This excerpt was originally published in Pre Shift, our newsletter for the hospitality industry. Subscribe for more first-person accounts, advice, and interviews.
This is the final installment of our series Getting on the Map, presented by Apple Maps, where we shared how some of the most creative bars and restaurants are marketing themselves to stand out in a crowded hospitality scene.
“Hey, I’m Mike,” the video opens. “I’ve been a bartender for a long time in New York City and I’m opening my very first bar. Let’s go inside.”
It continues, showing Mike, whose name is Michael Bishop-Myers, picking over menus for his Brooklyn bar, Susu’s, which opens this week. In one clip, we see drills on the in-progress bar counter; in another, someone adjusts a frame on a wall. A previous video from the bar showed the installation of its speaker system: 12 Klipsch speakers and one Powersoft amplifier.
Who’s this for? Apparently, a decent number of people! The first video accrued over 103,000 views on Instagram and earned the bar a slew of excited comments.
Across social media, owners of bars, coffee shops, grocery stores, and restaurants are turning their buildouts into video series and finding an eager audience for niche, behind-the-scenes content. Beginning in 2022, Chicago chef Jacob Potashnick used TikTok videos to chronicle the process of building his own restaurant, Feld, which opened in 2024. It has since won a James Beard award and earned a Michelin star, hooks that now guide Potashnick’s recent content. Vancouver’s Cowdog Coffee, which was started by content creator Joe Lee, similarly shared its buildout on social media.
The Nitro Bar in Providence, Rhode Island, has been a leader in innovative social media for food businesses, with owner-turned-social-media-personality Audrey Finocchiaro known for videos in which she presents her staff with goofy prompts (“I haven’t pooped in three days. What would you make to make me poo?”). Finocchiaro, who also makes videos about the reality and the absurdity of running coffee shops on her personal account, is now documenting the process of bringing the Nitro Bar to NYC in a series of longform YouTube videos. One follows her to an interior design meeting; in another, with over 54,000 views, she tours the production space.
As Rachel Karten of the social media-focused publication Link in Bio has explained with regard to The Nitro Bar, it all comes down to building a “my show is on” mentality around a business, which can feel, to some extent, like a character. “You’re the host, the employees are the cast, the coffee shop is the set,” Karten said on a panel with Finocchiaro at an industry event this spring. Finocchiaro has described her approach to social media as treating the coffee shop like its “own person,” someone who customers want to befriend.
Cookbook author and food personality Jake Cohen recently announced a new series in which he DIYs the transformation of a Brooklyn warehouse space into the event space and test kitchen of his dreams. “Should I do stainless countertops? Stone? Butcher block?” he asks, standing in the very-before-photo bathroom. Here, the crossover appeal of content like this becomes clear: It’s HGTV meets the Food Network, for people who need their consumption choices steered by some level of parasocial relationship. Through a “making the restaurant” series, a business owner (and even a business itself) becomes someone (or something) to identify with, and a character viewers want to support.
For the most extreme example of this trend, there is Sammy Nussdorf, who documented the journey to opening his high-end NYC grocery store Meadow Lane over, per Grub Street’s analysis, “430-plus days, several permitting snafus, and nearly 700 TikTok posts.” By the time Meadow Lane opened in late 2025, Nussdorf was not only a founder, but as familiar (and as polarizing) a character as a Real Housewife; his confessional approach and the saga’s protracted will-it-open-or-won’t-it air gave the grocery store buildout the kind of cliffhanger appeal we might otherwise seek out from reality TV.
“I think the more disclosure, the more unveiling of the curtain behind a private business, the more interested people are,” Nussdorf told the New York Times this summer. This TikTok approach was immensely successful as a marketing tool, spurring lines down the block when it opened; even Meijer shoppers in the Midwest were hearing about Meadow Lane.
We’ve seen this level of increased disclosure across the board in the restaurant industry, as the success of Substack and the rise of short-form video platforms allow anyone to go straight to an audience. Chefs like Stockholm’s Bill Allison have gained traction online sharing the nuts-and-bolts of restaurant life. While its Instagram presence is minimal (and its TikTok presence nonexistent), the new NYC restaurant Legion’s owners published a series called The Opening Files on Substack in the lead-up to its debut earlier this month. Whereas a prospective restaurant owner might have once relied on a traditional media publication to make the judgment call on whether audiences might be interested in the nitty-gritty of choosing a restaurant space or choosing dishware, individuals can now test that hypothesis directly.
Even legacy media’s leaning in. Last year, Curbed ran a multi-part series following restaurateur and author Eddie Huang as he embarked on the process of opening the restaurant that would become the new Baohaus. Here, Huang wrote about things like touring spaces, having deals fall apart, and very candid confessions about the specific finances of it all.
Ultimately, it boils down to one thing: People are nosy. Give them what feels like good gossip.
