Sydney food Influencer that suck: Places in Sydney (Just... Places. In Sydney.)

Welcome to a new, deeply necessary Table Talk: Sydney food Influencer that suck. First up, an easy target, the account so committed to its brand that it named itself after the single least specific concept available to a Sydney-based content creator: Places in Sydney. Not best places. Not hidden gems. Not even "good" places. Just places. In Sydney. A bus stop qualifies. So does a hole in Wagga Wagga.

Behind the handle is Adrian Widjonarko, who runs the account with his partner Josh (and, presumably, creative input from their dog Ollie, who gets a shoutout on the official "About Us" page). Together with his other account @adrianwidjy, he's built a combined following past 440,000 — 198,000 on this account alone, which by any measure is real, legitimate reach. The kind that makes a lunch spot's booking line light up the second a reel drops.

Here's the thing about that reel though: it's going to be positive. It's always positive. Take the recent one for HEYTEA's new Longjing Cheese Milk Tea:

"You HAVE to try" it, apparently, "creamy, refreshing, and not too sweet." A perfectly nice review — except for the four characters buried at the very end of the caption, after four hashtags, easy to miss if you don't scroll: [A D]. Very clever, cheeky monkey — but we're clever-er, and we caught it. That's Adrian's own disclosure, not a platform label — no "Paid partnership" tag anywhere on this post, just his own quiet self-flagged ad, filed under the hashtags where you'd have to be looking for it. Which is the actual problem: scroll past it and the unpaid-looking posts have the identical energy. A ramen spot in Mascot is "definitely one to add to your list." A shawarma cone in Concord is "so good." An Ugg outlet warehouse sale is your "last chance." We went looking, genuinely, actively looking, for a single post where the food was just okay, the wait was too long, or the $38 pasta wasn't worth $38. We didn't find one, paid or not. If you've spotted one we missed, drop it in the comments, because as far as we can tell, this man has achieved something no human who's ever eaten a meal has managed: a flawless victory, a 100% hit rate, never once not hitting the spot, not even a little bit of food poisoning. The occasional diarrhea would definitely make us believe his reviews had a drop of authenticity.

Weird, right? Except it stops being weird the second you look at the Linktree. Because this is where "Places in Sydney" reveals itself to be less a food account and more a small, extremely well-run affiliate marketing operation that occasionally shows you a noodle. The linktree runs to an Amazon storefront with something like eighty product links (kitchen gadgets, tech, toys — "I am eligible for commissions," it says, refreshingly honestly). There's a discount code for Insta360 cameras — CODE: ADRIAN. One for a kawaii shop called Rainbowholic — Disc Code: ADRIAN. One for an eSIM company. A referral credit for a marketplace app called Whatnot (which also gets its own dedicated Reels — "I've been loving finding amazing collectibles on this app"). And, our personal favourite, a FirstTable dining link offering 50% off your food bill with the code PLACESINSYDNEY — which means there is a functioning, literal, dollars-and-cents financial relationship between this account and restaurants getting written up as amazing, at the exact same time it's writing restaurants up as amazing.

None of that makes Adrian a bad person. Running a content business is genuinely hard, the man's clearly good at it, and hundreds of thousands of people didn't stumble into following him by accident. But "food reviewer" implies a coin that can land on tails sometimes, and this coin does not appear to own a tails. If literally everything is a 10/10 — disclosed or not — the review has stopped being information and started being an ad with his stupid surprised face like he just discovered sliced bread.

Which, selfishly, is exactly why a site like this one exists. LunchSpecial is new — right now, every single deal on here was added by one guy. One hungry guy who started this whole website just because he wanted to know what the lunch specials were near where he lived, and then again near whatever new office he'd landed in every time he started a job in a new postcode. That's it, that's the origin story. No investors, no media kit, no guy in a matcha ad. The hope is just to share that same small, specific joy, finding out the place around the corner does a $15 bowl of beef noodles on Tuesdays — with everyone else who also thinks a good lunch deal is worth knowing about. We're building it on a pretty unfashionable idea: the specials on here are posted by real people, for real people, because a deal was actually good or so bad you have to pay it forward by letting everyone know just how bad, and not because anyone gets a slice of the pie. We're aiming to keep it that way. If we ever have to run some Google ads to keep the lights on, fine. That's a banner in a sidebar, not a cash cheque stapled to a review. There's a difference between "this website costs money to run" and "this recommendation costs money to believe," and we will always stay on the right side of it.

Nobody posting a special on LunchSpecial has a paid incentive with their name on it. Nobody gets a cut if you show up. If the $15 bowl of noodle is mid, someone in the comments is going to say so, because they paid for it with their own money and got nothing for the post except the mild satisfaction of being right. It's not glamorous. It doesn't have a soothing voiceover. But it's a place that'll actually tell you when a place in Sydney isn't that good. Actually we could be wrong, maybe someone wrote "this bus stop sucks" at a bus stop. :)