Four St. Louis foodies have taken Instagram by storm and made lasting friendships

 By Rosalind Early       Photography by Carmen Troesser

“Do you want to get this pour?” food influencer Orlando Peyton is asking if fellow influencer Braden Tewolde wants footage of him pouring syrup on his waffle. The friend does and picks up his iPhone to pan the action.

This is the world of food-influencing. It looks like someone just grabbed a few snippets of video while out with friends. But the 2-3 minute videos that pepper TikTok and Instagram are intentional, with influencers shooting B-roll, carefully selecting a table with the best natural light, ordering things that plate well, and photographing the food till it's cold.

And the pay is abysmal. Most influencers are buying their meals themselves and spend more than they take in, which means everyone has a day job.

So how do food influencers juggle a full-time job, filming restaurants, editing reels, engaging with their platform, finding brand deals and the rest of life? We talked to four: Braden Tewolde of bradenstl, Mary Asher of mary.eats.stl, Orlando Peyton of epic.eats.stl and Whitney Sherr of whitneyinthecity to find out what a day in their life looks like.

While no day is the same, they’re all filled with three things: photos, phones, and tons of food.

Braden Tewolde

It’s 7 a.m. and Braden Tewolde is up checking email and his DMs on Instagram to see what’s urgent. He doesn’t just work a 9 to 5 recruiting for an insurance company. He also is food influencer BradenSTL, podcast host of Ope Cast the Pod, which highlights St. Louis creators, and he runs his own marketing agency Space Mission Marketing.

“No day is the same,” he says. “But every day is busy.” Today, he spends the morning on marketing calls about Avalanche, a holiday pop-up event, and in meetings about a new hire for Space Mission. After that, he works his day job till lunchtime when he heads over to the season announcement for the Muny.

After 5 p.m. Tewolde comes back to his influencer office at Tech Artista in the Central West End, gets the equipment to record his podcast live, and then heads home around 10 p.m. to edit a video. He may crawl into bed around 11:30 or midnight (or still be up answering emails) only to get up the next day to another jam-packed schedule.

“People have different hobbies,” Tewolde says. “We don’t watch TV. We just create.” Tewolde is speaking about himself and fellow food influencer Orlando Peyton who posts as epic.eats.stl (for more on Peyton, see below). The two are good friends and Peyton credits Tewolde with teaching him the importance of good lighting when they first met back in the summer of 2020 at a Burger Week event. They both started influencing in 2020 to help local restaurants get business during the pandemic.

Tewolde has a singular interest: building up St. Louis. For him, St. Louis needs more influencers to showcase how great the city is.

“We see all the potential,” Tewolde says about fellow influencers. “We grew up here. We know what’s holding our city back and we know where we need to go.”

Mary Asher

If you recognize food influencer Mary Asher (mary.eats.stl) out in public, she will give you a sparkly sticker with her Instagram handle on it. It’s the perfect remembrance because Asher herself is, well, sparkly.

“Isn’t this place cute?” she asks as we meet at Fiddlehead Fern Cafe for some sumptuous golden chai tea lattes and lunch. “Cute” is a word she uses frequently.

“I didn’t think she was genuine when I first met her because she’s so friendly,” says food influencer Whitney Scherr (for more on Scherr see below). “Then I realized… she’s just genuinely amazing and good.”

Asher’s excitement about life makes sense when you realize she is a little bit surprised to be alive. She has cystic fibrosis, a genetic disease that damages the lungs and other organs. In 2019 she got sick and declined rapidly. She got a lung transplant later that year.

“I was in the hospital and could not breathe. I pretty much had to get the lungs or I would have died,” she says. She pauses. “At least now I can talk about it without crying.”

Reborn, Asher started getting more into food influencing, especially when the pandemic hit. She would get to-go orders and photograph them while picnicking or at her home.

Now, Asher, who has a day job, spends most of her nights and weekends going to events, restaurants, bars, and cafes to get content.

She walks me through a typical weekend. “Breakfast out. If it’s Saturday, I’m eating at the Tower Grove Farmers’ Market. If it’s Sunday, I like to find a coffee shop or bakery with a great breakfast sandwich or croissant.”

She generally skips lunch, and uses downtime to photograph products or relax. Dinner might be out or at home (she and her husband love to cook), and there’s usually an after-dinner event to go to.

The editing slog is for the workweek, when Asher will find some time in the mornings or evenings to put her reels together.

“I’m living my second chance at life,” she says. “So why not have fun?”

Orlando Peyton

With 63,000 followers on Instagram, Orlando (he goes by Lando) Peyton is one of the biggest food influencers in St. Louis. His polished reels posted under epic.eats.stl not only make the food he’s showing you look appetizing, he also makes St. Louis look cool.

But his popularity explosion is fairly recent. In December 2022, he only had 5,000 followers after being a food influencer for two years.

“I started making reels that were aesthetically pleasing, but didn’t really catch people. So I had to learn processes and look at other cities and other influencers,” he says.

His breakthrough is in part due to making his videos more personal. “I started putting my face more in the videos,” he says. The ideas were actually Tewolde’s (see above), a good friend and fellow influencer. But there was another element to Peyton’s breakthrough. Previously, he didn’t want to post anything negative. 

“I had people commenting on my posts like, ‘Nah, he’s saying everything is all good.’ And I was like, ‘OK, I need to be really authentic in my videos. So, if I don’t like something, I’m still posting,’” Peyton says.

He incorporates critiques into his reels (typically sandwiched between more positive comments) and emphasizes that what he’s stating is opinion. “I’m not bashing the restaurant,” he says. “It’s just my preference.”

We head over to Bowood by Niche so Peyton can get some footage. He’s never been there before even though it’s not far from the office he shares with Tewolde. As he’s gathering B-roll, the hostess recognizes him.

They strike up a conversation. “Where should I go next?” he asks. She tells him Pastaria, another Gerard Craft spot. Peyton has never been there and says he will try to go. “I’m always looking for recommendations,” he explains. “People want me to tell them where to eat, but I want to know what’s your favorite spot.”

Whitney Scherr

When she was training for the New York City Marathon a few years ago, Whitney Scherr decided to start trying more restaurants.

“The only thing I actually liked about training was I could eat anything I wanted, especially on my long run days, and so I would hop around restaurants in New York,” Scherr says. She took photos of her outings and posted them to social media. When she had to move to St. Louis for work in 2017, Scherr had amassed 7,000 followers, and she continued food influencing here.

“I thought I was moving to the land of chain restaurants, but before I even officially had moved I met a group of people walking up to Food Truck Friday and they showed me the ropes.” The folks also remain friends with Whitney to this day.

Another person that Scherr ran into due to food (this time food influencing) was Mary Asher. They each claim the other as a BFF. Each year, for instance, Scherr goes to the same number of restaurants as she is old, an epic (and ever longer) restaurant crawl.

“The one rule is you can’t say the f-word, which is ‘full.’” says Scherr. “You can’t say ‘I’m full’ or ‘you’re full’ or ‘this restaurant is full.’ Full is a state of mind, and we don’t need that on this day.” She has to get something to eat or drink at each restaurant. This year, she turned 37 and says that the crawl took about 11 hours.

Asher and husband Nick were along for almost every spot. “I visited a place before I met up with them,” Scherr says.

Scherr even divides her time similarly to Asher, focusing on getting content over the weekend and editing it during the week when she’s not at work. She’s embraced St. Louis (it did take a while to get used to our Italian food, she says, because our red sauce is so sweet) but does she ever miss New York?

Nope.

“St. Louis is one of the most unique places I’ve ever lived, because people here genuinely want to support,” Scherr says. “Like if you were living in New York… you wouldn’t be caught dead in a New York shirt. In St. Louis it’s actually abnormal to walk into a restaurant and not see somebody wearing a St. Louis shirt. And that just says a lot about the community and how much people here love their city.”

Learn more about Whitney at whitneyinthecity.com.