Social climbers: is non-stop content creation now what it takes for restaurants to survive?

The Guardian

23-03-2025

Will Murray isn't sure about the toad in the hole. In the soft gleam of a prep kitchen, deep below St James's in London, the chef-patron and co-founder of Fallow frowns at a pan of puffy bronzed batter and extruded sausages. 'Do you think we need to do it again?' asks one of his chefs, Emma Taiwo, approaching the pass. 'I think we need to do it again,' says Murray, striking an apologetic tone amid the waft of simmering gravy.
On the face of it, this level of perfectionism is not surprising – Murray and his fellow chef and co-founder Jack Croft both emerged from the fastidious, Michelin-starred environment of Heston Blumenthal's Dinner. What is unexpected is that the people this dish is being made for will never actually taste it. Next to the worktop where Murray and Croft stand, a three-person production crew fiddles with iPhones, audio equipment and propped-up wearable cameras.
That toad in the hole is one of 14 dishes being cooked and tasted during a day of filming for an 'Iconic British Dishes' YouTube challenge that will be beamed out to Fallow's 1 million subscribers and beyond. It's the latest in a long line of attention-grabbing videos that have seen Murray and Croft compare scrambled-egg techniques, turn beef fat into soap and replicate a cockentrice, a complicated Tudor dish. 'Yeah, that didn't really work,' says Croft.
Welcome to the weird and increasingly lucrative world of restaurant social media and content creation; a digital-age gold rush that has seen hospitality businesses of all kinds seek to transform their fortunes through Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. From the moment Croft, Murray and restaurateur James Robson launched Fallow, initially as a pop-up in 2020, they have been embracing the potential of a savvy online presence. What began with social-media accounts for their three restaurants (including chicken shop Fowl and Canary Wharf blockbuster Roe) has mushroomed into four accounts with millions of views a month across different platforms. They feed into an operation that employs 345 people (six of whom are part of a dedicated content team) and, in Fallow, has a flagship restaurant doing 5,200 covers a week.
Where once a restaurant's digital footprint consisted of some Instagram, a few dutiful promotional Facebook posts and a blog last updated during 'eat out to help out', now it is just as likely to be an ambitiously shot mix of kitchen documentary, reality show and meme-literate sketch comedy. Crisply technical, ASMR-style recipes walk us through the process of dishes (see Thomas Straker and Maison François's Matthew Wryle ). Day-in-the-life videos demystify the hospitality business and valorise tasks such as dough-proving and wiping down surfaces. TopJaw-style interviews thrust clip-mics into the faces of commis chefs and bartenders.
The result is a lightning bolt of virality and real-life restaurant success stories (such as solo operation Patio Pizza in Kingston; Bristol-born Sandwich Sandwich; and Spud Bros in Preston, the jacket potato tram turned TikTok phenomenon with 3.7 million followers). Internet culture, having given us Instagrammable interiors and cartoonish, phone-eats-first dish aesthetics, is now transmogrifying much of the restaurant landscape. In a 2024 interview with Restaurant magazine, Croft suggested Fallow's business 'might become a social media group with restaurants rather than a restaurant company that's funding our digital'.
The days when a chef's 'content' was limited to what they put on the pass are long gone – but what does it all mean for the future of hospitality, and old-fashioned notions such as whether the food is any good?
One of Fallow's formative social-media breakthroughs was born of a problem perhaps as old as restaurants themselves. 'Saturday morning service was always our slowest of the week,' explains Murray. 'One of our general managers said, 'Why don't we do brunch?' And, of course, every other chef is like, 'Fucking hell, we're not doing brunch.' But we thought: actually, that's a great idea.' After developing a menu, they posted photos of their new 'royale pucks' – decadent, drippy riffs on egg McMuffins, wedged between proprietary pressed croissant buns – to their Instagram. 'We sold out the brunch service for the next three months,' says Murray. 'It went from our worst service of the week to being 450 covers.'
Here was a measurable justification for the energy expended on an Instagram account. Boosted by the arrival of experienced creative director Joe Cowie, the Fallow team built on this proof of concept. Longer YouTube content followed, including a series of popular POV videos (the first has 6.4m views and counting) which featured GoPro cameras strapped to the chests of Murray and Croft in the midst of a busy service. The success of those absorbing clips, a kind of culinary Call of Duty, led to a couple of other lightbulb moments. The first was the discovery of their exact YouTube demographic (96% male and 25 to 45 years old); the second was a meeting with a YouTube department head who explained what worked on the platform.
'People interact with content for three different reasons,' says Murray. 'Education, access or entertainment. A pillar of our content is that it's educational.' This targeting forms the basis of the technical dish breakdowns and playful, YouTuber-coded challenges ('We cooked the best Michelin star dish from every decade') Murray and Croft devise alongside their content team. These are filmed every Monday, and put out on restaurant channels and the Herd Chefs account that is the umbrella entity for their virtual cooking school.
I get a closer look after Murray orders that toad in the hole to be remade. Downstairs, he and Croft taste and rate a plate of fish and chips as part of the British Dishes challenge; Cowie films and directs with two iPhones while production manager Russell Clamp supplies sheets of research. It feels like the kind of thing that might once have been an anarchic TV series.
'The idea of promoting your restaurant and a brand as a story is age old,' says Frances Cottrell-Duffield, publicist and founder of Tonic Studio, a social media agency for the hospitality industry. 'It's not that dissimilar to Jamie getting on TV or Nigella writing books. It's just that there's a brand new delivery system, and the scale is almost limitless because of the number of people you can reach.' Social media's tendency to prioritise scrappy honesty over gloss has enabled creators to go where TV seldom would. 'We view our specific niche as teaching people how to cook, being radically transparent and taking away the veil of restaurants,' adds Murray.
That notion of transparency is key. If restaurants have traditionally been predicated on theatre, and careful obfuscation of exactly what goes on beyond the swing doors of their kitchens, today's businesses are making a feature of how the operational sausage comes together. Fallow has turned explanatory videos about not wearing rubber gloves and the high mark-up on its £29 sriracha butter cod's head into content. Dalston's Dusty Knuckle bakery has used Instagram to provide detailed breakdowns of why prices are going up. Gina, the forthcoming Chingford restaurant from chef and Junior Bake Off judge Ravneet Gill and her husband, Mattie Taiano, has a companion Substack, which acts as both a crowdfunding mechanism and a diary of the process of opening a restaurant. This approach doesn't just reflect a TikTok-age prizing of authenticity and get-ready-with-me fascination about the minutiae of other people's lives. It also mirrors a cultural moment that has given us The Bear and Boiling Point, when there is a particular, alluring fascination with professional kitchen environments that can be harnessed into something transformative.
No British restaurateurs know this better than the founders of Onda Pasta Bar in Manchester. In September 2023, the restaurant was four months into operating from a temporary space on the edge of Ancoats, struggling for consistent bookings and not getting much traction from its social media. Then, co-founder Patrick Brown noticed the refrigerated drawer where chef Sam Astley-Dean kept a scoopable slab of tiramisu. 'Because I'm not from a chef background, I was just like, 'What is that?'' says Brown. 'And Sam said, 'Oh, it's just something I did to save a bit of time in the kitchen when we get an order.' I had it in my head for about a month.'
The subsequent social-media post altered Onda's fortunes. Following a like-magnet comment on TikTok ('Need this in my bedside table'), the viral video of Astley-Dean's tiramisu drawer was viewed 3m times in one morning, shared on Instagram by the actor Florence Pugh and almost melted the booking function on Onda's website. 'By the end of that week we were fully booked from October until February,' says Brown. 'It gave us confidence to start looking at permanent sites, rather than looking at the finances and thinking we could go under any week.'
Creative dessert storage and the aspirational reality of kitchens are not the only routes to virality. In the past 18 months or so, Bristol-based Indian restaurant Urban Tandoor has had a business-reviving uptick in bookings via an unlikely source: captivatingly shonky music parodies shared on TikTok. Aqua's Barbie Girl has become Bhaji Girl, performed by waiters and chefs in cheap wigs; Sophie Ellis-Bextor's Saltburn-soundtracking hit is now a terrifically silly 55-second love story called Murder at the Tandoor. The restaurant's owner, Sujith D'Almeida, notes that tourists from as far afield as Australia have been prompted to make pilgrimages for selfies with befuddled front-of-house staff, and that 'about 40%' of business now comes from fans of their TikTok. 'The restaurant market is saturated on social and the appetite for content is changing,' notes Nat Brereton, head of TikTok at Nonsensical, the dedicated TikTok marketing agency behind Urban Tandoor's videos. 'You can only look at so many gorgeous plates of food, so people want something that feels authentic, a little more raw and has some personality.'
Of course, if everyone is hurling things at the same algorithmic target, the impact is going to be dulled. Brereton acknowledges that it takes until 'the 70th post or something' to see cut-through. Brown thinks that we may have already passed saturation point. 'I can't say for certain, but it feels like the wins mean less,' he explains. 'If so many restaurants are going viral for day-in-the-life videos, that's going to stop putting bums on seats. It's only been a year and a half since our tiramisu drawer reel but I don't know if it would have been as successful or had the same impact now.'
Cottrell-Duffield also points out that the unstoppable engine of social-media popularity can occasionally backfire. 'We had a restaurant where something went viral on their dessert menu and it totally brought in the wrong audience,' she says. 'The customers didn't enjoy it when they got there so it was this unhelpful flash in the pan.'
Murray acknowledges that worries about screen time and what some in the US have started to call 'attention fracking' will undoubtedly grow in the next six months. 'A hundred per cent there will be a move away from it and we'll be first in the firing line,' he says. 'If it gets to the point where we're prioritising content over the success of the restaurant, we've gone too far.'
Signs of a shift in approach may already be here. One of the notable restaurant trends of recent months has seen some places taking an ascetic approach to social media. The Dover in Mayfair has a placeholder Instagram presence, and Canteen in Notting Hill favours soft-focus kitchen candids and a single, repeated screenshot of the day's changing menu. At Lucia's, a small, Mexican-inspired counter in Hackney Wick, a rush to open accidentally turned into a hugely successful, digital-averse approach. 'People loved that their initial contact with us was a conversation rather than a picture on Instagram,' says founder Jo Kurdi. 'They had to come in, explore and find out for themselves.'
To swim against the tide is a strategy in itself. But it's worth noting that all these chefs and owners are using wildly different methods to search for the same thing: the joyful interactions that arise when customers discover delicious food. 'I think it comes from the lack of money in hospitality,' says Cottrell-Duffield. Last November, accounting firm Price Bailey reported that 12% of restaurants in Britain were at imminent risk of closure. 'There is an air of desperation, in all honesty, and people are just trying to find a way to bring people in, at a time when no one has really caught up to how quickly the media landscape has changed.' Viral dishes that aren't actually good are as ephemeral as an Instagram story.
This competitiveness is what is driving Fallow and others to double down on digital content; not to replace traditional hospitality, but to navigate an increasingly brutal trading environment. It's at the forefront of Murray's mind as he prepares to make a pork pie for Cowie's cameras and millions of viewers. 'The food is the most important thing, and the customers, too,' he says. 'But at the same time, what does the food matter if there's no one there to taste it?'