You know what, lately I have observed a shift in my social media appetite. Somehow, Reddit has become my favourite corner of the internet.Instagram feels like it always has an agenda, an algorithm deciding what I should feel today. Reddit does not care about any of that. People just say what they actually think, strong opinions, solid perspectives, and I have started going there whenever I want a real answer instead of a filtered one.
So there I was, scrolling a thread, when I landed on this question:
And honestly, that same question has been sitting quietly in the back of my head for a while too. In the B2B world, you cannot even imagine doing organic marketing without a blog; it is the first thing anyone sets up.
But restaurants? You have reels doing the heavy lifting. You have a great name; sometimes your name alone gets you the reservation. So why would a restaurant need to write anything at all?
I went down the research rabbit hole to find out.
Turns out, the fancy ones already know
The Fat Duck writes. They also have a newsletter of their own!
Eleven Madison Park writes, and writes so well that I stopped scrolling and actually read every word.
Blue Hill Farm writes & Noma, oh my god, they did not stop at writing an article; they published an entire book, The Noma Guide to Building Flavour, essentially turning their kitchen’s thinking into something people buy and keep on a shelf
None of these places calls it a blog, by the way. Nobody wants to sound like a B2B SaaS company. They call it an editorial section, a journal, a newsletter, whatever fits their voice. But strip away the label, and it is exactly what a blog does: it gives a brand a written voice to go alongside its visual one.
And here is the part that got me thinking.
These are restaurants that do not need the extra push. They have Michelin stars, waitlists that stretch for months, and a name that alone fills every table. If content this good is coming out of kitchens that already have nothing left to prove, that is not decoration.
Why you need something beyond reels
A reel can show me your dish in four seconds. It cannot tell me why your grandmother’s recipe for that dish only uses jaggery and never sugar. It cannot tell me why your chef refuses to serve a particular fish outside of its two months in season. It cannot carry the weight of eleven years of getting one gravy exactly right.
That is the gap written content fills. Not instead of reels, alongside them.
Your reel gets the scroll to stop. Your writing is what makes someone feel like they know your kitchen before they have even walked in.
One builds attention, the other builds a relationship, and a restaurant that only has the first is running on borrowed excitement that resets every single day.
I know writing does not excite everyone the way it excites me. Most people would rather plate a dish than describe one. That is completely fine. This is not about turning your whole team into writers overnight; it is about finding the one small habit that fits your restaurant.
Where to start
Nodding along is easy, but actually opening a doc and writing the first line is the harder part (ask me)
So here is exactly where to begin, and none of it requires hiring a writer or building a fancy blog page overnight.
And if the word blog still feels wrong for your restaurant, drop it entirely.
Nobody is asking you to run a content calendar like a media house. Think of it as tasting notes on your specials, a short farm diary when your produce guy sends something interesting, a two-line note on the menu card explaining why a dish exists.
The form does not matter; the habit of putting your voice into words does.
Find your writer, rather than hire one!
Every restaurant already has someone on the team who journals at home, sends long thoughtful texts to friends, or writes captions with more soul than the rest of the page combined. Notice who that is. Give them permission and a laptop, not a job description.
Start with the smallest possible format.
Pick one, write a hundred and fifty words, done.
- One dish, one paragraph, why it exists and not how to make it
- One ingredient, one paragraph, where it comes from and why you chose it over the easier option
- One kitchen moment, one paragraph, something that happened this week that nobody outside saw
Permit yourself to go slow!
You do not need a blog live by next Monday. Even one write-up a month is a beginning. The point is not consistency from day one, it is simply starting to see your food as something worth writing about, not only plating and posting.
And here is a thought I genuinely believe in!
Do not just let this writing sit on a page on your website waiting for someone to stumble on it. Turn it into a monthly newsletter instead.
A newsletter goes straight to an inbox, and every person who signs up hands you their email, which is one of the few pieces of customer data reels can never get you. One story a month, sent directly to people who already like you, quietly builds a list you own, unlike your followers, which the algorithm owns for you.
Ohh, and while I am writing this, another idea just struck me.
Remember Reddit? The place that started this whole newsletter?
You can actually use it too. Not for self-promotion- nobody likes that, but you can genuinely talk about your restaurant, your dishes, your ingredients, your process, right there on Reddit.
Start your own thread if you want, or jump into an ongoing relevant one, and use any profile you like to do it. People trust Reddit precisely because it does not feel like marketing, so let your restaurant show up there the same honest way everyone else does.
So, worth the ink?
You do not need to become Noma overnight, and honestly, most restaurants never will; that book took a legendary kitchen years to earn the right to write. But somewhere in your restaurant, right now, there is a dish with a story nobody has bothered to tell, an ingredient nobody has explained, a chef with a voice nobody has heard beyond the pass.
Reels will keep getting you noticed. Writing is what gets you remembered.
I am not asking you to start tomorrow, next week, or even next month. Just start thinking about it; that is enough for today!
See you next Monday!