How Restaurant Influencers Work w/ Stephen Buranyi

Today’s very special episode of the Vittles podcast is with journalist and editor Stephen Buranyi, who spent six months reporting and investigating the world of restaurant influencers for our Issue 3 cover story, titled ‘Who’s Paying for All of This?

When he set out reporting at the beginning of this year, Stephen, an experienced reporter, soon realised the London restaurant influencer industry was much more tight-lipped than he’d anticipated, more discreet ‘than the civil service’. ‘I found in general here people did not wanna talk,’ he tells us in today’s conversation. ‘I think there’s a sense that they don’t want anyone to know how this whole thing actually works.’

Eventually, he found people who would talk. In this podcast, we learn more about how those conversations came about, why ‘a lot of restaurateurs and PRs find influencers a little bit distasteful and a bit vulgar,’ but also why they rely on them nonetheless, even when they claim they don’t. He gets into the humans behind the characters that pop up in our feeds every day, drooling, screaming, and waxing lyrical; a largely male band of content creators who have, in many ways, become the dominant force in food media today.

We also examine the influencer industry as an extension of the advertising industry, and the problems both influencers and PRs encounter when influencers lose their audience’s trust. Stephen gets at the structural, algorithmic forces underpinning influencers’ past success, their anxiety about the future, where influencing might be going next, and - most importantly - how everyone is getting paid. We also delve into the reporting process itself: the shocks and surprises, what didn’t make it into the final piece and without too many spoilers, try to figure out how all this happened.

We hope you enjoy it.

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