Are Toronto chefs and restaurants getting fed up with influencer culture?
Social media has grown to become the preeminent mode of marketing for nearly every industry worldwide, with influencers — those select few who boast large followings and cultural sway — holding the keys.
The Toronto restaurant industry is no exception. While traditional forms of getting the word out about restaurants, like legacy media, advertisements, and marketing, still play major roles in driving business success, over the past decade, social media has eclipsed them all.
It's become something of a symbiotic relationship: influencers (some of whom prefer the term content creators) go to restaurants for a typically comped meal, post about their experience, and, in return, the restaurant gets exposure for the nominal price of the free food.
But the now-inextricable relationship between restaurants and influencers is starting to show signs of strain.
In January 2026, celebrity chef Massimo Capra (Restaurant Makeover, Chopped: Canada) took to Instagram to speak out about his yearning for "the old days" of food criticism: a time before influencers dominated the scene.
"I miss the old days of food reviewers," Capra says in the video, "people that were knowledgeable, that knew what to write, and knew why a dish was built in a certain way."
Nowadays, he goes on to explain, "we're left with social media," describing influencers as "people who really have no business discussing food."
Capra's argument is this: when you put the ability to make or break a restaurant in the hands of untrained people, people who have little to no expertise or experience in the food industry, you end up missing out on the intricacies of the art form.
He's not blind to the fact that social media can earn exposure for restaurants, but he's not convinced that people who, in his own words, "go from eating McDonald's to being able to afford to go to a good restaurant in the city and judge the food," are right for the job.
He's not the only prolific name in the industry that feels this way, but the issue is a lot more nuanced than that.
Even before Capra posted his video on Instagram, prolific Toronto restaurateur Jen Agg (General Public, Le Swan) expressed a similar sentiment on her own social media in August 2025.
In the post, Agg made her stance clear: her restaurants do not, and will not, collaborate with influencers, even though a vast majority of fellow businesses in the city do.
In the post, she explains that, while she appreciates influencers taking the time to create content around her restaurants if they choose to, she'd rather sink her efforts into consistency and quality that will result in regulars and word-of-mouth, rather than a flood of followers from an Instagram Reel.
The idea that restaurants must rely on influencers to survive, she adds, feels "especially fraught at the moment."
"Lots of places are desperate for a spotlight but also can't really afford to give away meals. Bit of a rock and a hard place for operators," she writes in the post.
Agg tells blogTO that she's not even entirely convinced of how beneficial the exchange of a free meal for content ultimately is for restaurants.
"You're asking me for an exchange which you cannot show the value for," she tells blogTO. "It doesn't really matter whether you have 12,000 or 240,000 followers; you cannot tell me that your post or your story is going to directly translate to dollars for the most part."
And even if the exchange were to result in extra bums in seats, so to speak, for the restaurant, Agg believes that the trade would still be unequal: the influencer's platform gets a boost from the content while also getting to eat for free, while the restaurant only stands to gain exposure.
Influencer culture, Agg believes, thrives off restaurant turnover, or "flashes in the pan," as she says. Those aren't the types of businesses she's interested in creating, and she says they're not the only restaurants that benefit from support. But longstanding, consistent, quality restaurants rarely get the same attention on social media.
"I mean, I totally get that this is such a challenging industry, and if you're out there doing great work and nobody's reflecting it back to you in any way. I can't imagine how dispiriting that would be. I understand why a business in that position might turn to influencers for support. I'm just not sure whether it actually works like that."
She reiterates that, for her, she'd far prefer her customer base to come from word-of-mouth and from return customers than from people who found her restaurants on social media. At times, she can even get behind a bit of old-school legacy media, though with the growing absence of restaurant critics in the city, even that is becoming homogeneous.
"I don't get the same level of satisfaction from a 30-second TikTok that I would get from, you know, 2,500 thoughtful words from an educated diner who I might not fully agree with. It feels like criticism is in a very dangerous, almost dead place to me, and I don't love it."
When chef Eric Valente and his partner, Tam Phan, took over The Rosebud on King East in late 2025, they found themselves walking a tightrope when it came to their decision to collaborate with influencers or not to.
There are two ways for a restaurant to approach its reliance on influencers, Valente tells blogTO.
"Number one, you can look at it from a business perspective, right? Like, sure, any publicity is good publicity, and then you can let people determine their own opinions," he explains, "but then, on the flip side, there's no criteria for being a quote, unquote food blogger or food influencer, right? So, you know, it's tough because they can literally make or break a restaurant, and it's challenging."
There's a huge potential for nuance to get lost in the space of a 30-second TikTok video that can lead to customers getting potentially disappointed, regardless of the actual quality of the product.
In the early days of operating the restaurant, Valente says that he and Phan felt some pressure to welcome influencers to get the word out; there are few other avenues to get the same reach, after all, but now that they've been established, he says that continuing to work with content creators no longer feels necessary.
"It's something I'm still figuring out from a business perspective," he says. "At the beginning, I felt the need to reach out to people to try to generate business, but now that I'm feeling more confident with the cover counts and the clientele that are coming in, I don't really feel the need to have the influencer thing, and also, it's not really us."
Jordan Shore, a Toronto influencer who largely built his following with restaurant-related content, tells blogTO that he has a "two-fold perspective" on the sentiments increasingly expressed by local chefs.
Shore, who has spent years working in and around the restaurant industry, with stints bussing, serving, running social media for restaurants and working for a food media company before embarking on his solo content creation career, tells blogTO that his perspective "comes from somebody who didn't just, like, pick up a phone one day and was like, I'm going to be a content creator and start going to restaurants and eating for free."
"I'm someone who understands how the industry works [and] has worked with chefs. So, in my opinion, I think it's such an important symbiotic relationship now between influencer [or] content creator, and restaurant."
Things get muddy, Shore argues, when the restaurant fails to be intentional about which influencers they choose to work with. If you give a free meal to everyone with a following who asks for one, your return on investment is bound to take a hit.
The fact of the matter is this: there are food influencers in the city who are, very much, only in the business of building a platform, and who saw food content as the way to do it. They're not interested in the techniques or stories behind the restaurants they're featuring, but ultimately, neither are their followers.
On the other hand, there are content creators who do care, who have educated palates and a passion for the industry. Those, likely, will also be the ones who'll still be willing to cover a restaurant, even if they have to pay.
It's a deeply saturated business in the city. Attend any restaurant opening party, and you'll find it flooded with more local influencers and content creators than you could possibly name, but, at the end of the day, there's a reason for that: it works.
Restaurants have every reason to lean on influencers for support, but if they choose not to, they also have every right to opt out entirely.
At the end of the day, more restaurants in the city are willing and excited to work with influencers than aren't: a fact that's unlikely to change until a cheaper, more effective form of marketing arises.
However, the increasingly audible voices, like Agg, Valente and Capra, pushing for a return to word-of-mouth or old-school food criticisms may point to a larger societal trend that extends far beyond the restaurant industry: are we getting fatigued by social media and the way it's become entwined with nearly every aspect of our lives?
If we can't even figure out where to eat without consulting Instagram or TikTok, what can we do?
Fareen Karim
