Are You Experienced?
The Lowcountry’s fastest-growing foodie community is taking Facebook into the kitchen. BY BARRY KAUFMAN
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If you’ve been on Facebook at all lately, you know that this is a rough time to be on Facebook. Endless political posts, raging debates over masks and rampant negativity have made the site a battleground, one where even the most innocuous post can turn into a flashpoint with a single comment. And then there’s the Bluffton/Hilton Head Food Experience. Started in March of 2019, the group is the rarest of things in the modern world – a community that offers nothing but positivity. “This group is bringing a lot of people together, especially now that there are a lot of people at home,” said the group’s founder, Tony Russo. Inspired by a similar group he was a part of, the Brooklyn Food Experience, Russo opened the Bluffton/Hilton Head Food Experience with the simple goal of giving foodies a place to share their favorite dishes and restaurants. It was slow going at first. Largely extending invites to his circle of friends, the self-professed foodie and New York native ended his first week with around 20 members. He began beating the bushes, passing the word around to area restaurants, but was by and large ignored. Now, with just under 3,300 members as of this writing, the community he’s created includes some of the biggest names in area restaurants. It also helped that his group began gaining traction right as the pandemic hit, when restaurants needed that extra connection to their customers. “Now, with all that going on and restaurants taking a beating, they go on our group and post. When I first started this, advertising was not allowed. Now, I’m allowing it,” said Russo. While not really advertising in the classical sense, being members in the group did allow restaurateurs to show off some of 22
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PHOTO BY ROB KAUFMAN
their latest dishes plus communicate directly with their customers. “Now they can see what people are saying about them.” And overwhelmingly, those responses are positive. The group has grown to the point where Russo added several moderators, all there to keep the good vibes front and center. “If somebody says something negative about a restaurant, I’ll immediately take that down,” he said. “I tell members, if you have something to say, say it to the manager. Don’t post it here.” That positivity extends to the amateur chefs who show off their latest culinary creations on the page as well. Members routinely post photos of their meals, with comments almost universally offering encouragement and praise. Something you don’t find a lot of on Facebook these days. Along with photos from amateur and pro foodies, the big draw is Russo’s regular chopped challenges, where he tasks members with using specific (and often outlandish) ingredients in a dish, ranging from Chef Boyardee pasta to Spam. The winner of the Spam challenge, as an example, was Tracy Dietrich, a sous chef for The Sea Pines Resort who created “Mini Polenta Cornbread Muffins with Sage Wild Rice Spam Meatballs and a Welch’s Concord Grape Gastrique.” Ultimately, the goal of the group was to create a community, one where the Lowcountry’s foodies could share their experience in the kitchen with other members and with some of the area’s renowned chefs. “I’m not making any money off of this, I just enjoy seeing people enjoy the site, that’s basically it,” said Russo. To join, visit facebook.com/groups/BlufftonHiltonHeadFoodExperience.