24 Hours in the Life: Social Media Celebrity

My friend from Miami, who runs the handle The Naughty Fork, is visiting. She has like 550K followers. She is LEGIT and rightfully so. Her photos and videos are beyond beautiful. She runs Miami. We commence a day-long food crawl, which is pretty much what I do every day.

We’re at Drunken Dumplings, that giant soup dumpling place. There are already people waiting to get in there. It’s slammed. We eat a million dumplings and I shoot a video. I don’t typically charge restaurants, some food bloggers do. My goal isn’t even to have a great meal (although most of them are fantastic), it is to shoot 1,000 photos and post them forever and ever and ever.

Next, Speedy Romeo. I love Speedy and they love me. They give us everything on the menu. Pizza, salad, octopus, etc. And these are not slices, they are giant pies! I really try not to eat everything. Restaurants give me, like, 12 entrees for free, every single day. I normally can’t take leftovers home with me either. I mean, I walk around with a giant thousand-pound camera (maybe that is an exaggeration), my tripod, my gym bag. I physically can’t handle bags of food too – so I’d like to figure out how to easily make food donations somewhere (Any ideas?).

At a restaurant, I like when food is coursed out. The worse feeling is when all the food is dropped in front of me by a waiter all at once. That gives me extreme angst and makes my job – making beautiful, well-produced food photos and videos – very hard.

I make sure to drink a ton of water and I don’t drink alcohol on the job. I’m my own boss, but it’s still work. And booze will slow down my day.

We get to Ippudo Ramen in the East Village. By now, we are dying. And here comes another thousand plates. At least we walked there. Fresh air somehow helps with digestion. Ramen goes over really well on Instagram. People love that stuff. French fries too. People want to see food they understand. If I was served a giant sandwich with Hormel^® Natural Choice^® turkey, I’d make sure to cut it in half and present one half on top of the other. Sometimes you have to do a little surgery to make great-tasting food look as gorgeous on camera.

I have to do business stuff. Sure, I could spend all day going restaurant to restaurant, but sometimes I have to deal with taxes, emails, boring stuff that no one thinks about. I keep an excel spreadsheet of everyone who’s invited me to their restaurants, and currently there are 250 places that I’ve yet to go to.

I only go to events if they are particularly cool and different, like the Curemaster Reserve^® ham launch lunch at Toro. With that one, Chef Jamie Bissonnette was presenting, and musing on, the new premium Curemaster Reserve^® hams – and that detail made it sound so fun, and impossible to say no to.

Tonight I actually have a date. It’s the one meal I’ve paid for in a while! I intentionally made a reservation like a “normal person” because if I did it through the publicist, they’d send out tons of dishes and we’d just drown in food. Overeating doesn’t make for a very good date.

I’m already thinking about brunch tomorrow. For years everyone hated brunch, but brunch is so good now! Sunday in Brooklyn has the best pancakes I’ve ever had in my entire life. Llama Inn serves super amazing Peruvian food. But, I’m not a critic. All my food is free, so I can’t fairly judge anything. I just produce food content.