![]() I wasn’t looking for a bar that would be an experience, I’d hoped to find something nearby that simply served a decent cocktail. Don’t get me wrong, the search left me awash in bar recommendations, but where Google Maps would have provided me a wide swath of nearby bars at every price point, TikTok served me videos of frothing cocktails and elaborate interiors at bars that would no doubt be mobbed. A “cocktails” search reveals only recipe videos, and “cocktail bars” doesn’t bring up anything helpful either. I’d been to Mud Spot before, but didn’t know they were running the brunch special, which seemed like a great deal, especially for the area.ĭinner I have a longstanding reservation for dinner tonight, but as my friend and I try to settle on a pre-dinner cocktail spot, I whip out my phone to check TikTok. The video is over a year old, but somehow still ranks close to the top of all results, which wouldn’t be the case on Google where new content is prioritized in search results. It points me towards a Tex Mex-ish cafe called Mud Spot and recommends the brunch special (a coffee, mimosa, and entrée for $21.80). The third video hits: “Let’s go to brunch for less than $30,” the voice-over begins brightly over a shot of a sandwich on toasted bread, and a smiling woman walking down a sunny street. I can tell you from experience that pizza and garlic knots for lunch will make it medically necessary for me to take an immediate nap, so it’s a no-go. The balls of dough are drowned in garlic and olive oil and tossed in an enormous metal bowl. The first is a series of quick interior shots of the same Scandinavian spot where I’d gotten a coffee just hours ago-eerie! The second is a quick video of a local pizza spot making garlic knots. At a conference last year, Google senior vice president Prabhakar Raghavan said that “In our studies, something like almost 40 percent of young people, when they’re looking for a place for lunch, they don’t go to Google Maps or Search.” TikTok’s somewhat mysterious algorithm is weirdly good at recommending content that users want to see, and now members of Gen Z ha ve turned to the app as their search engine of choice. Cloudflare, a content delivery network, reported in late 2021 that TikTok was the most visited domain of that year, outshining behemoths like Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and even the former champ, Google. And TikTok is changing more than the restaurant industry it’s disrupting the way people use the internet as a whole. Whatever your opinion on the way TikTok and food culture have collided, the two are now inextricably linked. Recipe content isn’t always user-friendly, and it’s true that short TikTok videos often can’t entirely capture a restaurant's vibe. ![]() But for all the carefully shot and edited hacks, recommendations, and recipes that have appeared on your FYP (the personalized For You Page), how many can you say you’ve actually used? TikTok is undoubtedly addicting, but is its cooking, food, and restaurant content, actually useful? For some restaurants, the app is critical to success, and for influencers turned restaurant critics, it’s become a career-maker. The #restaurantreview tag boasts more than 1.3 billion views, and turns up an endless scroll of videos. Videos tagged #cookingfood have over 82 billion views. In between the bicep-flexing thirst traps, the historical explainers, the strangely dead-eyed dances, and the get-ready-with-me videos (should I not be revealing what’s on my FYP?), TikTok is flooded with food and cooking content. ![]()
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