On a midsummer night, content creator Lisa Wahl, wearing a long denim dress with a white belt above the hip, approaches a rust-colored building just a few steps away from the Los Angeles River. She holds up a camera and begins speaking in a rapid but soothing voiceover: “If you love seafood and the flavors of Baja Mexico, you’ve gotta try out Loreto in Frogtown.”

LisaEatsLA

This is how Wahl, whose Instagram and TikTok account LisaEatsLA, captures the experience of eating at a restaurant. Before coming to a restaurant, Wahl scopes it out by reading Eater, the Infatuation, or even Yelp to see what the hive mind thinks. She gets an idea of what to order and what to avoid, though that can change depending on the chef’s or server’s recommendation. She always tries to get to the restaurant when there’s still natural light, but if she has to get there after dark, Wahl asks for a table in a quieter part of the restaurant so as not to disturb others with her lighting. Then she dines there, records all her videos from a phone propped up in the middle of the table, and edits them down to about a minute in CapCut, a popular video editing app for content creators. Wahl joins a cohort of creators using vertically filmed long-form video on social media to transform the way that everyday diners learn about restaurants in Los Angeles.

What differentiates Wahl is that she approaches restaurants as a lifelong Angeleno — someone who knows the ins and outs of mom-and-pop restaurants scattered across the city’s myriad suburbs but makes space for hitting the hot spots around town, too. Her primary aim is simply to share what she likes, a service to viewers and a real boon for restaurants that might struggle to gain attention in a crowded scene. Wahl takes particular delight in highlighting relatively unknown international restaurants in San Gabriel Valley or far-flung neighborhoods, following in the footsteps of the late food critic Jonathan Gold, who she says shaped her perception of food while growing up in LA.

Like other creators, Wahl will accept comped meal invitations from restaurants. But unlike some, she never takes money from small businesses to produce her videos or post on social media. On rare occasions, she’ll make advertisements with big brands like Fetzer wine or Coca-Cola. But in the end, Wahl only features places that she genuinely likes. She doesn’t rate places on a point scale and she rarely gives hot takes about what she’s eating, at least publicly. In a way, her cheerful, positive, but informative approach mirrors the bloggers of the late aughts and early 2010s, remixing the formula for what restaurant journalism can look like in the TikTok and Instagram era.

Wahl’s journey started over a decade ago when she became a hobbyist Yelp reviewer. “I started taking pictures of food because I wanted to remember what I ate, but what I really wanted was to be a Yelp Elite,” says Wahl. “That’s what a lot of people strove for back in the day.” She started posting more on Instagram in 2018 as a food journal for herself, but soon realized she was gaining an audience. “I never thought social media would turn into what it is today. Like, this is crazy to me, that this is a thing I do,” she says.

By day, Wahl is an optometrist, working either at home or out of the office of a South LA nonprofit community clinic, helping patients with their vision care and managing a team as an administrator. By night, Wahl dresses up for some of Los Angeles’s most talked-about restaurants, offering sleek, visually compelling clips along with her recommended dishes. At the new Izakaya Dongame in Echo Park, she holds up glistening grilled unagi (eel) skewers, recommending the restaurant’s “fantastic selection of premium sake,” as the clear rice wine spills out of a brimming glass and into a small wooden box. At Dear Jane’s in Marina Del Rey, she swoons while taking a bite of yellowtail carpaccio, which is followed by a mesmerizing clip of molten cheese and marinara flowing out of a golden brick of chicken Parmesan.

Wahl has become one of Los Angeles’s most prolific ungatekeepers, posting appetizing shots of steaming-hot volcano ramen in Downtown’s Kazzan Ramen, sizzling rounds of thinly sliced pork belly at Origin BBQ in Koreatown, or dipped bánh cuốn at Golden Deli in San Gabriel. Her usual setup involves three devices: two Apple iPhones for capturing photos and video, and a Google Pixel with cell service that’s her main unit. Before taking a bite, she flips up her wallet-sized LED light to illuminate her face, where she tastes the food, then smiles. A scroll down her account shows every other post as a portrait sitting at a restaurant, with either a dish or drink in hand — a checkerboard of smiling Lisa Wahls punctuated by thumbnails of food. She aims to post videos two to three times per week. “I don’t have it in me to do a video every single day,” she says.

When choosing places to eat, Wahl has a running list that she gets through, with some restaurants chosen based on invitations and others selected from places she’s read about in food publications. Though dozens of restaurants may invite her to have a comped meal at any given time, she remains very selective. “I go to a lot of places that I just pay for because I want to go anyway. I don’t base it off of places that just invited me, and I also don’t reach out to places for invites,” says Wahl. She mentions one recent invitation meal in Echo Park where the experience was so negative that she just paid the full bill. “There’s no way I would post about this. I didn’t want to accept a free meal, so I paid, tipped, and left.”

She considers the Echo Park instance rare, and usually likes to focus on the positive when posting videos. “Even if the food is mid, there’s always something good to say. I’m not going to give a raving review, but I might talk about the ambience or the cocktails, or how convenient the place is,” says Wahl.

She finds under-the-radar restaurants she loves to feature by driving through the wide boulevards of San Gabriel Valley, spotting newcomers or places she and her Vietnamese mother — whom she nicknamed “the Empress” — haven’t heard about. “My mom will sometimes find out about new places from her friends,” says Wahl. “But sometimes I get really lucky and find a place on Yelp. I’ll search for a particular dish, like bánh xèo, and something new pops up.”

Often the social media response on the smaller independent restaurants is bigger than the splashy new Los Angeles openings. After visiting Bánh Xèo Quán, a small Vietnamese restaurant in Rosemead, Wahl’s video received over 4,000 likes and 77 comments. Wahl shared her internal metrics on that post, which showed nearly 198,000 views and about 4,500 shares, astounding numbers on a restaurant that virtually no other food publication has covered in recent memory.

To get through a week of eating, Wahl shared her detailed Google calendar with me — crammed with dining appointments more than a month out. She runs through the last week of eating, an ambitious itinerary for anyone, let alone a bona fide content creator.

Thursday, August 1

Wahl had dinner at chef Nan Yimcharoen’s Kin Kan in Virgil Village for Thai-style omakase. This is what Wahl considers a “really creative tasting menu,” cooking Thai food with a little bit of Japanese fusion, and sometimes even Mexican fusion. “The flavors worked really well together,” says Wahl.

Friday, August 2

Wahl went to a hosted dinner at Lonzo’s in Culver City, where she had leche de tigre ceviche, lomo saltado, and grilled octopus with choclo. It’s a tried-and-true spot for Wahl, who used to live on the Westside and was a regular customer who came for the excellent lomo saltado. “They invited me back, saying they were struggling a little bit for business. That was an easy ‘yes,’” says Wahl. “I was already eating as a normal customer. They have amazing ceviches, and it’s family-owned.”

Saturday, August 3

Wahl ordered in a LaSorted’s pepperoni-hot honey pizza and just stayed home. “I like to air-fry delivery pizza so the crust gets really crispy. I’ll do a crust check when I get it — if it’s soggy or soft I’ll air-fry it,” says Wahl, who uses an Instant Pot air fryer attachment for the extra crispiness. “I also love LaSorted’s wings, which are some of the best in LA. Sometimes I’ll order a mortadella sandwich too. There’s really nothing like it,” she says.

Matthew Kang

Sunday, August 4

Wahl ventured to two places with her mom, first eating chicken pho and Hải Nam chicken at Pho Ga Bac Ninh in Monterey Park. “The chicken pho’s not as good as my mom’s. She makes the best because of the way she attends to her broth — it’s super clean.” Afterward, they went to nearby Hoa Phat for a pork loaf banh mi sandwich. “The meat is called chả lụa, and it’s similar to a meat in a đặc biệt (house special). It might be my new favorite banh mi place,” she says.

We have a discussion about great banh mi, where I recommend she try the đặc biệt at Hue Thai Bakery & Deli in Rosemead that my colleague Cathy Chaplin picked as her citywide favorite. Wahl’s video on Hoa Phat eventually goes viral too, drawing over 250,000 views on Instagram alone according to metrics she shared. “I ended up visiting a few weeks later and they were sold out — and they were pretty unapologetic about it!” says Wahl. Apparently, Hoa Phat’s owners didn’t recognize Wahl and just blurted “sold out,” when they opened the door, leading she and her mother to walk out.

Monday, August 5

Matthew Kang

Wahl worked from home, then headed to dinner at Momed in Atwater Village area for avocado hummus, wild mushroom manti, and a Porn Star martini.

“The ambience is great and it’s wonderful for large groups. Everyone loves a patio vibe. I thought the pita and the dips were super good, but it was the wild mushroom manti that I thought was pretty exceptional. It’s a great little neighborhood spot, but I don’t know if it’s destination-worthy. It’s definitely somewhere I recommend, and somewhere I would go back, and pay for,” says Wahl.

Tuesday, August 6

On Tuesday, she went into the clinic and had the leftover LaSorted’s pizza, crispy again thanks to the Instant Pot air fryer.

Wednesday, August 7

Wahl started with a strong Vietnamese coffee, skipped lunch, went to the gym around 4 p.m., and then arrived in Frogtown for our dinner at Loreto. Toward the latter half of the meal, as the sun was setting and while discussing the merits of Daedo Korean barbecue in Koreatown, she paused and asked me to take a picture of her. She smiles, holding up a glass of white wine, a piece of grilled fish still hanging at the end of her fork. The relentless content march must go on. “It’s a grind,” she says.

Returning to Bánh Xèo Quán a few weeks later, the owner recognized Wahl and her mother, saying the restaurant had received hundreds of new customers from the viral video. “She knew it was because of the video because a lot of non-Asian customers were coming in, who claimed they found out about it because of my Instagram or TikTok,” says Wahl. The owner tried to comp Wahl and her mother, but they insisted on paying for the food. Wahl and the Empress settled on allowing the owner to comp the drinks as a kind of “thank you.” “I love when I can help a mom-and-pop shop, and they get tangible results. It means more people who may not have known about it get to eat delicious food.”