people’s opinions are. If you watch a lot, it’s such a mixed bag.”
She tends to correlate creator virality with a decrease in narrative substance, “because I think they’re playing more on hype.” Thus enters internet-speak: “This is iconic!” “The room was a vibe.” “This is unhinged!” Journalists aren’t immune, by the way. Chaplin has edited her fair share of hyperbolic language out of Eater writers’ copy. Being a fellow elder millennial, she can’t really apply these terms without knowing their internet meanings. “What is ‘iconic’ anymore?” she called into the zeitgeisty void. Does it even matter?
Yet, even as it evolves, such hypercasual, jokey speech and semantic bleaching (the reduction in intensity of a word’s meaning, such as “awesome!,” which now means merely very good) always permeated spoken conversation and letters. Even so, this was largely invisible until the internet made it inescapable.
“The internet is just a huge, nice example of the way people talk,” Barrett said. “In strong-willed, outrageous cultures like America, and for example in Australia, varieties of English are interestingly very hyperbolic and tend to exaggerate in extraordinary, often hilarious ways to make a point.”
I literally have no clue what he’s talking about!
Still, words do matter, even for influencers, whose perceived authenticity can occasionally affect their bottom lines. Consumers distrust influencer marketing more than advertising, according to a 2025 report from the National Advertising Division of BBB National Programs. About 80 percent of the 3,700 respondents mistrust influencers who aren’t genuine, honest, or transparent.
As Wittenberg told me, “There is, for me, a direct line between how genuine someone is and how much I want to watch them.” But even as she enjoys the work of knowledgeable creators like Corre Larkin (aka @cocolarkincooks), who tackles restaurant-caliber dishes and meals French people cook at home, Wittenberg too counts among those mourning the decline of traditional reviews and longer-form food writing. She regularly reads the New York Times and subscribes to several food-leaning Substacks. (Tellingly, that newsletter platform recently added video.) But she admitted that it takes conscious commitment for her to read longform food writing rather than scroll her FYP for quick, food-focused pleasure hits.
“I really feel aware of the fact that short-form internet content is melting my brain,” she said. “Sometimes, I’ve really got to lock in to read a longform piece of content about food, which is bizarre because I read books a lot. But I really have to feel committed to doing it and divorce myself from the idea of instant gratification.”
It makes me wonder how many people are reading or watching descriptive food storytelling for sheer pleasure, especially when 30-second videos filled with stretching mozz and shattering croissants make it so easy to keep scrolling. Before long, our eyes glaze over like the milky gloss draped atop a pillowy yeasted doughnut.
For now, I keep piling up subscriptions to the likes of Vittles, new-look Gourmet, and Best Food Blog, starved to be mother-birded the descriptors that kindled my food-writing appetite when I first picked up Garlic and Sapphires by Ruth Reichl in 2005. Have you read it? That book, like, slaps.
