Spend a few minutes scrolling through restaurant reviews on TikTok and a formula soon emerges: A sunny Sabrina Carpenter song and an even sunnier influencer invite viewers to tag along as they walk into a restaurant. A breathless voiceover introduces the location, along with a pithy fact or two, while rapidly cascading camera shots of the kitchen, cooks, and dining room flit across the screen in quick succession. Too much food soon lands on the table. The on-screen personality eagerly digs in — taking generous mouthfuls, pulling apart sinewy cheese strands — and declares everything universally delicious. All this happens in under 45 seconds — enough time to trigger a Pavlovian response in the viewer before the algorithm serves up its next flashy thing.

The production value of food videos on social media is certainly glossier than what appeared in the early 2000s, when Blogspot templates and point-and-shoot cameras ruled. Avid readers used to bookmark food blogs or use old-fashioned aggregators to alert them of new posts that wove restaurant reviews with colorful first-person anecdotes and gauzy photos captured in dimly lit dining rooms. “Back then, if you were to look at the Los Angeles Times or any major publication, they were looking at western, European food,” says Sharon Yang of Weezermonkey, a restaurant and lifestyle blog she ran between 2006 and 2013. “The early food bloggers opened the door to people who don’t always eat white people’s food.”

Early-aughts Los Angeles food bloggers traversed the Southland and its tangle of congested freeways to find captivating under-the-radar restaurants and share their discoveries with an audience that could number in the tens or thousands. For the most part, bloggers operated as independent publications — a single person responsible for the roles of reporter, writer, editor, fact-checker, photographer, webpage designer, and, often, IT service desk. Sheer satisfaction from telling the story of a memorable dish or uncovering a deep-cut gem in a far-flung corner of the city was often the only compensation. The Southland’s blogger community was part of a larger wave of personal blogs proliferating on the internet in the 2000s that covered topics like street fashion, celebrity gossip, and home cooking. More polished sites like Gawker, Jezebel, and Eater set the foundation for how blogging could be applied to mainstream media nationally.

“The premise was I was a white kid from Santa Monica who was raised to believe that nothing good existed east of the 405,” says Noah Galuten, who published the Man Bites World blog between 2008 and 2009. “What would happen if I tried to eat food from a different country every single day in a row? How long would it go until I ran out?” Galuten’s premise led him on a 102-day dining spree through little-publicized mom-and-pops, residential households, and most memorably, a now-closed Inglewood grocery store where three Ghanaian women cooked for him and a friend and joined them for a feast of fried fish with okra stew and “some kind of kenkey or fufu,” he says. “It got me to understand my city in a way that I never had before.”

Whereas Galuten’s blog captured the breadth of Los Angeles’s restaurants, Bill Esparza’s Street Gourmet LA chronicled its depth. “I’ve always tried to find people that represent the best of regional cuisine, highlighting Indigenous, Afro Latino, Mexican, or Latin American styles of cooking,” Esparza says. “I want that restaurant to be so good that when I write about it and tell people about it, it becomes part of the conversation of what’s great about Los Angeles.” Esparza was the first to write about the deep-fried shrimp tacos at the Mariscos Jalisco truck on Olympic Boulevard in 2008. He suspected it would be superlative even before trying the food when he saw owner Raul Ortega’s Mexican hometown and state — San Juan de los Lagos, Jalisco — emblazoned on the truck’s side. “If you want to find real regional cuisine, anybody who’s either shouting out their hometown, their region, or their Indigenous culture is going to be good,” he says.

No matter the cuisine, genre, or dish Angelenos searched for, an exuberant, obsessive blogger could be found writing about the subject during the first decade of the millennium — widening, as they clocked in significant car mileage, the scope of dishes and foodways covered by local food media. Many of Los Angeles’s earliest food bloggers felt especially motivated to spotlight the small businesses that dot regions like the San Gabriel Valley and South Bay. “I wanted to provide a service to the neighborhood, to let them know what was worth spending your money on and what was not, because even back then restaurants were starting to get really expensive,” says Pat Saperstein, who first published her blog Eating L.A. in 2004. “Even when Jonathan Gold was writing the most, he could only highlight one or two restaurants a week. I wanted to follow in his footsteps, in a way, but highlight more places.”

Food blogging emerged when Facebook was still a quaint platform to connect with old classmates, Twitter was in its infancy, and Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok were years away from obliterating the public’s collective attention span. These websites, woefully static in appearance, primed local readers to embrace restaurant reviews written and photographed from the perspective of earnest but uncredentialed enthusiasts — and effectively laid the foundation for the $21 billion influencer economy to come. “The early phase of blogging set the stage for influencing as we now know it because we got accustomed to the idea that we can trust people that occupy that in-between space: They’re not people that we know personally, they’re also not traditional experts,” says Emily Hund, the author of The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media; she holds a doctorate in communication and is a research affiliate at the Center on Digital Culture and Society at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication.

Hund says that the public’s distrust in institutions and the media in the aftermath of the Great Recession in 2008 increased the appeal of these seemingly more “authentic” personalities online. The term “digital influencer” replaced “blogger” in the collective vernacular when more visually driven platforms like Instagram and Pinterest emerged in the 2010s. “Platforms are going to come and go, but this practice of influencing, which is the idea that people need to cultivate audiences online that they can then leverage for personal and professional gain, I don’t think that that practice is going anywhere,” she says.

As the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and resident restaurant critic for alt-newspaper LA Weekly, Jonathan Gold was someone whose expansive palate and enviable prose brought Los Angeles’s many immigrant communities more concentrated attention — from Angelenos, out-of-towners, and national food publications. His immersive writing inspired Los Angeles’s early-aughts food bloggers to seek out family-run restaurants off the beaten path. “I don’t think there was another community that celebrated Jonathan Gold more than bloggers,” says Esparza. “Bloggers were his fan club.”

In that first decade of the 2000s, Gold became a singular voice on the city’s dining culture; his reviews were often required reading. Gold, who could have easily snubbed — or even rebuked — the food bloggers covering the same lesser-known spaces as he did, read their work with interest and sometimes even used it to inform his reviews. When Javier Cabral, then known as the Teenage Glutster, blogged about chef Rocio Camacho’s Moles La Tia in 2008, Gold took notice and filed a formal review of the restaurant in LA Weekly in 2009. “He gave me full credit for finding it, so that put me on the radar of a lot of other people and publications,” Cabral says. In another instance, Gold tapped Esparza for recommendations on a report about the rise of food trucks in the U.S. for the Smithsonian; Esparza pointed Gold to Mariscos Jalisco and helped fact check the story.

“He saw the impact and the value of having these different voices in different parts of the city who could discover new places and looked to that as part of his research,” says Diana Hossfeld, the blogger behind Diana Takes a Bite and director of brand and communications for Flour + Water Hospitality Group in San Francisco. Hossfield stopped blogging about restaurants in 2011 to avoid potential conflicts of interest when she transitioned from ad sales to public relations.

In 2013, Gold tapped Cabral and a dozen other amateur writers to serve as restaurant scouts for the Los Angeles Times, which was expanding its online food coverage and now-defunct Daily Dish blog. “That means more reports from the field and that means more bellies and pens — even Jonathan can only eat and write so much,” wrote Russ Parsons, then the Times food editor, in an introductory email to the selected individuals. Scouts were encouraged to file restaurant reports weekly and compensated $50 for their work. Short features and more comprehensive roundups of specific dishes or trends were paid $100.

While food bloggers’ casual banter and further-afield finds drew in Gold, many traditional media gatekeepers viewed this cohort in a negative light, according to Zach Brooks, the general manager of Smorgasburg who founded the New York-based blog Midtown Lunch in 2006 and its LA spinoff in 2010. “‘Food blogger’ at the time had a negative connotation for a lot of people in journalism. But we had an undeniable audience, and we attracted people that newspapers and magazines were not attracting,” he says. The original Midtown Lunch blog received 500,000 monthly pageviews around the peak of its popularity in May 2009.

Brooks finds the parallels between early-aughts food bloggers and modern social video creators undeniable. “I think everybody will have that TikTok creator pop up in their feed and be like, ‘Oh my god. Why is this person popular? Why are they talking about this? What’s the validity?’” says Brooks. “Whenever I have that thought, I always imagine what Jonathan Gold must have thought reading old blog posts — the sentiment probably would have been the same. The equivalent of a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer reading one of our early food blogs is like old-school food bloggers today looking at TikTok.”

Galuten started blogging while “filled with anxiety and stress about making a living post-recession,” he says, and was simultaneously working at a temp agency and trying his hand at playwriting after moving to Los Angeles from New York. His desire to write professionally outweighed the medium’s critics. “Blogging was stigmatized. It implies that you’re not credentialed, that you’re hiding behind the keyboard and shit-talking people,” he says. “As somebody who grew up wanting to be Ernest Hemingway, the idea of having a food blog felt a few steps removed from that.”

Still, by 2010, blogging’s popularity had caught the attention of the upper echelons of food media. Esparza, a longtime Eater contributor and the recipient of a 2016 James Beard award for his coverage of the city’s taco scene in Los Angeles Magazine, was one of several bloggers of this period to transition to writing for legacy media publications. Galuten’s byline has appeared in LA Weekly, Los Angeles Magazine, and several best-selling cookbooks, including Bludso’s BBQ Cookbook: A Family Affair in Smoke and Soul, which won him and Los Angeles pitmaster Kevin Bludso a 2023 James Beard Award. Saperstein parlayed her blog and journalism experience into a decade-long stint as the food critic for the Los Feliz Ledger and Larchmont Ledger. Cabral freelanced for Saveur and LA Weekly, among others, before serving as Vice Munchies’s West Coast editor and into his role now, leading the James Beard award-winning website L.A. Taco. Even Eater LA’s lead editor Matthew Kang blogged under the moniker Mattatouille before joining the website’s staff in 2014.

The Los Angeles food bloggers of this era were approached by national television shows to inform programming and often appeared alongside famous talent on-screen. Noodle Whore blogger Dylan Ho introduced intrepid traveler Anthony Bourdain to the pleasures of Sapp’s boat noodle soup for a Thai Town segment of No Reservations in 2006. In 2008, Cabral treated food personality Andrew Zimmern to homemade menudo prepared by his mother using a trio of tripe for Bizarre Foods. Esparza has curated the itineraries for multiple television shows since 2010, including Bizarre Foods and Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown. While Ho was not paid for his appearance, Esparza has received honorariums for his contributions on and off-screen; Cabral can’t recall whether he was compensated.

“We were disrespected and not appreciated, and there were people that complained about us saying that we weren’t ‘real media,’” says Esparza. “The only thing that I can say to prove them wrong is that all of us now are media.”

Compelled by an affinity for early food blogs and Ruth Reichl’s vivid account of being the New York Times restaurant critic as chronicled in her memoir Garlic and Sapphires, I published my first blog post from a Philadelphia high-rise in 2006 while working as a social policy research assistant. I named it Gastronomy to signal the point of view of an impassioned generalist and wrote a new post almost daily in its first decade. The blog traveled with me from Pennsylvania to Vietnam, where I introduced the producers of No Reservations to Nguyen Thi Thanh, my Saigon lunch lady — my name appears for a quick second in the episode’s closing credits — before settling in Los Angeles in 2008.

While I worked in communications by day and freelanced for local and national publications after hours, I wrote The Food Lovers Guide to Los Angeles in 2013. I even moonlighted as one of Gold’s scouts, shining a light on chef Minh Phan’s short-lived Asian Amish mashup in Hollywood and a Culver City modern Vietnamese restaurant ahead of its time.

The images I shot for my blog — I am a self-taught photographer using a Nikon digital SLR — led to a handful of professional photography gigs for local food brands like meat purveyor Farmer John and now-closed restaurants, including Animal on Fairfax, Picca by chef Ricardo Zarate, and Steve Samson’s Southern Italian spot Sotto. Normalizing the camera eating first may be my cohort’s most widespread contribution to this era. “During a time when no one was breaking out giant cameras at restaurants, there was bravery and courage to doing so,” says Yang. “Back in our day, it was a rarity, it was fucking weird. Today, if you’re walking down the street and see an influencer doing whatever TikTok dance, you don’t bat an eye.”

Before blogging gave voice to a community of amateur local writers and photographers, food and travel features in national magazines and newspapers were typically written by a seasoned journalist parachuting into a place for a few days, and edited to appeal to a wide swath of readers. The grassroots nature of blogging, in contrast, surfaced real-life accounts from locals who were already embedded in the scene. “It’s a first-person perspective from a regular diner, and I don’t think that the world had that before blogging because there were journalists and broadcast television, but there wasn’t really anything else,” says Anne Alderete, who wrote the blog Tuna Toast and is currently a restaurant publicist at FWD, where her roster of clients includes Michelin-starred N/Naka, Echo Park’s Tsubaki and Ototo, and others. Alderete transitioned from entertainment production to public relations in 2011.

The appeal of a “regular diner” providing an authentic and authoritative account struck a chord with the dining public. “Blogging got everyone used to the idea that there wasn’t just one authority on food and that it wasn’t just about what the person who wrote for the Los Angeles Times or the LA Weekly thought; that regular people also had valid opinions,” says Saperstein, who was a senior editor at entertainment industry publication Variety while writing her blog Eating L.A. “I never got to be a punk rock musician even though I was a fan, but [blogging] gave me my own little chance to do something punk rock and just do it for myself.”

The rules surrounding blogging in the early 2000s could be hazy. While some bloggers tacitly adhered to journalistic ethics and standards around conduct, gifting and compensation, and conflicts of interest, others subscribed only to gonzo hedonism. Most, though, carved out a space somewhere in the middle and made up the rules as they went along. “As a blogger, you were able to balance both in a way that traditional journalists can’t,” says Saperstein.

“When I started my blog, I thought of it as journalism and wanted it to feel like journalism,” says Brooks, who says he followed his own unwritten ethical code, driven by the desire to build trust with his audience. “I self-imposed these rules about not taking any free meals, not doing sponsored posts or anything like that because I felt like if the reader didn’t trust my opinion they wouldn’t keep coming back to my blog.” As one of three food bloggers hand-selected to partner with Foodbuzz, a San Francisco-based startup that monetized food blogs by wholesaling advertisements, Brooks was able to quit a full-time job at Sirius Satellite Radio in 2008. Hosting banner ads allowed him to financially benefit from Midtown Lunch’s popularity without compromising his journalistic integrity. “I maybe made $60,000 in that one year, which was a lot more than I was making in radio,” Brooks says.

It wasn’t until 2009 that the Federal Trade Commission required disclosures for blog posts and other social media word-of-mouth marketing. During this time, bloggers were often treated to elaborate multicourse media dinners attended by members of the press and orchestrated by publicists and restaurants. “People were recognizing the collective power that the blogging community had because we would frequently dine out together and cover our experiences quickly thereafter, there was an immediate impact that you don’t always see from traditional editorial coverage,” says Hossfeld. Following the FTC’s mandate that freebies be identified, bloggers could state within their write-ups the context surrounding an event, like who was on the guest list and who footed the bill.

Though the occasional free meal and food products were commonplace, many restaurant bloggers never dreamed of making an actual living through the medium; shaking hands with a famous chef or touring a kitchen after a meal were some of the more common perks. Website banner ads and one-off branding opportunities — “Toto Toilets once paid all the local bloggers $500 each to run an ad for a couple of months,” says Saperstein — could bring in a few hundred dollars per month depending on site traffic, but the funds were rarely sufficient or stable enough to be an independent blogger’s sole source of income.

“I distinctly remember when, years in, somebody offered to send me frozen yellowtail and I was absolutely floored,” says Alderete, who featured the fish in a recipe on her Tuna Toast blog. “I can’t believe I’m getting something free. It was so validating and I felt so lucky.”

As rewarding as it felt to shape my blog, see my byline in national glossies, and photograph trendy restaurants, these creative outlets served as serious hobbies rather than dependable sources of income. Photography assignments could offer a sizeable hourly rate, but freelance writing fees were dismal and banner ads never topped $1,000 monthly. Many of us writing at that time would not leave the first decade of the millennium with financially viable blogs — myself included.

By the early 2010s, food blogging ultimately lost its luster, as bloggers moved their work to burgeoning social media platforms (“Instagram ate the food blog because you’re able to share the same stuff without so much copy,” says Alderete); gained formalized positions within the food media (I joined Eater Los Angeles’s staff in 2018), public relations, or the hospitality industries; or just moved on with their lives. In the end, it quite literally didn’t pay to blog.

Hund, who has interviewed dozens of former bloggers and contemporary influencers in her research, has chronicled the shift in monetization over time. “Blogging was not really established as a career, so people a lot of times fell into it thinking, ‘If I start a blog, maybe people in the industry that I really want to work in will notice me,’” she says. “As the industry evolved and advertisers started to think, ‘What if we just advertised with bloggers [and influencers] instead of traditional media,’ then it became a viable career.” Over the next decade, as content creators, brands, marketing agencies, advertisers, and social media platforms grew hip to commercialization through product sales and sponsored content, the potential to make a career online became a real possibility.

“There is room as a creator to make it more of a business and not just a hobby or a passion project,” says Jessie Evans of Jessie Eats, who has 25,000 Instagram followers. “I think if you’re smart about monetizing and business-minded, you could make it.” While Evans sees the potential for profit across her various channels, a commitment to featuring only restaurants that she genuinely likes has capped her income to $500 a month on average. “It’s knowing your own morals,” she says.

The 31-year-old TikToker Kevin Noparvar, who has 3.4 million followers and is represented by United Talent Agency, shares a similar approach with his restaurant reviews. “I’m one of very few people who does not DM a restaurant before coming in for their first time. I make sure to pay for everything that I eat,” he says. Noparvar worked in real estate before making it big on social media and gets paid through partnerships with “bigger corporations.” In instances where videos are commissioned, he makes it “1,000 percent clear” in both the on-screen copy and accompanying caption of its sponsored status. He also refrains from rating the establishment to provide further differentiation from places that he personally seeks out.

The money exchanged between content creators and restaurants has increasingly blurred the lines between journalism and commercialism. Modern influencers can significantly monetize their social videos and posts, which has far-reaching impacts. Even with sponsorship hashtags, it may still be difficult for the average viewer to tell when these videos are commissioned work — a perceived lack of transparency that can seed skepticism and diminish the creator’s credibility. “It’s really unreasonable to say that everyone should have a sophisticated understanding of the continually shifting media industry so that they can parse every piece of content that they ever encounter and know exactly where it’s coming from, who’s paying for it, and what the strategy behind it is,” says Hund. “I have a PhD in this and it still took me years to understand.”

Even with the Federal Trade Commission’s updated guidance on how to disclose sponsored content, teasing out instances of pay-to-play from genuine critical review continues to be a challenge, both for audiences and small business owners who may be unaware of the inner workings of the influencer economy. “I cover a lot of marginalized communities, Mexican and Central American communities, and the first question they ask is, ‘How much is this going to cost me?’” says Cabral, who adds that the pay-for-play aspects of the influencer economy are why he doesn’t frequently engage with their work.

Food bloggers, though at times taken less seriously as legitimate sources for food recommendations, weren’t subject to the same level of harsh criticism around pay-for-play culture as influencers who are accused, for all intents and purposes, of extorting restaurants for consequential reviews. “With influencers, it’s really a business. They’re going to places that have budgets and can afford to pay their fees,” says Esparza. “We were going to places because we thought it had great food.”

Noparvar, who creates social media videos under his handle @how.kev.eats, can change the fortune of a restaurant overnight with a minute-long video. Since posting positive reviews of Easy Street Burgers in Studio City and South Philly Experience on West Pico Boulevard, both restaurants have drawn steady crowds. “I’m thankful every day that I have a job that fulfills my soul in some way helping out small businesses,” he says. While Noparvar might make it all look easy — order some takeout, consume it in the seat of his car, assign a decimal score on a 10.0 scale — the reality is that competing for views and audience engagement in an attention economy is fierce. The capricious nature of the algorithm is harder to be responsive to than, say, optimizing a blog’s searchability on Google with a few keywords.

Food influencers like Noparvar need to constantly feed the algorithm to generate views, engagement, and ultimately, dollars. “Influencers are at a disadvantage in that way and have to constantly be on high alert for changes, try to be a few steps ahead of the game, predict the future, and position themselves to be successful,” Hund says.

Evans dons “5,000 hats” and is “hyper-aware” while dining out to capture the visuals and information needed to produce a compelling social media video. “When I’m editing, I can’t just tell a beautiful story of why I like a place. It has to have a first five-second hook because otherwise, people are going to scroll past it,” she says. “I can’t just use a song because I think that it’s romantic; I have to use a trending song because these are the elements that we’ve been told make it succeed.” She likens heeding the algorithm’s unceasing demands to keeping a virtual pet Tamagotchi alive.

While Noparvar no longer pushes himself to post videos twice daily — it’s more like five times a week, these days, he says — he won’t visit a restaurant unless he can nail down a hook for viewers ahead of time. “I’ll frame a video in the beginning in a way that I think might get eyeballs,” he says. “If I don’t have the intro on the day that I want to try the restaurant, I probably won’t end up trying it because I want to do the video justice.” Noparvar knows within 15 to 25 minutes of posting a video if the algorithm approves of his efforts. When a video doesn’t quite get traction, he’ll take it down, “remix it a little bit” by removing any unnecessary pauses, and repost, usually to greater success.

The brutalizing influencer posting cadence can sometimes flatten storytelling and spur sameness. “It’s not clear that the algorithm cares about the same things that we used to care about as food bloggers,” says Brooks. He acknowledges that “TikTok is hard work” due to the medium’s algorithmic quirks and emphasis on keeping viewers hooked for as long as possible. “It’s not the TikTokers’ fault that they’re doing what is popular. It’s what the algorithm’s rewarding,” he says.

Some former bloggers say they respect influencer work that meaningfully connects an audience to smaller businesses in the scene. Jessie Eats is one of Hossfeld’s favorite content creators. “You can just tell she has so much enthusiasm for sharing the stories behind a restaurant or a dish and that shines through,” she says. Alderete gravitates to Caroline Juen’s snappy TikToks on Love and Loathing LA. The TikToks and Instagram Reels produced by Lisa Wahl of Lisa Eats LA centered on Vietnamese, Chinese, and Thai food remind Esparza of blogging’s early days.

Brooks, who finds his work helping small businesses to succeed at Smorgasburg similar in spirit to the days of Midtown Lunch, notes that many in his blogger cohort began long careers in media, and still write about food, in some form, to this day; he can see the same longevity happening for certain influencers. “It’s all content — the medium has changed, the messenger has changed, but in the end, it’s people trying to find good food,” says Brooks.

Additional photo illustration credits: kevinEats and Cathy Chaplin.