In the age of Eater and influencers, we've forgotten what restaurants are for.

Is the best way to support restaurants eating at all of them right when they open and then never again?

1. The “Best” Restaurants

When I tell people that I’m an independent food writer, about a fourth of the time the response I get is something like this, “I’ve been so bad, I haven’t gone to a new restaurant in forever.”

In the age of Eater and influencers, it would make sense that people think “supporting the restaurant industry” means going to every restaurant one single time mostly when it’s new.

We see food writers, influencers, and other foodies skipping from new restaurant to new restaurant in our feeds acting like this is the way to eat.

We also see that when a restaurant opens or gets a big award, that’s the time we’re supposed to write about it, lift it up, or say how much we love it. We feel this FOMO around not going to new restaurants, because that’s what the media shows us. We feel the guilt because we think if the foodies are doing it, they must be the ones who know best.

My response to this guilt is the same every time. I say, “Oh my god, no, going to the same restaurants that you love keeps them alive.”

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If we’re honest with ourselves, it is likely true that “the best restaurants” stay the same year after year, with some new ones coming onto the list because they are new and gorgeous or because they got their shit together. Some will come off because they have lost their sparkle or their head chef, or because they have have closed.

Travail is a good local example here, once heralded by many as one of our best restaurants (don’t take my word for it, look it up), it now feels like cheap theater that is stuck in the past. That didn’t happen overnight—it happened over years of chef change ups within the brigade, certain types of dining falling out of fashion, open disdain for restrictions (while still allowing them!), and women realizing that some of the frat bro party culture they experience there at dinner is, indeed, very icky and not just a “me” thing.

Diane’s Place, on the other hand, came onto the scene and solidified itself as one of our best restaurants overnight, which means if we had a more static “best of” list like the New York Times New York list (more on this in a minute), we might see a shake up. Diane’s Place would shoot to the top and another restaurant that is sitting on the edge at number 50 would lose its spot to a new star restaurant. Not overnight, but over many years of sitting at the edge of the list.

But in between those two extreme examples, mostly, the stars will stay the same. Bar la Grassa, Mucci’s, Spoon and Stable, Myriel, and Alma, for example, would make the list every year.

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If you watch Twin Cities local best of lists like I do, though, you see these restaurants come on and off lists in favor of new restaurants every year.

Rotating our best of restaurants rapidly instead of respecting consistency started with Eater, but it didn’t end there.

I’ve already written about how The Star Tribune always names the “best” restaurant as a new spot versus being honest that their restaurant of the year is “new restaurant of the year.”

Another example is the Minneapolis St. Paul Magazine’s top 2024 list. It’s 50 restaurants.

On the list, 21 restaurants/bars opened (or re-opened) in 2024.

5 opened in 2023 (notice how fast you lose your sparkle, two years later, you’re likely to fall off the list).

A total of 23 opened before that (with one of those, B-52 Burgers and Brew, set to open a third restaurant in 2025, and another two, My Burger and Chimborazo, opening a new location in 2024).

There was also 1 food truck whose open date I couldn’t quite find.

This means that the list is saying half of our best restaurants opened in the last two years. That isn’t true, but most across the country are written this way now, not just ours.

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This is not how best of lists used to be.

Before Eater burst onto the scene and started ranking everything, it was much harder to knock a restaurant off from the top of a “best” list than it is today. There was normally just one list. It was published once a year in the newspaper of magazine. It was so hard to knock someone off that list that it was frustrating to chefs when they opened a restaurant they knew was better than the ones on the list and they couldn’t break into it for a few years.

The NYTs national best restaurant list flops all over the place every year mostly focusing mostly on new restaurants in a way that feels maddening (the best restaurants in the United States do not change every year—they just don’t).

But the list they publish in New York holds true to the old spirit of pre-Eater food writing, where the list stays mostly the same every year. For transparency’s sake, they tell you how far up or down restaurants have moved on the list. They also have a list at the bottom of every restaurant that left the list. Sometimes those restaurants come back on the list when they figure out what’s wrong and fix it.

This list marks new additions clearly and you can see here that some older restaurants actually shoot up in the ranks over time, something we rarely see in our local food scene.

Love or hate this list, agree with it or think it’s bunk, the integrity of the list stands alone in 2025. It’s one of the only “best of” lists published by a magazine or newspaper that doesn’t value newness over consistency.

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2. Chasing the hype cycle.

I’ve dubbed this new way of writing about and eating at restaurants “chasing the hype cycle.”

Think of it like “chasing the dragon” for addicts. Here’s what it looks like in practice.

A restaurant is about to open, a writer goes in before it does. They write it up, not as a review, but a piece about the chef or the dream of the restaurant. That story is compelling. Little is mentioned about what it’s like to actually eat there (it’s not open), but maybe they’ll tell you how beautiful and meaningful the restaurant is to the chef. When it opens, they go again. They write about it again, not as a review, but as a “new restaurant write up” piece.

Influencers also go, often fighting to be the first to post so they have a shot at going viral (just look at the tagged videos from Cafe Yoto which opened this week). Those posts have to be positive for them to go viral, so they ham it up (best restaurant ever, you have to go, look at the rubber duckies in these drinks, the decor is so it, you HAVE to get [insert dish]). These are visually compelling, with voiceovers (yelling—they’re normally yelling), video cuts, and shot with ring lights that are incredibly annoying and intrusive to other diners.

Sometimes, these are posted after opening. Sometimes, they are not. They are posted from friends and family events (think sneak peaks), which everyone knows are normally a bit of a disaster (that’s why you host friends and family events! It’s your first service!). Privately, influencers and writers will often tell me what needs work, but they’ll put up those glossy videos for you. These gaps in service are not because the restaurant is bad. It is because it is new.

After that, other influencers go, other writers go. They keep posting. You keep seeing it in your feed. So do all your friends.

By the time a review is set to come out, the writers are all invested and so is the local community. Good or bad, they’ve picked that restaurant as ours, which means reviews are less honest (how can you write a bad review after writing three excited pieces about its opening?). So the bad reviews are tamed. Or metered. Or cut entirely.

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If everyone keeps going and everyone keeps posting those damn rubber duckies in the drinks (or whatever the equivalent of that is for the restaurant), it must be good, right? So you go.

It’s maybe great, sometimes good, often it will leave you confused. Maybe you’re disappointed, but you don’t know how to feel disappointed when “everyone else loves it.” The reason why you are disappointed is that the restaurant was not advertised to you on merit but newness.

Every new restaurant is poised as the next “it” thing, which in reality is just not true. Some restaurants are better than others. At opening and through their lifetime.

You might find yourself at that influencer hyped spot wishing you went somewhere else, somewhere you love, that you know will have good food, that is less busy, that doesn’t have ring lights. You do the hype cycle about 10 times and you think to yourself, “The food scene has fallen off,” and it’s not because it has, it’s that:

1. When a restaurant is new, it is the worst time to go to it in terms of food quality (this restaurant might be good in three months!)

2. No one is actually asking the question, “Should you go here over your standard spots? Is it better?” They’re asking, instead:

3. “Can I get views off of this?” The point is creating content and buzz, which means that restaurants with sexy light, rubber ducks in the drinks, and good plating are prioritized over the good soup spot on the corner that always splashes soup on the edge of the bowl. It also means that Eater and other outlets are going to keep creating listicles that change every month because people have stopped reading reviews and this is how they stay relevant.

My thesis for my work is: this way of engaging with restaurants kills them.

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In 3 months, whatever restaurant you went to during the influencer hype likely falls off the radar.

Kitchen teams have someone leave and don’t replace them because business has fallen off—or they fire a few workers they needed at opening because fewer people come six months later. The posts about that restaurant dry up meaning that you don’t see them in your feed anymore. You might forget them. It sure seems like writers do.

From time to time, restaurants are so good that the hype cycle continues.

Writers and influencers might look at that and say, “We made that!” But in reality, they didn’t. Word of mouth made it, because at this point, it’s not hype. It’s just that that restaurant was so good, everyone wants to go again. And if writers and influencers were so dead set on helping you find those places and lifting up our best restaurants day in and day out, they would keep going back and posting about it for years as one of our best spots, even if it’s just one mention on the best of list every year.

But they don’t.

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Go to any of the major newspapers and think of a restaurant that is still gorgeous 10 or 15 years out and see how many times it has been mentioned in the last year in a non-anniversary year. Go ahead.

Type in “Bar la Grassa” at the Star Tribune search bar.

Type in “Saint Dinette” and look at the coverage before they announced their closure.

Type in “Spoon and Stable,” a restaurant many people say is our best. How often are they mentioned outside of their Synergy series?

Type in “Martina,” look at when is the last time that restaurant was mentioned and why?

The search is in the top left, type in a longstanding restaurant, and take a look. Don’t take my word for it. They stop writing about our best restaurants and instead write about the new ones, and if you’re taking their advice, that means you end up forgetting about those stars, too.

You can’t tell me that this is the best way to write about restaurants for restaurants, that somehow this helps them, or keeps them alive.

You surely can’t tell me sending guests to new restaurant after new restaurant is going to give them the best dining experience possible in your city versus sending them to the institutions that have stood the test of time.

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If you eat the way that Eater, influencers, and now, unfortunately, our local papers across the country suggest you eat, you end up going to different restaurants all the time with very little loyalty. You’re going there for pretty photos of food, drinks, and your friends in a hip place.

It cheapens restaurants from gathering places and holders of our memories to tourist traps.

It forces restaurants to create those Instagrammable experiences, with everything from spotlights over the table to plates that photograph well to the “it” thing people will order (usually, an over the top dish or drink). Restaurant teams spend their energy there instead of on things like team culture or, sometimes, the quality of the food.

This is how we wind up with four liter shakes covered in 10 pastries and drinks that have junk in them (no, I’m not over the rubber duckies) and influencers eating the same dish over and over in slow motion with exaggerated facial expressions while annoyed diners wonder when they’ll turn the damn ring light off.

But it’s not how we get restaurants designed to last.

Often, when people tell me they are so sorry for not going to a new restaurant, I ask them this question, “What are restaurants for?” Their answers are always touching and have nothing to do with Instagram or hype. Mostly, they tell me a story of a place that means something to them.

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3. What are restaurants for?

In Chicago, I went to a pizza place that had, I am not kidding, the worst pizza I’ve ever had in my entire life. It was raw, including some unmelted cheese.

It is a pizza place that used to be a star and has been marked by decades and decades of accolades, and then at one point, it changed hands, and they fell off massively. They no longer grace the best of lists, which is hard in Chicago. In Chicago, once you’ve earned your stars on the pizza front, it seems that the city will support you forever and curse the name of anyone who says you’ve gotten worse, but it appears even they draw the line at uncooked dough.

While I was sitting there, staring at a raw pizza with something akin to sadness, a man and a woman came in. They were holding hands. They were so giddy. They were at least 70, on account of the fact that they had been married for 54 years, which they proudly announced.

All those years later, they still remembered that today was the anniversary of their first date. At that restaurant.

They told the server that this was also the restaurant that they got engaged at. It was the place that they had all of their kids’ graduation parties and the place that they went for date nights. “I just love pizza,” the woman said. “There’s nothing like this in Florida.”

They moved to Florida to escape winter, but they decided to come back this year for the restaurant. They missed it. It meant something to them. It defined their love and their hometown.

They were in Chicago and they could go anywhere, but they chose this place. They planned a trip around this place. I am sure the pizza tasted amazing to them because, for them, being at that restaurant had nothing to do with the food and everything to do with the memories that shaped their lives.

I couldn’t help but tear up at this. What a miracle, really, that this restaurant is still around so many years later for them to share this memory. I kept wondering if my favorite restaurants would be around in 54 years. There’s a couple of them that I think stand a chance, but in reality when I’m in my 80s, I’m probably not going to be able to go to my favorite restaurants for dinner. They likely will be closed and replaced with something else.

I bought this couple a bottle of champagne anonymously. They did not have any good champagne on the menu, but they did have some champagne. When they got the bottle, the woman was delighted. I am sure that that day for both of them will live on for the rest of their lives.

If it were up to me, I would rather have what they have (fierce loyalty to a restaurant that has fallen off) than what we have right now: no loyalty at all.

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Restaurants aren’t designed to be places that last. Most of the time, they come and they go in a flash. Changing that isn’t actually up to chefs and owners. It’s up to us.

If we want to change the onslaught of restaurant closures that have ramped up after COVID with no sign of stopping, we have to stop going to all of the new restaurants all at once.

If you go to 15 restaurants a year and they are all different restaurants that you never return to, you are not investing in your local community. You can’t tell me you “love restaurants” if you do that.

If you go out to eat 15 times a year and you go to your favorite restaurant seven times (and so does everyone else who loves it!), you’re doing something that helps keep that restaurant alive. It might be here when you’re in your 80s. Surely, it stands a far better chance.

This is what restaurants are for—not Instagram reels and opening hype.

Restaurants are holders of our memories. They are markers of the most important moments of our lives. When we take care of them, they take care of us. And when we don’t take care of them, the best keepers of our memories close and we wonder, “Why?” But restaurant owners know why: it’s because you stopped coming back.

With those options on the table, you have a choice: are you going to break out of the hype cycle or are you going to continue to eat at new restaurants while the restaurants you love wait for you with an open table?

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Writer’s note: JD Hovland of Minnesota’s Lonely Links gave a correction that B-52s is opening at third, not second, location.