Before many young diners pick a restaurant, they check whether it looks good on a phone. In survey results reported by Restaurant Business last November, 77% of Gen Z diners and 79% of millennials told OpenTable they weigh whether a place is worth posting on Instagram or TikTok before deciding to eat there.
For an owner, that turns a social account into something close to a front window. But most restaurant owners are not video producers. They are running a kitchen, a payroll and a lease.
Asher Lara thinks he can close that gap. Lara, 21, runs Iconify Media from Beverly Hills and has a YouTube channel with 8.5 million subscribers. His plans for the agency lean heavily on food service, according to contributor profiles published this year. Restaurants and cafés are high on the list.
The appeal is the short distance between watching and buying. A good video can move someone from the couch to a counter in an afternoon.
Iconify's first official client was not a restaurant. It was a mortgage company. Joseph Shalaby, who founded E Mortgage Capital, made videos with Lara that went viral and brought in new business. The lesson Lara took from it was repetition. Viewers saw Shalaby often enough to feel they knew him.
One feed to many
Lara did not start with a method. At 16 he posted every day for a year and got almost no response. "I was grinding but I wasn't thinking strategically," he has said. He changed by treating each post as a test and keeping notes on what held viewers. Friends and other creators started asking for help, and he answered them one at a time. That informal help became the agency.
An agency serving dozens of restaurants needs Lara's judgment to work in other hands, on other schedules, for owners who may not want to be on camera at all.
Iconify's answer is structure. According to a contributor profile on Nylon's site, the agency starts with what a client wants to be known for and how its customers already talk. It fits formats to attention spans on each platform and builds posting schedules around real life, so clients can keep them without burning out.
Restaurants will test that last part. A café that opens at 6 a.m. has little time to film. Staff turn over. Menus change with the season. A schedule that works in March may not survive the summer rush.
What the record shows
So far, the record is thin. Most of what is public about Iconify's results comes from Lara and from contributor profiles about him. The company has not published restaurant results. Its best-known case is still a mortgage broker. Lara says he grew his most recent client's YouTube channel from 20,000 to 100,000 subscribers in two months.
Restaurant owners already pay for discovery through delivery apps, review sites and local ads. If a steady run of short videos can do some of that work, the math changes for a small shop.
Platforms, though, change what they reward without warning, and a format that fills seats one month can stall the next. Lara built his name spotting those shifts in his own feed. Doing it for fifty dining rooms at once is a different job.
Iconify is betting that a creator's feel for an audience can be written down and handed off. The first restaurant accounts should show whether it can.
The figures on Gen Z and millennial diners are from an OpenTable survey as reported by Restaurant Business (November 2025). The description of the agency's approach is from Iconify Media and from a contributor profile of Asher Lara published on Nylon's site. Details of E Mortgage Capital are from the company. Lara's age, subscriber count, early posting history, quotation and plans for the agency are from contributor profiles published in 2026, including the Nylon profile.
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