For some restaurant owners, there is a time when the hype machine runs out of gas.

A few months ago, I had one of the best bites of my life. It was japchae, the Korean sweet potato noodle dish, eaten out of a takeout container, peppery and stuffed to the brim with julienned carrots, roasted shiitake mushrooms, marinated onions, and fresh arugula. It was light but hearty, comforting but not greasy—a truly perfect bite. And I’m not going to tell you where I got it.

I bought it from a big white farmhouse surrounded by lush green gardens on a cul-de-sac in a quiet neighborhood in a small town somewhere between New York City and Albany. There, a 70-year-old former translator who wishes to be known only by her first initial, “I,” has converted her garage into a vibrant farm stand. There are tables brimming with fresh herbs and veggies: curved Chinese eggplant, chard with leaves the size of elephant ears, bright yellow tomatoes, sweet-smelling peaches, bundles of garlic bulbs hanging to dry, and purple and green perilla leaves that she hands out freely. There’s a fridge full of Napa cabbage, daikon, and garlic chive kimchis and pickled ginger, plus an assortment of prepared foods—kimbap, bindaetteok (mung bean fritters), and the stunning japchae. Everything here is made by I and grown in her garden.

It’s difficult work for the one-woman show; she is often outside at 5 a.m., sowing seeds, weeding, or harvesting, and she spends weeks preparing for the two weekends a month she is open. The japchae alone takes eight hours to make—I hand-grinds organic sesame seeds and turns the mushrooms every four minutes while they slow-roast for hours. Her cooking is craftsmanship, with keen and careful attention given to every ingredient. For now, I isn’t looking for more of anything. “I can barely keep up with my usual clients,” she says.

So I’ll keep my promise: the location of this flawless dish will remain a secret.

There is something refreshing about I’s acceptance of her limitations. She isn’t looking to grow her business, and, of course, she does not have to contend with the burden of New York City rent or sustaining a workforce. But in today’s food world era of abundant options and opinions—restaurants thirsting to go viral, and social media creators eager to share their “discoveries”—there’s a constant, buzzing churn toward more. My TikTok algorithm and Instagram feed are filled with an endless stream of restaurant recommendations, more often based on photogenic cheese pulls or gimmicky fusions than on the stories of the people who made the dishes or the culinary context from which they come. The rushing river of “places to try” content is exciting, but it can be exhausting and overwhelming, representing a capitalistic overindulgence that often prioritizes quantity over craft. It makes I’s desire to fly under the radar feel welcome, even noble.

At the same time, the power these videos hold can be life-changing.

“We kind of owe our whole business to social media,” says Ashley Coiffard, co-owner of the popular Brooklyn bakery L’Appartement 4F. “To this day, we haven’t paid for any advertising.”

Coiffard and her partner, Gautier, started baking sourdough bread and French croissants in their apartment in early 2020, posting pictures and videos to Instagram—shots of their croissants, baguettes, and gooey chocolate chip cookies, sunlit and sitting on linen tablecloths or speckled ceramics, with lilies or vintage candlesticks nearby and Brigitte Bardot or Édith Piaf playing in the background. Even amid the COVID pandemic, word of their (truly excellent) baked goods—and, perhaps, the allure of their expertly crafted aesthetic—spread, and then “it took on a life of its own,” Coiffard recalls. Quickly, theirs was considered a must-try croissant in the city.

One particularly impactful moment for L’Appartement 4F came with the creation of their croissant cereal—miniature crisp croissants, coated in a cinnamon sugar syrup and made to be eaten in milk, priced at $50 per bag due to their high labor cost. Coiffard says they had the idea for the cereal when they were trying to raise money for their brick-and-mortar bakery, which would eventually open in May 2022. She didn’t expect the cereal to take off—“We just think of ideas we would personally like; social media comes second,” Coiffard says—but take off on social media it did, with countless posts appearing featuring bowls of these tiny, aesthetically pleasing, hand-rolled croissants floating in milk.

One of those videos, which has over 340,000 views on TikTok, came from Sistersnacking, an account with close to half a million followers on TikTok and more on Instagram. Madison Vitale started Sistersnacking with her three sisters in 2015, but she says their platform really took off in 2020 when they were living at home in Connecticut together, cooking and doing takeout reviews during the pandemic. Vitale grew up in a “food family” and would often drag family members with her to try new restaurants. Sistersnacking became a way to put her passion for food, accumulated from her foodie upbringing plus “lots of Food Network,” to use. “I wouldn’t say we’re restaurant critics—we’re just girls who really love to eat,” Vitale says. “We’ve eaten at a lot of places, and I feel like we’ve built our taste buds from that.”

A responsibility Vitale says the sisters don’t take lightly is the trust they’ve built with their audience. Their success, while partially founded on well-filmed food shots, colorful writing, and tight edits (“that food porn stuff,” as Vitale calls it), is also based on the idea that people (myself among them) want to hear from them—they trust their recommendations.

In a world in which TikTok has democratized recommendation culture and taken it out of the ivory towers of restaurant criticism, attention is garnered in the currency of both aesthetics and trust. Sistersnacking has taken off because the sisters have earned this trust from their audience—by regularly recommending hits but also by speaking in the aesthetic language deemed credible on these apps. It’s a position of power when making one video can generate lines of people excited to try a new spot.

“It’s definitely a fragile place to be in, because you want to be honest, but you also don’t want to hurt a business,” Vitale says. Now, if they don’t have a positive experience, they won’t publish a video.

The sisters regularly hear from restaurants about the positive impacts they’ve made. “I speak to chefs and restaurateurs all the time, and they say it is a tough business to be in right now,” says Vitale. The sisters pay for their own meals and do not accept money from restaurants, and any paid posts are clearly marked. Vitale can understand a one-woman show like I’s veggie stand not wanting too much traffic, but in a busy city like New York, she says, “I can’t think of any business that couldn’t benefit from having some sort of social media buzz.”

At the same time, social media success can be a monster of your own making, one that can be hard to put a leash around and lead in the direction you want. “I’ll be the first person to say L’Appartement 4F is overhyped,” says Coiffard. “I’m not saying we don’t deserve the recognition—we just have a lot of recognition, and it is so hard to manage.” She knows a busy bakery is a truly wonderful problem to have, but it presents its own challenges. The Coiffards have had to figure out how to preserve quality while scaling up quantity significantly to serve the long lines they often have as well as how to adjust baking temperatures to deal with a constantly opening and closing front door. Gautier, whose background is in engineering, comes up with creative ways to handle this, Coiffard says.

But perhaps most important, they have had to give up some control of the narrative around their business. “We’re trying not to overexpose ourselves, but it feels like it keeps happening, with or without us.” She says that now everyone comes in with an expectation and might be disappointed if it is not met. She’s had to learn not to take criticism too personally, as it is an inevitable symptom of digital overexposure.

“I’ll be the first person to say L’Appartement 4F is overhyped.”

TikTok has exponentially increased the pace at which new food businesses are exposed, inundated, and evaluated, but this quest to uncover a diamond in the rough is nothing new. In 1979, John McPhee wrote his famous 25,000-word New Yorker profile of an anonymous chef he called Otto. Otto ran an inn outside of New York and prepared McPhee some of the best meals he’d ever eaten. McPhee writes that he had the fifth-, fourth-, and third-best meals of his life there, and, “When things come up so well, culinary superlatives are hard to resist, and the best and second-best meals I have ever had anywhere (including the starry citadels of rural and metropolitan France) were also under that roof—emanations of flavor expressed in pork and coriander, hazelnut breadings, smoked-roe mousses, and aioli.”

The article is a rumination on craft, a portrait of a person doing something they love thoughtfully and artfully. McPhee writes about how Otto holds his knife, “beyond the handle to pinch the blade”; about the kitchen blender, “old and bandaged with tape”; and about the intimacies of Otto’s culinary preferences. “When he makes béarnaise, he uses green peppercorns, preferring the stronger taste. When he makes bordelaise, he uses pork rinds, boiled until tender, in preference to marrow.” For McPhee, and presumably for his New Yorker editors, this portrait was enough. “He would like to be known for what he does, but in this time, in this country, his position is awkward, for he prefers being a person to becoming a personality,” McPhee writes. The chef knows “that if his property were invaded…with people who had read of him in some enameled magazine, he could not properly feed them all,” McPhee writes to explain his decision not to share more identifying details about the restaurant. “The quality would go down the drain,” Otto is quoted as saying.

But others weren’t satisfied. By the week following its publication, the New York Times had tracked down the anonymous restaurant, which was revealed to be the Red Fox Inn in Milford, Pennsylvania, and the ever-opinionated Mimi Sheraton had written a scathing review. Otto was outed, and the magic McPhee had crafted quickly vanished.

@sistersnacking Did we just find the best restaurant in Staten Island??? #sistersnacking #statenisland #nyc #nycfood #nycfoodie ♬ original sound – Sistersnacking

Both McPhee’s and Sheraton’s articles had their own value. Through his gatekeeping, McPhee created a mythology, painting a portrait of a place and a time that wasn’t about hype but about craft. Sheraton did a service to readers, uncovering and evaluating a restaurant of note.

I think the case against gatekeeping is incredibly strong. Using your platform the way Vitale does with Sistersnacking—to highlight things you love, support businesses, and spread the good word—is a generous act, one that helps place well-deserving establishments like L’Appartement 4F on the map. Vitale says she never gatekeeps—she is passionate about searching for exciting restaurants and spreading the word far and wide. I’m among the people who benefit from this service.

On the flip side, I believe there is also a case for gatekeeping. When I think of the Chinatown basement reflexology spa where I chat with my masseuse about his grandchildren as he presses the tension points on my feet, or of the Mexican grocery store with a couple of tables in the back whose owner texts me “albondigas hoy” when they have my favorite meatball dish, I don’t want to share them far and wide. It’s not because I don’t want to see these places succeed or expand their business opportunities, but because I think there’s value in relationships built on intimacy and shared with a few friends rather than born from a fervid desire to consume.

I like the idea of a hidden gem, one that doesn’t need to be excavated, cut and polished, and shown at a museum but is instead set deep in a cave, where only a few know to come and visit and appreciate its beauty. I appreciate a craftsperson like Otto or I, chefs who are content with the right people finding and admiring their work, outside of the “enameled magazines” or cheese-pull videos that entice our capitalistic cravings. It is an attention garnered in the currency of community and intimate preference. It might not have the same value in this profit-oriented world as the attention that comes from virality, but it’s one that I think is deeply necessary and increasingly rare.

“It doesn’t always have to be about more,” I tells me. She has had ample opportunity to expand her business, but instead she chooses to focus on the community she has built. She takes hikes with customers and shares details about her fascinating history. “I care a lot, and I love to make people happy,” she says, and she knows that taking things at a pace she can handle is the only way to do that. This decision, of course, comes from a place of privilege, one in which she doesn’t need to use social media to, for example, establish a business and earn a living amid a pandemic or pay New York City rent.

“I kind of miss when it was just word of mouth instead of running to social media. But at the same time, when I’m in a new city, that’s what I do—go and look on social media,” Coiffard says. “So, yeah, it’s a good and bad thing.”