The Culture of Influence

On Friday, Geoffrey Lee stepped down as executive chef from his San Francisco restaurants Ju-Ni, Handroll Project and Hamburger Project after sending a barrage of inappropriate messages to a local influencer. 

The chain of events kicked off when Kathleen Ensign who posts under katwalksf and katfoodsf shared a review on Instagram of Lee’s latest spot Hamburger Project, which opened just days earlier. In her reel she called the single Wisconsin burger “good not great” and gave it a 7.2 out of 10 and gave the original burger a paltry score of 5.1. Ensign noted that the smashburgers, which are designed to be thin and crispy, were “giving ozempic burgers.” 

Lee did not take kindly to the feedback and began posting on Ensign’s content and calling her a “disgusting fan girl” and said that “she is so weird, it seems unstable.” The SF Standard also reported that Ensign alleged that Lee commented on her weight but was unable to get a screenshot of the message before he edited it. Lee denied the claim. 

There is no defense for Lee’s behavior, and there was certainly nothing gained by it. But this episode highlighted the tenuous relationship between chefs and influencers, and as a blogger and someone who has practiced journalism, it got me thinking about how creators exercise their influence and more generally how we consume that content. 

It is hard to be a small business owner. And it is very hard to be a restaurant owner. But it is extremely hard to be a restaurant owner in a place like San Francisco. The average profit margins for a restaurant is 3-5%, but chefs and owners have seen those further squeezed as the cost for rent, labor and ingredients have risen. 

Whenever someone opens a restaurant it is a leap of faith, and it is a small miracle when a place experiences some longevity. The impact of a review from a critic or influencer can have an outsized impact on a business for better or for worse. Given what is at stake for these restaurant owners, objectivity and fairness is the least critics and influencers can offer. That is why in general, I don’t believe in reviewing a restaurant right after they have opened and why food critics for publications visit a restaurant multiple times before offering a review. 

But social media has changed the game and expediency is often rewarded over quality of content. And when the currency that influencers are trading off of is likes and comments, entertainment and engagement ends up being the temple they worship at. 

While hardly the first to introduce the concept of a rating system, Dave Portnoy popularized it with his ‘One Bite’ pizza reviews for Barstool Sports. For the uninitiated, he orders a cheese pizza from the location he is reviewing and then offers a score on a scale from 0-10 with most scores ending with a decimal (because apparently whole numbers are rookie scores). With the popularity of his series, copycats have followed with their own shoot from the hip ratings of restaurants. 

While it may make for entertaining content, these arbitrary rating systems with no explanation of the scoring system and how they arrived at it aren’t actually making audiences more educated. If done correctly, critical analysis can serve both diners and restaurateurs, but in many cases influencers don’t possess any credentials for the topics they cover nor are they bound to any journalistic standards. So influencers offer an opinion and to what degree it is informed can vary. 

During my stint in food journalism, I saw firsthand that influencers were often given the same credence and access as journalists. With many wielding thousands of followers on social media platforms compared to my measly hundreds it is arguable who had more ‘influence’ in that situation. 

While journalism is facing its own credibility issues, as a whole, there are still editorial guidelines that dictate what you can and cannot accept from a business, how you present information objectively (to the extent humanly possible) and how to apply rigor through research and fact checking. 

A journalist’s oath is to the truth, but who an influencer is serving can get muddied by the fact that they may have a partnership and/or are receiving free items in exchange for reviews or content placements. (It is worth noting that there are some influencers who are committed to objectivity and maintain proper boundaries between the businesses that they cover.) 

Food influencers may be more innocuous than say unlicensed health influencers, but it does say something more broadly about what we are feeding our brain and our desire for entertainment over information. And in the same way we think about a balanced diet for our body, it might serve all of us well to think about information and what we are putting into our mind.