Cuisine for comment: how influencers pick food fights

After years of saying yes to ‘influencers’, fed-up restaurateurs have finally had enough.

‘Honesty and integrity’: Tim and Sarah Scott at Joy in Brisbane. Picture: Mark Cranitch.

Every week, in every city, self-styled “influencers” — maybe former contestants of ubiquitous reality shows, or millennials who just love to be photographed in smart new eating houses — walk into restaurants with two or three of their friends to enjoy expensive meals. In exchange, they’ll post a photograph or two of themselves at the restaurant on Instagram with a message: “#yum #wow The food @restaurantX is sooooo amazing.”

Nowhere are the waters between legitimate opinion and quid-pro-quo endorsement more muddied than in restaurant land.

There will be no declaration of the deal to followers — and anyone else seeing the post — something the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission says may in fact be illegal and a way of avoiding Australian Taxation ­Office scrutiny.

The restaurants that say yes — possibly feeling they have little choice for fear of negative reprisal posts — may or may not get something out of the deal. It’s difficult to quantify. And for the influencers, it’s nice work if you can get it.

Instagram is the dominant social media platform of the restaurant world and has spawned a generation of image-savvy users with large followings looking to cash in — sometimes quite literally. As one slightly unsophis­ticated would-be influencer asked a restaurant via Instagram last year: “Don’t I just post a pic. In exchange for two meals and two drinks for 2 people. Isn’t that how it works?”

One Brisbane restaurateur with three venues told The Weekend Australian he recently received 15 requests in one day for free meals in exchange for social media exposure. He doesn’t play the game.

Many, feeling their way in uncharted waters, have been saying yes for years, but the tide is turning. There is a growing industry movement standing up for transparency and calling out those who promise great reviews in exchange for freebies. The industry finally has begun questioning the validity of follower numbers, the nature of their audience and whether this stuff helps or in fact hinders their business. Industry heavyweights Matt Moran, Justin Hemmes and Maurice Terzini have all vowed to “cut off B-listers who try to use their status to eat for free”.

The movement has been loosely united under the Instagram hashtag #couscousforcomment used by those in the industry brave enough to expose the sometimes naive overtures.

The latest salvo came this week from a tiny 10-seat Brisbane restaurant, escalating the friction between the industry and the influ­encers. Brisbane’s Joy restaurant was messaged, via Instagram, with a request for dinner and drinks for three, worth about $400, in exchange for Instagram exposure from @brisbaneweekender, the Instagram account of Brisbane Weekender, an online “inside guide to everything Brisbane”.

Restaurant co-owner and chef Tim Scott posted his partner Sarah Scott’s response to Instagram: “I’m not really sure when or why it became acceptable to exchange an Instagram post for years of hard work from two small business owners,” she wrote. “That is not something we are interested in. We run our business with dignity, honesty and integrity.”

The post was subsequently liked, commented on, shared and reposted thousands of times under the hashtag #couscousforcomment, gaining enormous traction in the restaurant industry.

Within 24 hours of Scott’s post exposing the request and the response, three damning reviews of Joy appeared on Google Review. One, by a Katherine Emily Bowden, said: “Very rude, I would not go back. Disappointing food.” A David Bowden said: “Terrible service, what a disappointment! Shame the previous reviews didn’t ring true.” The “film writer and digital guru” at Brisbane Weekender is a David Bowden. His wife, Katherine Emily Bowden, runs the site. All requests to the Bowdens for comment by The Weekend Australian received no reply. Another negative Google review also appeared the same night. According to Joy’s Sarah Scott, neither David Bowden nor Katherine Emily Bowden have dined at the restaurant, which opened only last month, “where we seat 10 people, greet everyone with a handshake and know exactly who is dining with us at any one time. We’re tiny, it’s not hard.”

The reviews have subsequently been removed by the authors.

The Scotts declined to be interviewed for this story for fear of a backlash. Via a statement, they say: “Our issue isn’t that trade agreements exist; our problem is that someone we don’t know, someone that has never dined with us, worked with us or even spoken to us, has already agreed to write a positive Instagram post regardless of never experiencing our restaurant, which is dishonest and lacks integrity. To us, that undermines the power of honest reviews and industry professionals with educated opinions … Our predicament was: pay hundreds of dollars for a false good review or zero dollars for false bad reviews.”

According to another Brisbane restaurateur, requests for “collabs” have got out of hand.

“Simply put, free food for reviews rips the heart and soul out of the industry we love,” says Simon Gloftis of Hellenika. “I would urge everyone in our game to think twice before throwing away the authenticity of our profession on the hope that a few free influencer reviews will be some beacon of hope and bring a full house every night. It’s just not the case.”

Last month, Adelaide chef Duncan Welgemoed created a storm of his own when he called out My Kitchen Rules contestant Andy Vignati, who asked for a free dinner in exchange for social media exposure, citing her MKR credentials as her base of influence. The Africola co-owner shared an email sent by Vignati on his Instagram account, where she declared she’d “love to come try some food. In exchange I can post food shots and stories on my Instagram page.”

Welgemoed ridiculed the request: “How about you do the right thing and pay for your meal like everyone else,” he wrote on ­Instagram with the hashtags #payforfood, #payforstaff and #f..kexposuredollars.

Yet most restaurant industry marketers agree there is a place for influencer marketing, despite the fracas. “There are good and bad online influencers, just as there are good and bad operators in every industry,” says Jeanine Bribosia of Cru Media, one of Sydney’s biggest players in food PR. “This is now an actual industry, and to ignore it would be a mistake.”

She says the volume of requests, and those who claim they are in this space, has definitely increased “and that means that we say no a lot more than we say yes”.

Rebecca Gibbs, whose business Example represents Australia’s biggest restaurant group, Merivale, among others, says many smaller operators “feel like they have to offer free meal after free meal because they don’t have big marketing budgets and assume that this is the best way to reach as many people as possible”.

“My advice to them is that if the influencer doesn’t specifically target the audience the business wants to attract, can’t showcase what the restaurant offers, or create quality content that can be used by the business to promote their services, then there is no point pursuing the request for a free dinner.”

Unfortunately, the restaurant industry is just the tip of the influencer iceberg. As Perth restaurateur Joel Valvasori told The Weekend Australian: “Word of mouth will always be the best publicity. Word of mouth you pay for isn’t really word of mouth at all. This influencer thing will pass.” Time will tell.

For the ongoing story, follow #couscousforcomment at Instagram or @johnlethlean.