2026-10-12
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A Crisis of Authenticity, The Truth About Food Influencers by Stephen Baragny, read by Josh Berry.
In 2017, two aspiring YouTubers, going by the name Topjaw,
published a video posing the London foodie's most important question, what to eat in Chinatown.
They enlisted the help of longtime Instagrammer Ka Xing Tong, better known by his username KS8Here,
who took them on a lovingly curated loop of the neighborhood.
Cantonese Shu Mei Duck at Four Seasons, Chongqing-style handmade noodles at the now-defunct Little Wooden Hut,
and Ba Shu on Frith Street, where they decadently cracked a whole crab for the camera.
Any of the 100,000 odd viewers
who watched it at the time would be well served by its responsible, if unspectacular, recommendations.
But in retrospect, the video may be of more interest to historians.
In its unassuming and rapidly cut seven minutes,
you can almost see the tectonic plates of the food world begin to shift.
Tong is the elder statesman.
The KS8 here account began in the social media dark ages,
first on Twitter, then on an Instagram that was dominated by static photography.