An Upfluence study of TikTok Must Eat in New York
What to do to rank on TikTok Must Eat
TikTok launched Must Eat in New York, Los Angeles, and the Bay Area last week. Restaurants can’t pay to be on it, and the list is put together from what people post, review, and comment on the app. We looked at the TikTok activity around the 19 New York restaurants at the top of the list and compared it with 11 well-known restaurants that didn’t make it, to see what the listed ones have in common.
TikTok creators per restaurant
3×
The typical listed restaurant had 19 different TikTok creators post about it from April to September. Well-known restaurants that missed the list had 6.
Restaurant hashtags
66%
TikTok posts about listed restaurants that used the restaurant’s own hashtag.
Manhatta
4
TikTok creators who posted about it in our data. It’s still number one in Elevated Dining.
Restaurants on the list have about three times as many TikTok creators posting about them. From April to September 2026, the typical listed restaurant was posted about by 19 different creators. For a comparison group that includes Balthazar, Le Bernardin, and Eleven Madison Park, it was 6. Seventeen of the 19 listed restaurants are above the comparison group’s median.
The number of people matters more than the number of views. Total TikTok views were about the same for both groups, around 180,000 for the typical restaurant. Most creators posted about a restaurant once.
Restaurant hashtags do a lot of the work. Two thirds of TikTok posts about listed restaurants used the restaurant’s own hashtag, such as #4charles or #torrisi. Eleven of the 19 listed restaurants were never @-mentioned on TikTok in our data at all.
Getting on the list and ranking high look like two different things. Position barely follows creator count. Manhatta is first in Elevated Dining with 4 TikTok creators, and Levain, with the most (359), is ninth in Everyday Eats.
We can’t tell yet whether location matters. From the location where we did the analysis, 14 of the 19 restaurants are within 2 km. But the order doesn’t follow distance: the top four Everyday Eats picks are farther away than the bottom six.
Listed restaurants have more people posting about them on TikTok
TikTok says the list reflects places people discovered and kept going back to. The clearest pattern in our data is that more different TikTok creators post about the restaurants on it.
Do restaurants on TikTok’s Must Eat list get more TikTok content than other popular restaurants?
In our data, yes, about three times as much. Between April and September 2026, the typical listed New York restaurant was posted about by 19 different TikTok creators, counting posts that @-mentioned the restaurant or used its hashtag. We compared that with eleven well-known New York restaurants that weren’t in the top spots, including Balthazar, Le Bernardin, and Eleven Madison Park. Their typical count was 6. Seventeen of the 19 listed restaurants were above that comparison group’s median. Matching restaurant names in captions instead gave the same direction, 27 creators against 13.5. We don’t know exactly what TikTok counts, but the listed restaurants clearly have more people posting about them.
Does being popular on Instagram help a restaurant get on Must Eat?
Not that we can see. Several restaurants that are well covered on Instagram barely appear on TikTok, and none of them made the top of the list. Balthazar was posted about by 131 Instagram creators between April and September 2026 and by none on TikTok in our data. Le Bernardin had 81 Instagram creators and 6 on TikTok. On Instagram, listed and unlisted restaurants look about the same, at roughly 90 to 100 creators each. On TikTok, the listed ones have about three times as many. Since Must Eat is built from TikTok content, a following on another platform doesn’t seem to transfer. Restaurants need people posting about them on TikTok itself.
TikTok creators who posted about each restaurant
Different creators whose TikTok post @-mentioned the restaurant or used its hashtag, April to September 2026. Blue restaurants are in the Must Eat top 10 (Everyday Eats) or top 9 (Elevated Dining). Grey ones are well-known restaurants that aren’t.
Behind the numbers
The comparison group isn’t made up of unknowns. Balthazar and Russ & Daughters are institutions, and Le Bernardin and Eleven Madison Park have three Michelin stars. What most of them don’t have is a steady stream of TikTok creators posting about them. Joe’s Pizza (140 creators) and L’Industrie (123) are the exceptions, and we wouldn’t be surprised to find both further down the full list.
Being famous on other platforms doesn’t seem to carry over. Balthazar was posted about by 131 Instagram creators over the same six months and by none on TikTok in our data. On Instagram, listed and unlisted restaurants look about the same, which is why this study focuses on TikTok.
Views don’t separate the two groups either. The typical restaurant in each group got around 180,000 TikTok views on matching posts. What differs is how many separate people are posting.
More creators doesn’t guarantee a higher spot
If the list ranked restaurants by how much TikTok activity they get, Levain would be first in Everyday Eats. It’s ninth, and Elevated Dining shows almost no link between creator count and position.
Does more TikTok content mean a higher position on Must Eat?
Not reliably. Creator count helps separate listed restaurants from unlisted ones, but it barely predicts the order within each list. In Everyday Eats, Levain had by far the most TikTok creators in our data, 359, and is ninth. Katz’s is first with 109, and Maison Pickle is fourth with 14. In Elevated Dining there is almost no relationship at all. The rank correlation is about −0.3 for Everyday Eats and close to zero for Elevated Dining, and neither is statistically meaningful with lists this short. TikTok says it uses more than 40 million posts, reviews, and comments to build the list. We can only see the posts, so the other inputs probably explain much of the order.
Why is Manhatta first in Elevated Dining when it has so little TikTok content?
We found only 4 TikTok creators posting about Manhatta between April and September 2026, using its hashtag or account. That’s one of the lowest counts on either list, and it still ranks first in Elevated Dining. Tatiana, ninth on the same list, had 3. So Elevated Dining doesn’t seem to be ranked by video volume. Our guess is that things we can’t measure count for more here, such as in-app reviews, the tone of comments, saves, and videos tagged to the location without a hashtag. Manhatta is a 60th-floor dining room people book for birthdays and anniversaries, which is the kind of place people save and review more than they film.
List position compared with number of TikTok creators
Each dot is a restaurant on the list, with number one on the right. Different TikTok creators who posted about it, April to September 2026. The vertical axis is logarithmic so Levain (359) doesn’t flatten the rest.
Having lots of different creators post about you seems to help get you onto the list, but where you end up depends on other things too. TikTok says the list is built from more than 40 million posts, reviews, and comments. We can only see the posts.
Most restaurant videos come from small creators
In all three places where Must Eat launched, about three quarters of restaurant videos come from accounts with fewer than 50,000 followers. Larger accounts get most of the views.
Who makes restaurant content on TikTok in New York, Los Angeles, and the Bay Area?
Mostly small accounts. We looked at 21,530 TikTok posts tagged with city food hashtags such as #nycfood, #laeats, and #sffood between April and September 2026. Of those, 74% came from creators with fewer than 50,000 followers, and creators with 5,000 to 50,000 followers made 52% on their own. New York is the biggest scene by far, with about 4,500 creators posting under its food hashtags in six months, compared with about 1,100 in Los Angeles and 600 in the Bay Area. Only 911 creators posted five or more times under one city’s tags, so the number of regular local food creators is in the hundreds.
Do restaurants need big influencers to get discovered on TikTok?
Big accounts get most of the views. Creators with more than 50,000 followers made 26% of the city food-hashtag posts and got 81% of the views, and the 87 accounts with over a million followers got 34% by themselves. Most videos reach far fewer people: the median was about 1,800 views. Smaller creators hold their own on engagement, with the 5,000 to 50,000 tier getting about 92 likes, comments, and shares per 1,000 views, against 65 for the 50,000 to 250,000 tier. For Must Eat, the number of different creators seems to matter more than their size, and about three quarters of the TikTok creators posting about listed restaurants have under 50,000 followers.
Share of posts and views by creator size
21,530 TikTok posts tagged with NYC, LA, or Bay Area food hashtags (#nycfood, #laeats, #sffood and others), by creator follower tier, April to September 2026.
Food creators by city
Creators who posted with each city’s food hashtags, April to September 2026.
| City | Creators | Under 50K | Median views |
|---|---|---|---|
| New York | 4,508 | 75% | 1,807 |
| Los Angeles | 1,083 | 74% | 1,821 |
| Bay Area | 611 | 88% | 1,745 |
Engagement by creator size
Likes, comments, and shares per 1,000 views on the same posts.
| Tier | Per 1K views | Median views |
|---|---|---|
| 0–5K | 88 | 956 |
| 5K–50K | 92 | 1,541 |
| 50K–250K | 65 | 4,804 |
| 250K–1M | 102 | 22,861 |
| 1M+ | 130 | 144,496 |
Does location change the list?
We measured how far each restaurant is from the location where we did the analysis, in lower Manhattan. Most are close by, but the closest ones aren’t the ones at the top.
Is TikTok’s Must Eat list personalized by location?
We can’t say yet. From the location where we did the analysis, in lower Manhattan, 14 of the 19 top restaurants were within 2 km. The median distance was about 1.3 km for Everyday Eats and 1.4 km for Elevated Dining, which looks local. But the order of the list doesn’t follow distance. The top four Everyday Eats picks include Los Tacos No.1 in Times Square, 3.2 km away, and Maison Pickle on the Upper West Side, 6.6 km away, while the two closest restaurants, Levain and The Commerce Inn, are ninth and eighth. The downtown cluster might just reflect where Manhattan’s most-discussed restaurants are.
How can you check whether Must Eat changes by location?
Look at the list from two places at the same time. TikTok publishes a list for each launch region (New York, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay Area) and shows it in search, the Local Feed, and restaurant pages. Take screenshots of Everyday Eats and Elevated Dining on two phones, one in lower Manhattan and one in Brooklyn or on the Upper West Side, and compare which restaurants appear and in what order. If both phones show the same 19 restaurants in the same order, the list is citywide. If the restaurants change, location is affecting what people see. We plan to run this check and update the study.
Where the listed restaurants are, relative to the analysis location
Each dot is a restaurant on the list, placed by its real direction and distance from where we viewed the list (the cross at the center). North is up. Rings mark 1, 2, and 5 km, drawn over a simplified outline of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. Hover over a dot to see the restaurant and its position on the list.
Distance from where we did the analysis, in list order
Straight-line distance in kilometers. If closer restaurants ranked higher, the bars would get longer toward the bottom of each list. In Everyday Eats they mostly get shorter.
Most of the list is close to where we viewed it. That could mean TikTok tailors the list to your location, or it could just mean Manhattan’s most talked-about restaurants are concentrated downtown. Checking the list from a second location will answer it.
What restaurants can do
Restaurants can’t pay to be on Must Eat. What they can influence is the TikTok content the list is built from.
How can a local restaurant improve its chances of getting on TikTok’s Must Eat list?
TikTok says nobody can pay for a spot, so what a restaurant can work on is the TikTok content the list is built from. In our data, listed New York restaurants had about three times as many different TikTok creators posting about them as well-known restaurants that missed the top spots. A realistic plan is to find 20 to 50 local creators who already post about food nearby, start with the ones who are already customers, and keep inviting new people over several months. Pick one hashtag and ask every creator to use it and tag the location. Two thirds of TikTok posts about listed restaurants used the restaurant’s own hashtag.
Can restaurants pay creators to post about them under Must Eat?
TikTok says restaurants can’t pay for a spot on the list, and it checks that each listed restaurant is open and in good standing. That rule applies to the list itself. Creator partnerships are a separate matter, and they’re already common in food content on TikTok. Paid posts still have to be disclosed under FTC rules. Working with creators who already like the restaurant tends to hold up better over time. Their posts are more likely to get real comments and saves, and to bring people back, which is what the list seems to pick up on. Restaurants should also be ready for a sudden rush, which can overwhelm a small kitchen and staff.
For restaurants
Aim for many local TikTok creators rather than one big name. The listed restaurants stand out because a lot of different people post about them, and about three quarters of those people have fewer than 50,000 followers. For a neighborhood restaurant, working with 20 to 50 local creators over a few months is realistic, and likely more useful than a single post from a celebrity account. Start with people who already come in.
Make your restaurant easy to find in a post. Pick one hashtag, put it on the menu or the receipt, and ask creators to use it and tag your location so their video shows up on your restaurant’s page. 4 Charles Prime Rib and Torrisi show up in our data only through hashtags like #4charles and #torrisi, not through @-mentions. Also make it easy for guests to leave reviews and comments.
Elevated Dining seems to work differently. Manhatta is first on that list with only 4 TikTok creators in our data. For special-occasion restaurants, reviews and saves probably matter more, so it’s worth paying attention to what makes people want to write about the evening afterward.
For creators
There aren’t that many consistent local food creators. In New York, about 4,500 creators posted with city food hashtags over six months, and only 911 did it five or more times. If Must Eat makes restaurants care more about creator content, those regulars become more valuable.
For platforms and the creator economy
Must Eat makes TikTok creator content part of a ranking that restaurants can’t buy into directly. That should move restaurant marketing budgets away from paid placement and toward working with creators, especially in ways that make it affordable to work with many small ones. It also makes disclosure more important. If paid partnerships feed into the list, people need to be able to tell which posts were paid.
Methodology and caveats
How we counted. The main comparison counts TikTok posts from April 1 to September 30, 2026 (the stable window after an April 2026 ingestion change) in prod_bronze.tiktok_videos joined to prod_bronze.tiktoks. A post counts for a restaurant if it @-mentions the restaurant’s account (prod_bronze.mention_edges) or uses one of its own hashtags, matched exactly in the post’s tag list and caption. We report distinct creators per restaurant. A second, independent method, matching the restaurant’s name in captions that also mention New York, gave the same direction (a median of 27 creators for listed restaurants versus 13.5 for the comparison group). The creator-size and city analysis uses posts carrying NYC, LA, or Bay Area food hashtags. Creator size uses current follower counts.
Lists and comparison group. Must Eat rankings are the Everyday Eats top 10 and Elevated Dining top 9 as viewed in the TikTok app from the location where we did the analysis, in lower Manhattan, on November 2, 2026. The comparison group is 11 well-known New York restaurants not in those top groups. Some may appear lower on the full lists, which would understate the gap. Semma was dropped because #semma is a common slang word and most matches weren’t about the restaurant. Carbone has no account we could match, so it is counted through hashtags only. Au Cheval and Levain posts can include their locations in other cities, and #lucali includes Lucali’s Miami location. Restaurant tags stored only as TikTok location data, rather than hashtags, are not in our data.
Limits. Upfluence indexes a large sample of creators rather than all of TikTok, so these counts are best read as relative. We can’t see TikTok in-app reviews, comment text, saves, or location tags, which TikTok says feed the list. With nine or ten restaurants per list, correlations are descriptive and not statistically significant. Distances are straight-line from one location and can’t establish personalization on their own. This study describes the TikTok activity around the list. It does not claim knowledge of TikTok’s ranking system.