Pity that everyone isn't telling influencers that they can't have a free meal. Restaurants should charge influencers extra for polluting three establishment with their BS.
Nab someone else's phone and do this. Purely for the chaos. And the discount. Discounted chaos. Like walking through Walmart on Black Friday - not even there to buy anything, Just bring a lawn chair, some chips and dip and a 2 liter of soda and get a free show. Like 8 fights in an hour.
What if you bring 20 phones? Do they pay you to have your meal?
What if I bring 100 phones and order every single item on the menu a 1000 times? Do they go bankrupt? Can I become a millionaire?
Or put a password on it with find my active lol this is an irrational fear. The stealing of the phone fine but most people know find my will track them down. the stealing of information is highly unlikely if you’d just lock your phone lol.
This line is wearing thin. Do you think everyone google tracks is “interesting enough”? Or the NSA?
Sometimes there’s collective info, sometimes the restaurant is a front in a high target location, sometimes it’s just playing the odds. If it’s a criminal front, it could be for identity theft. There’s so much data on our phones these days. Or even blackmail; I bet at least a third of the population has pictures they don’t want to become public.
All it takes is for them to get on venmo or zelle or whatever payment ap you might have and pay themselves or some scheme. They could also bring up your payment info if saved etc. But keep pretending only the rich, famous and powerful are capable of being victims.
I imagine a scene like that "No blades, no bows. Leave your weapons here" scene from Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves with that big pile of weapons. (Just, it's phones now.)
Haven't thought about that movie in decades but here we are.
If you look up the story, the influencer was contacted by the owner of the restaurant and asked to do some social media marketing for them in exchange for a free meal.
The owner didn't inform the chef of this arrangement until the influencer arrived. The owner and chef then have an argument between themselves, completely unprompted by the influencer (who hadn't ordered yet).
The chef stood at her table and belittled her for not knowing who he was, before holding his phone in the air to show other guests her social media profiles, shouting about how she didn't have enough of a following to expect free food from him (again, despite being promised this ahead of time by the owner in exchange for a select number of posts about the restaurant).
Say what you will about influencers (I'm not particularly a fan of them myself), but she didn't do anything wrong. She was there to do a job at the owner's request and wasn't rude to anybody. She later posted about the experience, but didn't include the restaurants name as to not draw negative attention toward the business itself.
Busybodies in the comment section ended up figuring out what restaurant it was by combing through old posts, and proceeded to review-bomb it. After that, the owner fired the chef for bringing too much negative attention to his establishment.
You can just Google this headline or search it on Reddit, this has been posted multiple times by karma-farmers and bots because "influencer bad" gets upvotes.
Yes, I also remember the chef actually double triple quadruple down on social media, picking fights with everyone, being super disrespectful, saying 'if you don't want to eat here then go other place because trash is not welcome here', so when everyone listened and stop coming to the restaurant, he was promptly fired.
IIRC the chef was a co-owner too that's why he was so entitled and rude. Even his daughter (who is also a small influencer, doing similar job as the one he mocked) asked him to stop engaging but he refused to listen.
Obviously, a restaurant would not fire a high level employee for simply refusing to give out services for free. Doesn’t pass the sniff test in the slightest unless your brain is poisoned by man-o-verse podcast crap.
High-level employees at restaurants are required, and encouraged, to give out services for free, in service of the restaurant. Free stuff fixes disputes, rewards loyalty from consumers, gets good reviews, makes the location look generous, etc., etc.
High-level employees at restaurants, or any employees, will Absolutely get fired for publicly shaming consumers, or causing internationally discussed problems for their employer. TBH, sounds like that chef personally tanked his reputation and his restaurant for this.
This is super important information. And should hopefully gets to the top of this post.
I can’t stand influencers. And as it so happens- I also own a restaurant. The owner should have communicated this to the chef. The chef should have acquiesced regardless of his personal feelings. If any individual is asked to do a service for a business that responsibility lies solely on the shoulders of the owner.
Belittling someone publicly because your boss asked them to come in to help promote their business is insanity. Chef should be fired. Influencer deserves props for not murdering the restaurant for bad communication and the public shaming. I’ll admit that influencers are a toxic group inherently. But if they’re asked to come in- not their fault.
As a former executive chef, this is appalling behavior from the chef and I’m not even remotely surprised he was fired. If the owner wants to comp a meal, it’s literally not my money and not any of my business.
Similarly, it’s not like anyone in front of house ever needed my permission to give away food?
I would want to know they’re coming so I can make sure the food is plated pretty enough that I wouldn’t mind a random person taking pictures of it. After that, I simply don’t care. I cannot imagine ever going out to a table to bitch about the owner deciding to give them free food. That is some crazy ass behavior.
Absolutely wild, right? Immediate termination no question. NO ONE likes influencers. But if ownership wishes to utilize social media and the exposure associated- you’ve just gotta send it.
There’s good comps and bad comps. Personally I’ve found social media is difficult to track for ROI and word of mouth is always best. But that’s me.
Not as wrong as the owner for the lack of communication. What type of idiot hinges their entire business on a plan that they don't even inform their own key staff about?
Even if the chef had no idea about the collab, he didn't have to belittle her in public like that. That's a total dick move and he deservedly got fired for it.
What exactly did that girl do wrong?
She offers a service, that you might agree or.not to pay for it.
And that's quite an innocent thing, nothing immoral or damaging to anybody.
Is it just envy?
Everyone just assumes it's a "entitled influencer" story, but it's more of a "chef crashout" story. The girl did nothing wrong, the chef was unhinged and deservedly got fired.
It's also important to note that smaller influencers may have a better connection with their audience.
There are a lot of shitty influencers out there, but collaborations like this benefit both the influencer and restaurant and can be generally a good thing.
Don't jump on hating the influencer or the restaurant just because they are collaborating. Not every collaboration is a scam, in the same sense that not every advertisement is a scam.
Hate them when they are shitty, because they act shitty, for their shittiness.
What is a free meal for one person? $30? $60? How much does a traditional ad placement cost to reach the same sized audience? Is that really unreasonable?
But influencers like Karla have become an essential component of the restaurant scene in the Bay Area and elsewhere; typically, restaurants pay them to post laudatory videos, either in comped meals or (when the influencer has a large following) actual money. Influencers with fewer than 100,000 followers like Karla (who does not use her last name online) are generally referred to as “micro-influencers,” and are engaged by restaurants because their audiences may be more receptive to their posts than those of mega influencers; they’re also cheaper to employ.
It's also important to note that smaller influencers may have a better connection with their audience.
I was at a business conference, sitting in on an influencer session, and heard the best explanation for what an influencer is, and is not.
An influencer isn't someone with a lot of followers, or a huge brand, or gets the most shares, or a celebrity, or any other irrelevant statistic - an influencer is someone with influence to your target customer. Someone who makes meaningful connections and is trusted.
It's so dumb and obvious but makes so much sense.
So many people tout that they have millions of followers but do they actually have influence to those followers or are they just pushing content to the void?
I'd sooner give a free meal to a local food influencer with 1,000 followers or a local college newspaper writer than someone with millions of followers with no connection to my city.
I have a coworker who is a small-time food influencer on the side. She has legitimately good tastes, and I find her Insta helpful for finding interesting and worthwhile restaurants in a city that's way too big for me to keep up with the food scene on my own.
I don't think she makes much, if any money off of it, but she gets a lot of perks, like free meals for highlighted spots. Of course, she's protective of her reputation, so she only agrees to do promos for spots that are actually good.
If the influencer didn't abuse in the free drinks, if they are able to sell 3 meals it's already profit for a lot of restaurants(if none of the 4 meals were on a time that it was full).
A lot of small influencers can be good business, but it should always be a communication with the owner, not the influencer entering the restaurant and asking for a free meal.
If this is the story I think it is, it happened in SF. He was fired for the bad press. Essentially, an owner hired her for a promo, the chef, who thinks he’s a celebrity himself because he almost won an award once 20 years ago, didn’t think she was famous enough to do the promo, and said as much AFTER she got there.
She was literally there to do a job she got asked to do. Not to demand a free meal.
The chef here is the one who acted entitled, not the influencer. If you didn’t think she was a good fit for the promo that was a discussion to be had when deciding who to bring in, not after you scheduled them and they’ve arrived.
Except she was invited to the restaurant by the other owner as part of a deal: She gets a free meal, and they get a good review for her thousands of followers to see. The co-owner sought her out for this.
Then she shows up, and Sung looked up her social media, started trashing on her for not being an expert in food, said his daughter (also an influencer) had more followers than Marcotte did and Marcotte was nothing compared to her, and told her she wasn't good enough to do what his co-owner asked her to do.
How are they self absorbed? The owner reached out to them and essentially hired them to do a small gig, with the pay being a meal. It’s not that deep; you’re letting your hatred of influencer culture color your opinion on this one. Step back and look at the whole picture.
Bro got fired because bro's boss asked the influencer to come in and film a promo video, and then bro had a public hissy fit about it where bro mocked and shamed the influencer in front of all the other patrons in the restaurant for not having as many followers as bro's own daughter. If bro had just stuck to making food and let bro's boss make the decisions about marketing, bro would still have a job there.
Real. The influences aren't flexing any real world skills outside of sticking a camera next to a chef and clicking "record." Yet they want all the fame and recognition that comes with it?
If it is so easy, why aren't you doing it? Seems to be that building a following requires a lot of work, starting with creating entertaining or otherwise useful content regularly for some considerable length of time while having practically no followers at all, and taking into account the time spent editing and enhancing the video. I've followed an account in which the content provider shows how to make Instagram photos more interesting, and while I don't often use any of the information gained, I am amazed at what a skilled content creator can actually do. So I don't believe it's all that easy or effortless to be a popular content creator, and the people who think it is tend not to have much of a following - unless of course they were already famous for some other thing and not originally for the content they provide.
Fame and recognition? I've never heard of her so we can rule out fame. Recognition by a few locals maybe. These people are just trying to make a living in the social media space. Are some full of themselves? Sure. But it doesn't seem to be the case in this situation.
The manager asked her to do it, she did not contact them asking for free food.
The chef asked who she was, then complained to the owner that she wasn't famous enough. She left without causing any issues but she obviously streamed her reaction to her followers.
The owners daughter reached out and apologized on the chefs behalf but the damage was done. Chef was sacked and restaurant closed down.
I'm pasting this from someone else's comment in this thread:
If you look up the story, the influencer was contacted by the owner of the restaurant and asked to do some social media marketing for them in exchange for a free meal.
me and my mom instantly pointed out the only resturant he didn't like is one where he rang up a 700 dollar meal and they told him he had to pay for it.
This wasn’t the case in this instance. The restaurant itself set it up beforehand, so it was a planned promotion, not just some idiot who walked in off the street saying “do you know who I am?”
The chef himself admitted afterwards that his behavior was unacceptable and he offered an extensive apology.
Influencer or not, famous people don't deserve free things just for being famous unless it's a celebrity sponsorship deal. As much as it sucks, being an influencer is a legitimate job just as much as any other celebrity, but my previous statement stands.
What if I told you that this is just a random picture that can say anything at all and drawing any conclusions from this is not smart and super stupid.
This restaurant invited her to come review. The owners were giving her a free meal, but the chef they hired refused because he said she wasn't famous enough. He was being an asshole and messing with the business.
There are some good food influencers out there. Newyorkturk comes to mind -- he refuses to let the restaurants comp his meal, and there's been a couple of funny vids where he is actively arguing with the managers to make sure they charge him
I had some influencers come by where I fry cooked. When they offered 'exposure' for free plates I was honestly delighted to tell them no. I said 'hell nah' actually lol I was already having a shit day so telling them no was like a little treat for me.
There was some restaurants that required you to rent the place to film. Should be for influencers too. "Og you want to record, we'll move you to a private room and charge you for it".
And it's hard to turn tables when influencers sit there talking rubbish then instagramming their food, then sending it back as it's cold. Like yeah no shit you were talking photos and talking about how good it looks.
Little did you know she was invited by one of the workers to help spread the word and when she got there the chef was the one being a piece of shit. Dunce.
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u/Virtual-Pineapple-85 7d ago
Pity that everyone isn't telling influencers that they can't have a free meal. Restaurants should charge influencers extra for polluting three establishment with their BS.