Chowing down with Boston Bites, Harvard’s biggest food porn blogger

There is only one thing we love more than food and that is taking pictures of food.

Sophomore Alana Steinberg, 19, started an Instagram account dedicated to such a mission last year called Boston Bites – and now she has a huge audience.

Despite being a massively busy Harvard student and having over 4000 followers, she was kind enough to sit down with The Tab for an interview.

How did you get the idea for Boston Bites?
I had the idea the summer before I came to Harvard. I was talking to one of my friends who goes to BU, and I was saying I was afraid I would get stuck on campus. I thought making an Instagram account would keep me accountable to getting into Boston and trying new things. When I travel, my favorite way to explore new areas is through the food because I like trying new things and trying new flavors, and I think it’s a really authentic way to get to know a culture and to get to know a place. So that’s what drove the idea for Boston Bites.

Do you use any filters to make the food look better?
I very, very rarely filter my photos, but I will edit them. Sometimes the restaurant’s dark, sometimes I’ll add a little bit of contrast, but I don’t do anything that changes the nature of the image. That’s something I believe in as a photographer beyond Instagram. I don’t change the facts of the image. I just make it look more appealing or more aesthetically pleasing.

So, usually, and I’ve said this before, usually when you edit food, it doesn’t end up looking better. You know, sometimes adding shadows will help, but no one wants to see a glowing cupcake, or a really faded hamburger. They want to see it clear and well lit, nice colors and nice composition. It all really comes down to composition and light when it comes to the pictures.

I always tell this funny story when I talk about lighting in my pictures because, like I just said, it gets dark in a lot of restaurants, and when it’s dark, I’ll steal a friend’s phone and use the flashlight on their phone to light my own pictures. I can probably find photos of this because my friends think it’s, like, absolutely ridiculous, but it’s much better that I have that extra light that I hold way above my head so it’s not too harsh. It’s a soft light. It just much better than a really dark, underexposed photo.

Regarding hashtags and things like that: I still hold to that I don’t think of Instagram as a competition at all. I hope other people support each other, and we just want to find more restaurants. But of course, I also want to grow my own audience, just personally.

When I originally started the account, I would tag people in my photos who I knew either reposted or people looked at the photos that they were tagged in. So, major food accounts like Infatuation or Hungry Girls or New Fork City or Miss New Foodie or people like that, the real thing, as well as local Boston food bloggers, small ones and bigger Instagrams to kind of get myself on their radar.

Eventually, I think once I hit one or two thousand followers, I really slowed down on that. Every once in a while if I think a photo’s really great and I want to get it reposted or if I know an account that’s running some kind of commission competition, I’ll tag people in it, but I don’t do twenty every post anymore.

What I do now is that I add hashtags in the comments of my photos. That’s my way of getting the Boston Bites out past the people I’m following because my goal, as to extending Boston Bites, is to help other people explore food just like I do. That’s not a way to feed my ego and my account’s ego, it’s a way to spread the mission of Boston Bites. And the puns go along with that. I wanted to distinguish myself and make the page enjoyable. I think the puns are what keep people coming back.

How good is Cambridge’s food?
I actually think Cambridge is a great place for food. You can get stuck in a rut in Harvard Square because there’s the classic restaurants everyone goes to, and Harvard Square’s not that big, and it’s really easy to fall into a routine.

So connecting back to liking to explore the area, I’ve walked to Central or walked to Porter and just kind of found some really cool restaurants. A great example of that is Asmara, which is towards Central, and it’s a mile away from the Yard and Harvard. It’s an African restaurant where you eat with your hands. It’s a lot of fun. You put it on a huge dish, you share your food, and hold the bread, and you pick up the food with your hands. That was something I never would’ve found if I didn’t just walk past it, life-wise. It’s more of a classic place that’s not just on campus.

Another one of my favorites is actually near the Quad. It’s a little bit past the Quad, towards Porter’s Square, and it’s called Elephant Walk. It’s a French-Cambodian restaurant. I was actually born in Boston, and my parents would eat Elephant Walk two to three times a week until I moved when I was just a baby. So that place has a special place in my heart, and it’s absolutely delicious. So I think Harvard Square food is fantastic, but there’s also hidden gems when you walk past the Harvard T stop.

After you graduate, where do you plan to take this?
That’s a great question, something I’ve really been thinking about much more lately because I didn’t start Boston Bites as a business idea. I just did it as something for fun, to keep my spirits up when I was stressed, to keep me exploring Boston and trying new things.

Recently, I’ve started reaching out more to restaurants and different companies, like Door Dash and Patty Chen’s Dumpling Room, and it’s something I didn’t really foresee. I didn’t realize it would catch on, so I’ve definitely started reconsidering how it’s going to fit into my life in the future.

I think it’s a little early to call what happens after I graduate because so much has changed over the year that I’ve been doing it, but I’ve even been thinking about staying in Boston over the summer and interning somewhere so I can keep Boston Bites up rather than go to New York or back home. It’s definitely playing more of a role in my life than I originally anticipated.

On Boston Bites, there are so many great photos of food. Do you have a favorite?
Oh my God. That’s really hard. I don’t know if I have a favorite aesthetically, but there’s one that kind of holds a special place in my heart. It was when I hit a thousand followers, and I went to Mike’s Pastry because that’s the quintessential Boston food.

I got a cannoli and then three cupcakes, to spell out one-zero-zero-zero. I was staffing the [peer counseling for eating concerns] office that night, and I brought the treats to the office, and the counselor who was staffing with me and I, we ate them all and just celebrated. It was the moment when I was like, “OK, this is real. Like, this is actually really fun.”

@devonblack2019