Stylist and merchandiser Amber Richele noticed a pattern on her feeds. You probably have noticed it, too, if you're the type of person who peruses Instagram and TikTok for restaurant recommendations.
Every time she looked at her phone, the aspirational San Francisco lifestyle influencer girlies were all recommending the same brick-and-exposed beam aesthetic restaurants, bars, and cafes to their tens of thousands of followers.
"It seems like every time I see somebody going out for date night or a girl dinner or something like that, they're all going to the same places," Richele told Gazetteer SF as she sipped her brown-butter miso latte at Sightglass in the Mission.
Richele, who was born and raised in San Francisco, was skeptical; surely, these places can’t be all that. After a barre class last month, she went to the Cow Hollow outpost of trending L.A. cafe Motoring Coffee, a spot she’d been seeing raves about for months. She paid for her almond milk matcha latte, and posted an off-the-cuff review on TikTok. She christened the series: “Is it worth the hype or do just white people like it?” (More accurately, white is replaced with a white circle emoji, as is common on TikTok.)
@amber.richele1 Episode 1: Motoring Coffee #isitworththehype #sanfrancisco #sf #coffeeshop #motoringcoffee
♬ Yacht Club - MusicBox
Her verdict?
“It’s a pretty good matcha to me,” she says in the video. She probably wouldn’t pay its $7 going price for it — but it’s solid. To her, the interior was quite nice, albeit reminiscent of Brooklyn dad-chic brand Aimé Leon Dore’s Lower Manhattan cafe , before concluding that you’re likely paying for the aesthetic experience.
The video connected with a local audience: over 100,000 views, thousands of likes. People were charmed by her candidness, her reluctance to fall for hype, and crucially, her point of view as a Black woman in San Francisco. In a sea of samey-samey influencers hyping up samey-samey restaurants, it feels like a breath of fresh air.
Over the course of the thirty some-odd videos Richele has posted so far, she’s visited just about every gustatory establishment across the city with palpable buzz or a longstanding reputation — Arsicault, the Laundromat, Flour and Water, Fiorella, Postscript. Many of the places she goes to have hours-long wait times, or are in San Francisco’s upscale neighborhoods, namely the Marina and Pacific Heights. “It's almost like a running joke where it's just, like, ‘Oh, it's in the Marina, of course it is,’” she joked.
That’s not to say these spots aren’t good or deserving of the hype. In fact, Richele is generally positive in her reviews: Juniper on the corner of Polk and Pine and Plow on 18th Street are among the places she’s given high praise to so far. (The Cubano croissant still lives in her head, rent free, she said.) The few that haven’t met the mark, she emphasizes, were not her taste. She’ll often receive suggestions of items to try if she ever chooses to come back, and she occasionally hears them out. But some experiences and specific foods just won’t ever be for her, like the one restaurant where she had to hunt down her server to take her order after they waited on everyone else or Arsicault’s specialty croissant, which is out of the question because she’s not into almonds. (Besides, she adores Arsicault.)
Two things set her apart from the crop of food influencers in the city: Richele pays for her own meals, and she only reviews already-trendy restaurants, where her take won’t make or break a restaurant’s bottom line, put a new restaurant on the map, or, like Keith Lee, singlehandedly revive a struggling restaurant.
“I’m not Keith Lee,” Richele said with a laugh. “Like I'm not Keith Lee, where [people are] like, ‘Please, come save my restaurant!’ I'm not … I'm not that person.”
But, at least in San Francisco, she’s already a bit of a minor celebrity. She’s been recognized a handful of times, primarily by people of color who watch her TikToks religiously. Once, out in Berkeley with her mother, a woman yelled out from the backseat of a car that she loved the series before the car quickly sped away. She was approached by two separate people one evening while waiting for a table at a restaurant; one asked if it was going to be on her TikTok. (It was.) It helps that she cuts a chic, striking figure with faux-furs, oversized sunglasses, and sleek leather boots, to the point where she has a companion series where she fit-checks the outfits she wears in her reviews.
Out-of-town commenters have asked for the series to come to their cities. And already, her restaurant review series has spawned copycats.
Richele is just one reviewer, but her vantage point means she’s seen how the city — its food culture and its broader identity — has shifted since her childhood. I ask her early on in our conversation about how growing up in the city has informed her content. She lays out a compelling argument of how displacement — of Black and brown, working-class, and second- and third-generation San Franciscans — has shaped its culinary scene.
“When I was growing up here as a kid, it was very possible to be somewhat middle-class as it were,” Richele, who now lives on the other side of the Bay, said. "You could be a bus driver, you could be a teacher, and you could still live here.”
She added: “All those middle-class workers and people who may have owned the mom-and-pop restaurants, they weren't able to live here anymore.”
When they're pushed out by a confluence of tech transplant money and homogeneity, they’re replaced with restaurants that represent the tastes of the young and upwardly mobile, for better or worse. Those places, Richele says, have become the norm.
“With the demographics of the city, if you want your business to thrive and prosper, you kind of see market-wise what the customer wants," she said. "It's just capitalism.”
That is why she’s unbothered by some hurt feelings that may come from the name of her series. She knows the question strikes a nerve — but that’s the goal.
