TikTok Virality Has Become a Key to Restaurant Success. It’s Not So Easy to Come By

On a quiet, drizzly Monday night in December 2021, Madison Shapiro decided on a whim to review Skirt Steak on @sistersnacking, a TikTok account she shares with her three sisters. She saw that the New York restaurant was drawing buzz for its $28 steak dinners with unlimited fries, and she knew timeliness was key. She quickly pulled together her positive review and sent it to her sisters for editing. They posted it two days later and by nightfall it hit a million views.

Owner Laurent Tourondel was in the kitchen that day when the host called and said to look outside. More than 100 people were waiting in line to eat. Skirt Steak got hit by the viral effect—and it wasn’t from Instagram, the main driver of restaurant industry viral marketing in recent years. It was TikTok.

“It’s nuts,” Tourondel says. “One day you’re doing normal service, the next you’re doubling covers because [someone] posted a video of your food and the space.”

The video social media platform’s impact on restaurant sales is already undeniable, following in the steps of Instagram and Facebook as important food marketing tools. Of course, creating a successful restaurant has never been an exact science, and neither has internet virality. But many of those who are harnessing the power of TikTok are finding that success on the platform can be particularly ephemeral—and riding the viral wave can be challenging. For now, the million-dollar question remains: Do all those eyeballs and noncommittal likes actually translate to more butts in seats? And what happens when your moment passes and everyone’s moved onto chocolate cloud bread or shawarma towers?

“You never know what views you may get or what will take off,” says Shapiro. “You could work hours on a video and compile a list of top restaurants for it to get 10,000 to 50,000 views and then post a video you made in five minutes and get 250,000-plus views.”

Since TikTok launched in 2016, it has gained a significant share in eyeballs. Almost 85 million Americans now actively use it each month, out of a billion users worldwide. On average, users spend 95 minutes a day on the app, compared to 51 minutes on Instagram.

Like with other digital platforms, timing matters; early adopters often capitalize the most. That’s been the case for The Red Chickz, a Nashville-style hot chicken restaurant in Los Angeles. In 2019, when most restaurateurs were still focused on Instagram, Red Chickz founder Shawn Lalehzarian took a chance. “We wanted to jump on it sooner than everyone else,” he says of TikTok.

Within four months, The Red Chickz amassed 17,000 followers through videos of its craggy fried chicken and sides, peppered with humor that has become trademark for the restaurant, like aggressive sauce-dunking and assembling cartoonishly large sandwiches. Followers grew by upward of 10,000 people each week until in November 2021, when—still with only one location—the Red Chickz surpassed 1 million followers.

The audience has translated directly into growth. Multiple customers turn up daily saying they’ve come because of TikTok. The restaurant runs promotions through the platform and once received so many orders that Lalehzarian and his partner had to delay a flight to help with the rush. At the beginning of the year, they explored franchising, and Lalehzarian argues that the TikTok popularity helped them sign deals on 18 new locations, with at least a dozen more on the way across Texas and California.

It’s an investment for the restaurant. The Red Chickz’s marketing team of four devotes 15 to 20 hours each week to TikTok—mostly brainstorming compelling content ideas and sizing up trends. They check in with senior leadership once or twice each month.

It’s also an investment that Lalehzarian thinks is worth the cost. A growing slice of users are getting on the platform “not necessarily to create content but to be entertained,” he says. Because they’re not expecting to see marketing or promotional content on TikTok, they’re less likely to skip, say, a short video showing a chef’s knife crunching through reddish fried chicken and dousing it with sauce, he argues. (This might not be the case for long, given the recent arrival of a so-called Branded Mission monetization program that enables users to take part in promotional content challenges.)

The age of TikTok users is creeping up too, despite its reputation as a platform for young people to perform silly dances. In the first quarter of 2021, 36 percent were between 35 and 54 years old, compared to 26 percent a year earlier. (We get FOMO too, after all.)

“It requires your own unique creativity and a different kind of communication,” Lalehzarian says of TikTok. “But there’s a real opportunity to get in front of people, not just with a dead picture, but a short video that they can connect and communicate with. I don’t think we’ve had such a marketing opportunity or tool before.”

Other restaurants gaining TikTok popularity are doing so not because of their own original videos but because of reviews from a new set of TikTok restaurant critics, who are amassing cadres of engaged followers who trust their opinions and relate to their vibe and taste.

Chef Derek Wong started hosting omakase dinners in people’s homes during COVID, and his business boomed due to videos from @sistersnacking. The account extolled the omakase dinners not once but twice; the first amassed 169,000 views, the second over 776,000. (The sisters estimate it takes 100,000 views before a post starts impacting restaurant foot traffic and sales.) “After @sistersnacking posted, it was getting crazy with people wanting the dinners,” Wong says.

With the popularity, restaurateurs sometimes gain benefits beyond initial sales. Wong was able to open a restaurant in Manhattan in February, called Matsunori. Skirt Steak’s virality leaked into more traditional media venues, with publications like Eater NY and Infatuation giving their own reviews that played up its “TikTok-famous” status.

But like all social media, no amount of creative and timely posts, trend monitoring or marketing trials can force that tantalizing, elusive moment when a TikTok video goes viral. Say a nail artist drives 80 miles to Veronica’s Kitchen in Inglewood, Ca., and films herself trying West African staple fufu, which 6 million people watch, kicking off a global #fufuchallenge in which people document their reactions trying it for the first time, and quadrupling business at Veronica’s Kitchen almost overnight.

Or all of a sudden, the food you’ve been serving all along becomes a main plot point in a hit TV show, and TikTok creators everywhere want to try it. The Korean noodle and dumpling chain MDK Noodles had been selling dalgona, the stamped Korean candy, for at least a year when “Squid Game” aired on Netflix last September. Dalgona, featured in a life-or-death challenge in the third episode, then became a TikTok favorite, and the chain, which has locations in L.A. Anaheim, and Houston, saw sales go from a couple dozen pieces a month to as many as 500 in a month at a single location.

But the tides change frequently on the video-sharing app, and it can be hard to snare, much less hang onto, a viral moment. Demand for MDK’s dalgona has since slipped to 150 to 200 pieces monthly, says Stacey Shin, who runs MDK Houston. The attention caught them by surprise, and she’s not sure they took enough advantage of it. Similarly, a search for Veronica’s Kitchen on TikTok shows that most of the top viral videos featuring the restaurant and its fufu were published in late 2021; very few videos featuring the restaurant seem to have made a splash in 2022.

Tourondel of Skirt Steak says business has yet to slow down after the viral TikTok videos, and has added a busser, waiter and an extra runner to accommodate the always-packed dining room. Yet from his perspective, none of it would last unless his business already had the goods to draw consistent crowds. “TikTok helped us accelerate our popularity,” he says. “Are we popular just because of TikTok? I don’t think so.”

Restaurateurs unsure of whether to invest in TikTok can no longer ignore the potential upside—whether from a single @sistersnacking review or even the echo effect resulting from happening to serve dalgona when it became a global phenomenon. While a viral moment isn’t guaranteed, even the skeptical must now consider building TikTok into their restaurant’s base marketing strategy. The rub here is this platform lives and dies by breathless creativity, making it harder to phone it in. Then again, who's to say how long TikTok itself will retain “It” status? Not so long ago, Instagram was the platform, and Snapchat before it—albeit briefly, then Twitter, Facebook and MySpace (anyone?). For a while, Lalehzarian thought Clubhouse, the audio chat room app, might overtake TikTok; so far it hasn’t caught on.

“The point is, you can’t fight it, especially with the growth of technology and virtual reality that’s growing so fast and spilling into every part of our lives,” Lalehzarian says. “I’m sure the next platform is going to be something else that’s beyond what we can even conceive of now.”

Indeed, the next It platform is as hard to predict as it is inevitable, almost like waking up to find out that dalgona candy is trending.