By Max Ayoub and Vanessa Saenz
@redlineproject
In 2024, Leslie Chavez opened her home-based cafe, LesSip and Drink, in Belmont Cragin. She knew that visibility on social media would be essential for success.
“I realized I needed to create a lot of content to get noticed and attract customers,” she said.
It didn’t take long for TikTok to become her most valuable social media platform. Now, it brings in a majority of her customers and motivates her to keep creating content.
Recently, Chavez has started exploring the collaborative side of content creation, reaching out to fellow local creators and businesses to promote her cafe on TikTok.
“I usually look for businesses that align with my brand and values,” she said.
Chicago is home to one of the most vibrant restaurant scenes in the world. It’s the cultural crossroads connecting a million stories from around the globe, all coming together in one city to add their customs into the proverbial melting pot of Windy City cuisine. There are thousands of restaurants around the city vying for the attention of the local consumer in an economy that ensures only the strong survive.
The competition is tough, and standing out means having a strong social media presence along with good food and service.
Sticking to her values and brand consistency seem to be working out well for Chavez. Her most successful TikTok posts feature behind-the-scenes shots from her coffee creations and recipes, all made with a personal touch unique to Chavez and her brand.
When it comes to Chicago restaurant and cafe owners riding the TikTok wave to success, Chavez is far from alone. The hashtag #chicagofood has over 105,000 posts, many made by independent food reviewers using their platform to turn their followers on to hip spots in the city. The Chicago restaurant industry has been forced to keep its finger on the pulse to stay afloat in the online age.
Since its release in 2016, TikTok — owned by China’s ByteDance — has proven to be one of the most culturally impactful social media platforms of the 21st century. In less than a decade, the app has established itself as the fourth most popular social media site globally, with a staggering current estimated monthly user count of 1.5 billion.
Plus, these users aren’t just on the app to kill time. A 2022 MGH national study found that 53% of millennial TikTok users have visited or ordered from a restaurant that they learned about from posts on the site.
These restaurant-based TikTok (or “FoodTok”) posts are being made by Chicago-based creators like Samantha Brizuela, who specializes in content highlighting Latino-owned restaurants in the city.
Since she was young, Brizuela has been passionate about sharing her life online. Before making food content, she first cut her teeth with fitness transformation and fashion videos. Ultimately, the opportunity she saw to uplift Latino-owned businesses led her to finding her niche in food.
Brizuela understands her influence: “With the power of marketing, you can capture their food and the vibes of the restaurant.”
As her platform has grown, Brizuela has discovered the “boom or bust” nature of social media content creation. When engagement starts to become low, she sticks to her values and stays the course.
“It would start to feel like a job if I only focused on the numbers,” she said. “I like to have fun with it.”
Paying close attention to the waves made by Brizuela and thousands of other FoodTok influencers in the Chicago restaurant scene are industry trendologists like Mike Kostyo, vice president of the Menu Matters consulting firm. He keeps his finger firmly on the pulse of food industry trends, and right now, TikTok is essential to understanding those trends.
“Previously, if you had a restaurant or you had a food brand, in order to get in front of consumers– their potential customers– you had to get somebody at the newspaper to write about you,” he said. “Now, you know, anybody can pick up their phone, take a video of the restaurant that they’re eating at, and in five minutes disseminate it out to the rest of the world.”
While this type of uncoordinated, natural exposure exchange happens between restaurants and influencers on a regular basis, with the market being so competitive, restaurants are also throwing some bribes into the mix to manufacture buzz.
“We live in a time when, you know, we have a ton of information at our fingertips, so for any single restaurant it’s really hard to break through,” Kostyo said. “A lot of them feel like they have to pay for coverage, or they have to offer up those free meals for an influencer to come in.”
Although the omnipresent forces of capitalism inevitably weaving their way into this equation, Kostyo insists that authenticity is still the key to consumers’ hearts. He sees TikTok’s great potential for storytelling.
“In all the research that we do, it shows consumers really want the story behind the food that they’re eating,” he said. “They want to know who’s making it. They want to know that there’s a human being behind the dishes that they’re eating, and this is one way to give it to them.”
Authentic, local stories that mean something to consumers are exactly what creators like Chavez and Brizuela are bringing to the table.
Recently, the two crossed paths and came together to collaborate on a post – Brizuela highlighted Chavez’s Latino-owned coffee shop and showcased her unique, lovingly crafted drinks. Together, their work expands a growing network of local business owners and passionate content creators who are helping each other thrive and shaping how Chicagoans discover and connect with their city’s food scene.
“It can get really exhausting,” Chavez said. Her days often start at dawn and stretch late into the night, but stays motivated by the dream of opening a full-scale coffee shop one day.
“Just need to stay patient,” she said. “I know my time will come.”
Audio
Reporter Max Ayoub talks about reporting this story.