An influencer with a mission: support New York restaurants

More Than Likes is a series about social media personalities trying to do positive things for their communities.

On a gloomy April afternoon, Jaeki Cho came to Renée’s kitchen in Woodside, Queens, the district where he grew up, ready to work. He wore a baggy navy suit, with an off-white beret and blue-tinted sunglasses that framed his goatee. Mr. Cho plopped down at a table by the window, an iPhone camera trained on his face.

Mr. Cho, 34, is the public face of eat fair, which highlights small New York restaurants, mostly run by immigrants and members of minority groups. Righteous Eats, which has nearly 400,000 followers combined on TikTok and Instagram, is not in the business of so-called food pornography. In the crowded food influencer market where butter tables and cheese strips are common attempts to go viral, Righteous Eats offers viewers a more nutrient-dense content experience. The food is the hook, but Righteous Eats is truly a platform to celebrate the people who make up one of the most diverse cities in the world.

In his trademark baritone and hip-hop vernacular, he begins each video with an elongated “Yo!” — Mr. Cho guides viewers through a litany of dishes, as he traces the historical arc of the food and the people who prepared it. The ads that Mr. Cho and his team feature often don’t have the resources or business fluidity to fund their own marketing campaigns. (Mr. Cho does not accept free food.)

“Ultimately, we want to build empathy through representation,” said Brian Lee, CEO of Righteous Eats. Mr. Lee believes that the way his company presents a variety of cuisines can help people “realize that we are all the same.”

Mr. Cho began the series on his personal TikTok account in late 2020, after learning of a report that, after the closure and depletion of loans, about a third of the city’s 240,000 small businesses may never open again. One of the first videos of her, uploaded on November 2, 2020, was at Renee’s, a 10-table family-run Filipino restaurant in one of the city’s most diverse neighborhoods. (Mr. Cho calls it “modern Ellis Island.”)

“You make up the cultural fabric of your communities, so please support your local restaurants,” Cho said at the end of the video, wearing a black surgical mask on his chin.

Renee survived the pandemic, like many of the establishments Mr. Cho highlighted in those early days. “We had a wave of people come in to try our food that we hadn’t actually seen,” said Earl Dizon, whose mother, Renee Dizon, runs the restaurant with her husband, Ernesto.

Two and a half years later, Mr. Cho was back at Renee’s, preparing to theatrically bite into a plate laden with sizzling sissig (minced pork, onion, chili, and an egg) placed on the table by Beth Chu, the Mrs. Dizon’s sister. .

“You’ve lost weight!” Mrs. Chu said, smiling.

“Lose weight? Really?” asked Mr. Cho, laughing. “I gained weight, with everything I’ve been eating.”

‘How did we create our American identity?’

Mr. Cho was born in South Korea, then moved to China when he was 6 years old. Three years later, his family immigrated again to Queens. He grew up in a dingy first-floor apartment at 41st Avenue and 75th Street, five blocks from Renee’s.

“No one in my family was fluent in English at the time,” Cho said. Most of the students in his elementary school were immigrants asking themselves important questions. “How do we craft our American identity? What do we model ourselves?

Mr. Cho was drawn to the hip-hop culture. Rappers like Nas, Immortal Technique and Ice Cube introduced him to aspects of American history not covered in his textbooks, such as colonialism and government corruption. He was soon dressing and talking like his heroes. After graduating from Fordham University in 2011, Mr. Cho wrote and edited hip-hop publications before producing a documentary, “Bad Rap,” which follows the lives of four Korean-American hip-hop artists, including Awkwafina, launched in 2016. Two years later he became co-owner of the Alumni’s Flushing location, a fashion boutique.

On March 24, 2020, while sheltering at home, Mr. Cho uploaded his second TikTok, a step-by-step guide on how to make tteokbokki, Korean spicy rice cakes. As of last month, the clip had amassed over a million views.

Soon Mr. Cho uploaded several cooking videos a week. His hearing exploded.

It was around this time that Mr. Cho decided to shift his focus to the small, struggling restaurants all over the city. He thought of the people who worked at the stoves burning, cutting vegetables and cleaning tables, people who, like his parents years before, needed to work to make ends meet in an unknown country.

The Righteous Eats series on Mr. Cho’s page resonated with an audience eager to support those hardest hit by the pandemic. It caught the eye of Mr. Lee, a media executive with experience working with social media creators, and in April 2022 they officially started Righteous Eats as a standalone page with a 59-second clip highlighting Cuts and Slicesa West Indian influenced pizza place.

“If you’ve never seen oxtail on pizza before,” Mr. Cho says in the video, “keep looking at the details.”

‘Tastes like home’

“Do you smell that?” Mr. Cho asked as he walked through his old neighborhood, about half a mile from Renee’s. The air carried a scent that even the most daring fusion restaurant could not dream of achieving: a mix of Thai, Bangladeshi, Pakistani and other cuisines. “This particular scent, at least in my memory, was always a fabric of this community.”

Over the course of a 30-minute walk through Woodside, Mr. Cho was able to maintain his anonymity; during a subsequent shoot in Astoria, a gentrifying part of Queens, he was approached four times by fans.

“Our audience tends to be very diverse, even though 10 out of 10 times they are either fluent in English or fluent in New York culture,” Mr. Cho said.

For Mr. Cho, getting the word out to a wider audience is “completing the mission”.

“The main goal was to have more cultural dialogue through food and to introduce people to places they wouldn’t normally be familiar with, or even try to get out of,” he said.

In November 2022, before Election Day, Righteous Eats filmed their most high-profile video yet: Mr. Cho sat down with New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at Evelia’s Tamales in Corona, another Queens neighborhood, part of an ongoing push for the brand to bring in longer-form content. (The team recently brought in Helen Cho, former producer of “Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown,” to lead that charge.)

The plan hinges on the continued appeal of Mr. Cho, who chatted with fans at the Korean-inspired event. between the bun in Astoria while waiting for his order: a bagel stuffed with jeyuk bokkeum (spicy roast pork), onions, and jalapenos. Mr. Cho took a large bite as his cameraman, Rob Martinez, executive producer of Righteous Eats, filmed.

“It tastes like home,” Mr. Cho said, nodding. “Tastes like New York.”

He paused. “My New York”.