In between the bicep-flexing thirst traps, the historical explainers, the strangely dead-eyed dances, and the get-ready-with-me videos (should I not be revealing what’s on my FYP?), TikTok is flooded with food and cooking content. Videos tagged #cookingfood have over 82 billion views. The #restaurantreview tag boasts more than 1.3 billion views, and turns up an endless scroll of videos. For some restaurants, the app is critical to success, and for influencers turned restaurant critics, it’s become a career-maker. But for all the carefully shot and edited hacks, recommendations, and recipes that have appeared on your FYP (the personalized For You Page), how many can you say you’ve actually used? TikTok is undoubtedly addicting, but is its cooking, food, and restaurant content, actually useful?
The app is, of course, far from perfect. Recipe content isn’t always user-friendly, and it’s true that short TikTok videos often can’t entirely capture a restaurant's vibe. Whatever your opinion on the way TikTok and food culture have collided, the two are now inextricably linked. And TikTok is changing more than the restaurant industry; it’s disrupting the way people use the internet as a whole. Cloudflare, a content delivery network, reported in late 2021 that TikTok was the most visited domain of that year, outshining behemoths like Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and even the former champ, Google. TikTok’s somewhat mysterious algorithm is weirdly good at recommending content that users want to see, and now members of Gen Z have turned to the app as their search engine of choice.
Google is taking note of the trend. At a conference last year, Google senior vice president Prabhakar Raghavan said that “In our studies, something like almost 40 percent of young people, when they’re looking for a place for lunch, they don’t go to Google Maps or Search.”
But how effective is TikTok as a search engine when it comes to food and restaurant recommendations? Yes, this app has mined enough information about me to understand what I think is funny or weird, but what is it like when I use it as my primary way of figuring out where and what to eat? And how could TikTok’s search capabilities shape and change the landscape of food and cooking as we know it? Inspired by my colleagues at Wired, I decided to find out firsthand. I committed to allowing TikTok to determine how I ate for five days.
First, some guidelines: Treating TikTok as a search engine, I’d use the app to search for recipes and restaurant recommendations the same way I’d normally search on Google—that is to say, plugging in search terms and scrolling until I find something feasible. Recipe searches would be for specific dishes as opposed to genre (“roast chicken recipe,” not “sheet pan dinners”), and I wanted to give the infamous FYP algorithm a chance to predict my restaurant and recipe needs, so at least one meal would be sourced from a period of time scrolling my FYP.
What follows is a true account of the five days I spent flinging myself into the beautiful and terrifying world of TikTok food content. The highs were high, the lows were sometimes soul crushing, and the results pushed me to question the future of the entirety of the food world.
Monday
Lunch
This is my first real foray into TikTok food-searching, and I’ll admit I’m nervous. I’m at the mercy of the algorithm—cornered into going to whatever restaurant it deems appropriate for me. Lunch is not my favorite meal (not supposed to drink, makes me sleepy, generally there are no appetizers involved), but I’m ravenous so I get to it. I type “East Village lunch” into the search bar, referring to my New York city neighborhood, and I’m shown a grid of four videos.
The first is a series of quick interior shots of the same Scandinavian spot where I’d gotten a coffee just hours ago—eerie! The second is a quick video of a local pizza spot making garlic knots. The balls of dough are drowned in garlic and olive oil and tossed in an enormous metal bowl. I can tell you from experience that pizza and garlic knots for lunch will make it medically necessary for me to take an immediate nap, so it’s a no-go. The third video hits: “Let’s go to brunch for less than $30,” the voice-over begins brightly over a shot of a sandwich on toasted bread, and a smiling woman walking down a sunny street. It points me towards a Tex Mex-ish cafe called Mud Spot and recommends the brunch special (a coffee, mimosa, and entrée for $21.80). The video is over a year old, but somehow still ranks close to the top of all results, which wouldn’t be the case on Google where new content is prioritized in search results. I’d been to Mud Spot before, but didn’t know they were running the brunch special, which seemed like a great deal, especially for the area.
TikTok content
After a ten minute walk, I arrive to find nearly every seat filled. I walk to the back room and sit at one of two empty tables. This place is just as affordable as the video mentions, and the restaurant is still—miraculously—offering the same year-old brunch special. It’s possible that I’m just ravenous, or that the smell of bacon wafting through the room is coloring my perception, but either way I’m thrilled to dig in. I order a breakfast burrito and a cup of coffee, forgoing the aforementioned mimosa—I’m on the clock, after all. The burrito is hearty, spicy, and crunchy—everything I needed. Cautiously optimistic that TikTok might actually make my life easier this week, I ask for the check. It comes to $26 including tip, which, thanks to TikTok, I think is the most affordable meal I’ve eaten in approximately six months.
Dinner
I have a longstanding reservation for dinner tonight, but as my friend and I try to settle on a pre-dinner cocktail spot, I whip out my phone to check TikTok. A “cocktails” search reveals only recipe videos, and “cocktail bars” doesn’t bring up anything helpful either. Don’t get me wrong, the search left me awash in bar recommendations, but where Google Maps would have provided me a wide swath of nearby bars at every price point, TikTok served me videos of frothing cocktails and elaborate interiors at bars that would no doubt be mobbed. I wasn’t looking for a bar that would be an experience, I’d hoped to find something nearby that simply served a decent cocktail. Feeling bashful after several minutes of somewhat frenetic and unfruitful scrolling, I slide my phone into my pocket, and we set out for a local dive.
It was naive to think that the TikTok search function would show me anything but the ostentatious cocktail spots that showed up—videos featuring fantastic aesthetics and eye-widening drinks garner the most engagement, which pushes them up in the algorithm, in turn encouraging other creators to make similar videos. No one, including me, is watching a review of the very ordinary bar around the corner. In hindsight, maybe I should have searched “dive bar” if I wanted a dive bar. Nonetheless, the very ordinary dive that we ended up at was the perfect spot for a pre-dinner drink.
Tuesday
Breakfast
Day one wasn’t bad, so I’m optimistic that day two will also go well. I get a late start today so breakfast and lunch are blending into one, but my priority is coffee (and maybe also a treat). My TikTok feed is constantly polluted with tiny, expensive coffee shops near me, so this should be an easy one. This time, I try scrolling through my feed until a coffee shop near me pops up—shouldn’t take too long, right?
In the first video that pops up when I open the app, a woman reenacts a scene at a 90’s movie rental shop, playing both the movie-renter and the store employee. Swipe. Two girls recreate some Spongebob sound effects. It’s pretty impressive, actually. Swipe. “Here’s how much it costs to retire in Sicily,” begins the next video. It’s quickly cut off as I swipe through. A couple ads, a few perfectly ab-ed guys dancing shirtless, and one grocery-shopping video later, it is clear that TikTok is not able to predict that I’m looking for a coffee shop. I continue scrolling TikTok, failing to notice, as I slip into the abyss, that I've stopped searching for coffee places.
An undisclosed amount of time later, I snap out of my reverie and search “coffee” but all I find is recipes. I’m definitely not equipped or willing to make coffee in my house—especially not these coffees. They feature swirls of caramel and milk frothers, and one is made inside an avocado. “Coffee near me” leads me to a video taken at a coffee shop in the Philippines, and when I finally plug in “coffee shop New York” I’m met with a video of a plant-filled space in Midtown, a neighborhood that’s a half-hour away by subway, and way too chaotic for this early hour. I scroll to the next video, a day-in-the-life vlog from a guy living on a narrowboat in England—am I shirking my journalistic responsibilities?
“Here are the top five coffee shops in New York City, East Village,” the next video begins. It occurs to me that I have no reason to believe this person has any authority when it comes to coffee shop superiority, but before that thought can land, the video is off and running and I’m locked in. It alternates between exterior shots of different coffee spots, and close-up shots of a coffee from each shop in hand. There’s no reasoning as to why these coffee shops are deemed “best,” except for a brief mention of 787 Coffee’s neighborhood discount. I notice the creator mistakenly refers to All the King’s Horses as “All the Kings,” but the video has already looped and started again. I tap the screen to pause it before the whole thing continues to loop over and over. It’s decided. I’m heading to the first coffee shop she mentions: Ninth St. Espresso.
TikTok content
Minutes later, I’m sipping a cold brew and munching on a miniature loaf of banana bread at one of the cafe’s sundrenched window seats. The coffee is good, but I keep thinking about what the creator’s criteria might have been in determining her top five coffee spots. How many coffee places did she visit before deciding? Were snack or pastry options factored in? Was there a reason she skipped Abraço, a local favorite which was mentioned in several comments? Most TikTokers creating best-of content position themselves as experts, but in the span of a thirty second video, it’s impossible to contextualize how qualified they might be to make those recommendations, or how much time went into research. To find the best coffee places near me, I’d normally check a publication like Eater NY, which has a reliable reputation and describes why each shop has made the list. There, I at least can be more sure that whomever is recommending has some amount of coffee knowledge.
Dinner
I’ve been promising my boyfriend I’ll make him a steak dinner for weeks, and today is the day. I turn to my trusty TikTok feed to figure out how I’m going to pull off the best steaks of our lives. “Steak dinner recipes” turns up a number of helpful results. The first is soundtracked with a Chris Brown song, and is cut so chaotically and quickly that I can’t follow the instructions. Cooking steps flash on the screen over close-up cooking videos for seconds at a time, which is a hallmark of the TikTok recipe genre. The only way to follow along would be to pause the video at every step to write the instructions down—an ironically analogue way to utilize a TikTok recipe.
The second is a brightly lit video that starts with a spoon pouring browning butter over two sizzling filets. Seconds later, tongs lower the finished steaks onto a cutting board. They’re sliced to reveal a perfect pink. “This is my quick and easy stovetop method I use for the perfect steaks every time,” the friendly, rehearsed voice-over says. “They’re steakhouse quality for a fraction of the price at home,” it continues while, as if we’ve traveled back in time, steaks, raw again, are put into a sizzling skillet to develop a nice crust. Ingredients, cooking directions, and even internal temperature guidelines are all listed in the caption—I am flooded with relief. I think this is doable! I make a short list of ingredients and head to the grocery store.
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TikTok content
This recipe is tagged “#budgetfriendly” and “#easyrecipe,” but one grocery run and $60 later, I’m not sure I’d deem this particularly easy on my bank account, though New York City grocery prices are often absurd these days. Still, this recipe is, in short, a banger. I followed the directions carefully, salting and patting my steaks dry, searing them for four minutes on each side, and finally adding butter, rosemary, and garlic to the pan for a few minutes of basting. I allow my steaks to rest for 10 minutes (the most important step, according to the instructions in the caption, though it doesn’t say why), and when I finally slice into them I’m rewarded with a perfectly pink medium-rare. They’re well salted, and the rosemary and garlic butter baste has infused the steaks with a stress-melting savoriness. Approximately 20 minutes of cooking was all it took to put together a simple weeknight meal.
I’ve never cooked a really great steak, so I was leaning on this recipe pretty hard. It was helpful to have the written instructions next to a step-by-step—albeit very fast-paced—video guide. I found myself bouncing between the video and caption to nervously confirm I was doing everything right, which I wouldn’t necessarily have been able to do with a traditional written recipe. Those visual cues were the handholding I needed. The comments section was also helpful. While many commenters stuck to something along the lines of “yum!” others chimed in with questions, which the creator or other commenters took upon themselves to answer. Questions about which cut of meat was best (filets), and the best pan to use (stainless steel) are extra useful nuggets of information. You win this round, TikTok.
Wednesday
Lunch
I’m rushing to get to the office on time this morning, which means I accidentally skip breakfast. Lunch at the office presents a challenge: What realistic options could TikTok offer for lunch around lower Manhattan? I open up the app hoping for the best—maybe I’ll be met with a video about the nearby Eataly and be forced to go there for a luxurious two-and-a-half-hour lunch. I’m just doing my job!
TikTok collects the location and GPS data of its users, so it seems like a “near me” search would be effective, but when I search “lunch near me” results show restaurants as far away as Australia. Typing “Lunch near” prompts the app to suggest touristy locations like “The Met” or “Central Park” that are not nearly within walking distance of my office. I type in “lunch near World Trade Center,” looking for spots near the Condé Nast offices. A video from last summer features someone eating at a street fair that was apparently in the area, another features One Dine, the restaurant at the top of One World Trade. Unfortunately, it isn’t open yet. I don’t see any viable options here, and, defeated and hungry, I face the inevitability of lunch at the Condé cafeteria.
Dinner
After work, I head to my gym in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood. Afterward, exhausted from a long day and a workout, I sit nearly catatonic in the lobby wondering how I might find a cheap, easy dinner. A burrito seems like it will fit the bill, but the first few videos under the “Williamsburg burrito” search point me toward a restaurant called Super Burrito, which I’m not crazy about—it hasn’t been as spicy as I would’ve liked on previous visits. I can think of about three other burrito spots that would be close, good, and cheap, but they are conspicuously absent from my TikTok feed. My hunger growing, I try “Williamsburg dumplings,” hoping I’ll be pointed towards an incredible new spot that will blow my mind.
Results are dominated by two restaurants. Antidote, which serves Sichuan-style food, pops up in the first several videos. One video begins with a slow pan around Antidote’s dining room, lit by a skylight, with chic concrete walls and several dangling plants hanging from the ceiling. A shot of a neon sign reading “Antidote,” more potted plants, a trio of brightly colored cocktails which the voice-over praises as “so pretty.” It goes on to recommend the wontons, soup dumplings, pork belly, fish and chili oil, and string beans while cycling between two-second overhead shots with a slow zoom of each dish. The delicate trio of soup dumplings and the shots of glistening pork belly look good, but it seems like a dine-in spot, and the food looks delicate enough that takeout containers and my long journey home might dim its shine significantly.
Vanessa’s Dumplings, one of New York City’s most well-known dumpling shops, also makes several appearances in the search results. One video begins with a quick overhead shot of eight dumplings covered in scallions, and nestled into a circular white takeout container. “Okay, let’s dive into the spicy wontons and the pork and chive dumplings from Vannessa’s Dumplings in Williamsburg,” says the creator. It’s clear from the video's background that the video was shot at home—I’m guessing delivery. I swipe out of the video as she’s raising a piece of dumpling wrapper up to the camera with her chopsticks. The next video is for Vanessa’s as well—set to a Calvin Harris song, it starts with a slow pan of the exterior of the restaurants, followed by several shots in takeout containers. Neither video is very detailed about menu items or much other restaurant information, but all the vital info is there: dumplings, check, takeout, check.
TikTok content
I frequented Vanessa’s throughout college, but was hoping that TikTok might have led me somewhere a bit less expected. As a search engine, it was feeling unwieldy and unfocused. Was I using the wrong search terms? Was there some other factor I was missing? Feeling frustrated, I mentally shake my fist at the sky, cursing the tweens that made this app what it is. “TikTok Food Week is ruining my life,” I text my boyfriend. After several minutes of weighing my options, paralyzed by hunger, I set off for Vanessa’s.
The dumplings are serviceable. The thin wrappers of the seared pork dumplings crackle on first bite and offer a satisfying chew. Chicken and basil dumplings have a bite of anise, and the fluffy pork buns tear apart to reveal a savory filling. Not bad, but not thrilling. What I’m learning from this moderately masochistic experiment is that the effort involved in searching, scrolling, and re-searching TikTok for food recommendations is more than I can bear, and doesn’t often lead me to anywhere exciting or new. Frustrated, I tell myself that I’ll cut down my TikTok meals to one per day for the rest of the week.
Thursday
Dinner
The week is nearly finished and I’m not the spring chicken I was on Monday. Nevertheless, I’m committed to finishing strong, and tonight I will find a new recipe on TikTok to make for dinner. I decide to eschew the search feature today—I’ll scroll through my feed on the hunt for recipes instead. Who knows? Maybe this will be a more fruitful methodology.
I scroll, and I scroll, and spend a bit more time scrolling. There are several of those split screen videos that show a Family Guy clip on one side, and a clip of someone playing subway surfer on the other. They’re meant to offer a double dose of eye-catching stimulation, and I hate to admit that my brain is incredibly vulnerable to them. I catch myself watching for twenty seconds or so before indignantly scrolling past, trying to train these videos out of my algorithm.
Eventually I swipe onto a recipe video. It’s a take on loubia, a Moroccan white bean dish, except this one is made into a pie with layers of crackly phyllo dough on top. I watch as the creator takes a bite of his finished loubia, rolling his eyes in pleasure as golden sunlight streams in from some off-camera window.
“This version of loubia, a Moroccan white bean stew, is for the working girls who come home feeling ran through,” the voice-over says. That’s me! I’m working girls who come home feeling ran through! The video is 43 seconds of snappy cuts showing chopping, stirring, grating, and sauteing, but it’s tagged #easyveganmeals, so I have hope that it will be feasible. I look for the recipe in the caption (no) or pinned in the comments (also no) but I finally find it by following the link in the creator’s bio. The estimated prep time is between one and two hours, and I count a whopping 19 (!!!) ingredients listed. This recipe is not for the working girls who come home feeling ran through. I’m missing ingredients like maitake mushrooms, phyllo dough, tomato paste, and fresh cilantro, parsley, and tarragon, and I certainly do not have the wherewithal to get through a 19 ingredient recipe. Not tonight. Possibly not ever.
Clicking through the #easyveganmeals brings me first to a video of a three-ingredient vegan pasta—tomato sauce, an entire thing of vegan cream cheese, and cooked pasta—that doesn’t look very good. Next, I’m fed a healthy vegan meal-prep lunch video for buffalo chickpea wraps which doesn’t give any measurements. I reluctantly tap the link in bio hoping to find a straightforward recipe, only to wade through links for meal plans, the cookbook the creator was selling, and meal planning app download links. Videos showing rice paper dumplings, coconut curries, and a confit tomato dish are next. Unfortunately, the three ingredient pasta is the only one I feel qualified to make, but I’m not sure I can subject my Ashkenazi stomach to that much vegan cream cheese.
All of the content was beautifully shot, the voice-overs were peppy and engaging, the dishes looked delicious, and there were even one or two tips—blooming spices, for instance—but ultimately the recipes were a flop for me. The quick cuts of the loubia pie video bely the complexity of the actual dish; it felt like the focus of most cooking videos was on engagement rather than actual instruction. I certainly can’t fault creators, who’re only trying to create successful content, but it speaks to the way recipe videos work on TikTok as opposed to other recipe sources—the New York Times Cooking website, or the Epicurious app, for instance, which, in my unbiased opinion, is beautifully designed and effortlessly functional… if you were wondering. There, I’m used to quick filters and categories—recipes deemed quick and easy are actually quick and easy, because there would be no reason to bait and switch the user. Realizing that more scrolling would not bring me closer to an actual dinner, I surrender and set out for my favorite Indian restaurant a couple blocks away.
Friday
Dinner
I’m going big and going home today. I’m searching TikTok for “best NYC restaurant,” and grabbing a reservation at the first place that has open tables. I don’t care where it is! I don’t care what’s on the menu! The first few videos that appear have titles like “My Top 10 NYC Restaurants” and feature restaurants like Carbone, The Polo Bar, and Misi—infamously difficult reservations to get in the best of circumstances, let alone on the same day. I take it back, I will not be eating at the first restaurant I find on my feed.
More scrolling leads me to a few rooftop bar recommendations, and a couple sushi spots that are booked up, until I finally land on a video recommending a restaurant I’ve never heard of in Hudson Yards. “If you’re in NYC you need to check out this amazing restaurant!” reads the app’s somewhat clunky text-to-speech narration voice. “It’s in Hudson Yards, and you get stunning views of the Vessel,” it continues, referring to the 150-foot piece of public art that’s vaguely shaped like an enormous rotating shawarma. Queensyard miraculously has tables available, and after a few clicks on Resy, my fate is sealed.
TikTok content
The first thing to note is that Queensyard is located inside The Shops at Hudson Yards—that is to say, it’s in a mall. But upon entering, the restaurant feels undoubtedly luxe. Large candles on the steps leading to the bar give everything a warm glow, and endless potted fiddle leaf fig trees, a notable staple of the TikTok aesthetic, make the space feel lush and luxuriant. I take note of the couples dining together, the just-a-bit-too-loud oontz oontz music playing over the speakers, and, as promised, the unobstructed view of The Vessel.
The restaurant bills itself as New American—whatever that means—and the menu features dishes like octopus with truffled scallion kimchi, and housemade bread with Marmite butter. My friend and I start with the aforementioned bread and Marmite butter which does not in fact have much of the malty, Marmite-y flavor the spread usually holds. We mosey through a respectable truffle Caesar salad, a well-cooked, delightfully citrusy branzino, and an overwhelming squid ink-heavy linguine that’s made gloopy by a leek cream sauce.
We leave full, but I’d describe our meal, in TikTok parlance, as “mid.” Sure, the restaurant was pretty in a frictionless, blandly luxurious way, and the food tasted fine—truffles, pasta, and warm bread will pretty much always taste good—but I wouldn’t describe the restaurant as “incredible,” the way the narrator in the TikTok video had gushed.
Using TikTok to search for restaurants felt like riding a hype machine rollercoaster. Every restaurant was the best restaurant, and each video saw the creator straining to prove why the restaurant they were featuring was particularly special. Look at this bar's secret entrance! Look at this cheese pull! Look at this cocktail overflowing with vapor from dry ice! If there’s one thing that drives engagement for TikTok’s restaurant content, it's a gimmick.
Recipes were another story entirely. Some, like the instructional steak video, felt incredibly user focused; instructions were right there so I didn’t have to exit the app, and I could follow along, referring back to the video or the written instructions as often as I wanted. Others, like the videos I found in the #easyveganmeals rabbit hole felt almost deliberately misleading. They led me to link-in-bios where creators were selling cookbooks, meal plans, and apps. When I did eventually find the written out recipes, they were not as easy as I’d been promised. Whereas traditional recipe apps and archives are generally quite good at helping you decide what to cook by accurately categorizing recipes by genre, TikTok’s recipe content worked best for me when I already knew what I wanted, and could search for specific recipes.
“TikTok Food Week,” as I’d been calling this experiment to anyone who would listen, had come to a close, and I’d learned a lot about both myself and the app in question. I learned, for instance, that helpful TikTok restaurant recommendations only come from very specific searches. I also learned that spontaneously planning meals on the fly makes me incredibly stressed out. I got new insight into a lot of different cooking techniques and recipes, and I learned that my pantry is woefully understocked to cook most of them.
Most of all, though, I learned that although it may gather worryingly detailed information from my scrolling habits, TikTok is a lot like every romantic partner I’ve had: It cannot read my mind and magically guess exactly what I want to eat.