POV: Just Asked a Foodie for Some Lunch Spots
Because dining out in the city is a nightmare.
There is something about being a foodie that attracts a broader tranche of haywire narcissists, but social media has turned this persona into a singularly weird kind of influencer. The distinctive manias and the signature shortcomings built into TikTok and Instagram Reels incentivize somewhat talented chefs to gratuitously transform what would otherwise be an appetizing meal into an extra and involuted mess, but at least they can cook. A foodie influencer is kind of the pied piper of gentrification, unleashing the siren song of FOMO onto hole-in-the-wall establishments once enjoyed by locals and exploiting them for clout, and it remains unproven whether many of them are capable of making a competent grilled cheese. They have personalities that are so opaque, twitchy, and relentlessly overstated that they almost seem debauched-but-mid: As archetypes, there are foodie influencers that can be poreless droids running the “excitable” personality package, or grinning and valueless himbos who still haven’t realized their ambitions outstrip their talent, or various varieties of gaudy peacock who are identifiable at 100 paces as someone you should never make eye contact with.
Foodie influencers have made eating out in the city into a tedious excursion of selecting a place that looks cool enough to make our voyeuristic friends mildly jealous, but not so cool that we can’t secure a table. This process is try-hard in its form and tragicomic thwartedness. I’ll see some trendy place on TikTok and my reaction is triumphant and paranoid; it may be highly aestheticized, and I am intrigued by their $28 seasonal negroni, but then I realize it’s just a regular negroni with added lavender. There isn’t much distinctiveness to these types of restaurants: They are either a tiny Italian joint named Parmo, or it’s a modern upscale place called The Wife of the Candle Maker (I don’t need a whole backstory, just name it one word).
Logging into Resi feels aspirational because these places will have a table, but only at 3 PM or 10:45 PM. I’ll text my friends, and late afternoon is a mutually convenient meet-up time. As we enter, our vibe is a return to the Jane Austen-style Regency Era. When the bill arrives, this despondence sinks in because the remainder of the day is a scheduling void and we are aging out of spontaneity, so we feel like we’re being wheeled back into an assisted living facility to make it back in time for the local news.
The merciless internecine bustle of a tight-quartered restaurant tends to augment the corny overdetermination that exists among foodies, both the aspiring and micro-influencer types. There are hordes of ultra-vain people who fetishize documenting every mundane aspect of living, and this is particularly jarring when you gaze at them meticulously filming a man slicing a Wagyu truffle cheeseburger in half.
The unspoken dynamic here is that everyone in the crew has a latent desire to run into someone moderately famous to make this excursion worth the hassle. You need someone who is not Timothy Chalamet, but Timothy Chalamet-adjacent to reify this journey—obviously so we can post an unconsensual candid pic of this encounter on our Instagram Stories.
On the off-chance that you do know a semi-useful foodie and ask them for restaurant recommendations, they’ll say something like:
Have You ever been to Casa de Niño Dios Doña Maria? It’s run by an elderly Salvadorian woman who serves pupusas out of her home kitchen, but you have to get there early because she runs out at 6:15 every morning.
Have you ever been to the Maddest Cow? It’s a fair-trade, ethically sourced meat joint where they only make burgers out of cows that have eaten people.
Hands down the best shawarmas are at Habibi. It’s in Little Berlin, you can only pay in coins, and not a single employee has a shred of Lebanese heritage.
I just discovered the best pho place. It’s called Ho Chi Minh City. It’s only a 15-and-a-half hour flight from LA and the conversion rate is 23,000 dong to $1.
You got to get to Duce, as they serve fascist Italian cuisine where everybody has to eat spaghetti and meatballs from a trough.
You have to try Out on Parole. It’s this food truck outside of a woman’s prison that only serves deconstructed Spaghetti Alle Vongole where they give you a bushel of wheat and a shovel and you figure out the rest.
I’m going insane for this place called Chipotle Mexican Grill. It’s got no aesthetic, always gives me diarrhea, and they charge me an extra $7 for a scoop of guac.
Those recs are awesome, but Duce sounds historically inaccurate as pasta was forbidden by the fascists because wheat had to be imported and you know how fascists feel about that kind of thing. Il Duce was a big proponent of Italian-grown rice.
the pupusas one is too accurate, there’s an old woman that sells them out of a shack just off the highway next to a liquor store near the town I work in and apparently you have to call before to make sure she’s open because her hours are basically just whenever she wants and she’s super hostile but the pupusas are worth it