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From fine dining to a hole-in-the-wall to a speakeasy, a London restaurateur turned food influencer is catering to “all things food” in the 519.
Dine in 519, an Instagram page with nearly 30,000 followers run by Jesse Walker, has more than 500 reviews of food spots across Southwestern Ontario, with many yet to be covered.
Walker goes outside London to highlight more spots in the 519 on the photo and video sharing app, the telephone area code covering London, Kitchener and Windsor.
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“As the page grows, I want to be able to offer these services to restaurants and consumers all across Southwestern Ontario and I just thought it (519) was kind of a catchy name and went from there,” said Walker, who co-owned Beach Boy Burger at 140 Fullarton St. in London for about a year.
Dine in 519 also runs on TikTok, a short-form video platform, where it has has nearly 9,000 followers.
New reviews are usually under two minutes and posted twice a week. Walker films and edits the videos himself.
Walker said the idea for the Instagram page came during the COVID-19 pandemic when he saw his favourite restaurants struggling to stay afloat or closing down.
Walker, who works as a marketing freelancer, combined his skills and experience as a restaurant owner to create Dine in 519 to help businesses and highlight them to new customers.
Since 2020, the number of new followers grew “quickly and consistently” but “exploded” when the reviews moved from being shot inside the restaurant to his car in a take-out format with his face on it, he said.
“If I’m driving on a side street, and I see a hole in the wall that I think looks good, I’ll do my research and go from there,” Walker said. “And a lot of times, these are great hidden gems within the city and outside the city.”
Walker usually visits the eateries as a regular customer, but local restaurants are reaching out to his platform for promotion due to the page’s reach.
The reviews that get the most clicks are “cool concepts,” he said, like one of pasta made in a giant cheese wheel of Parmigiano Reggiano at St. Jacobs Farmers’ Market in Woolwich that got more than three million views, or Staff Only, a speakeasy in London behind J.S. RYAN & CO barbershop.
A review of a fine-dining steak house also hit great numbers, along with one of London’s staples, Fast Eddie’s, Walker said.
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“The larger the page grows the more it helps these restaurants,” Walker said. “I recently posted a souvlaki and they were sold out the next day. It’s just awesome to see the impact that it has.”
Nick Angelopoulos, owner of Souvlaki Bro at 522 Dorinda St., said reviews on social media like Walker’s help smaller restaurants “immensely,” and the eatery saw an exponential growth on their Instagram page after the video on the Dine in 519 page.
“People were coming from other cities like Kitchener, Sarnia and Hamilton, to try our food, even Cornwall,” Angelopoulos said. “It’s some great, free advertising that you can get, right? So we appreciated that he came and gave us a good review.”
Walker said requests for cheap eats, such as where you can get lunch for $10, are constantly sliding into his direct messages. “Catering to every audience” is what the page is about, he said.
“I think that’s why it’s been so successful,” he said. “It’s not always the big-budget restaurants that are the best spot.”
On the business side, Walker does partnerships with business improvement areas and municipalities to curate a list of the best spots.
“I think the goal with this (page) is just to shed light on the great spots that we have not only in London but across Southwestern Ontario and to have the power and influence to be able to do that is really important to me,” he said. “And that’s been my driving force with it.”
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