Last edition was about a creator who made food sound irresistible. This week it's the other end of the senses.

Some plates stop you mid-scroll before you've read a word of the caption. This one's about a creator who builds them on purpose, and still gives you the recipe underneath.

Let's get into it.

Who's Elleni?

Known to her followers as @ellenikatalanos, or The Green Greek, Elleni makes food that you almost don't want to disturb. Almost.

Take the dish that caught our eye: whipped tahini piped around the edge of a shallow ceramic bowl, with gold and green oil pooling in the middle and little flecks of chilli throughout. Her caption? "Art that moves and changes as you eat it." We spoke to her recently, and after about thirty seconds of scrolling through her grid, it was pretty obvious why.

A few things stood out:

• The food is beautiful, but so is the way she shoots it. A recent summer salad - purple French beans, cherries, nectarines and currants - is shot from directly above, with hard natural light casting tiny shadows across the plate. It looks like a still life before you even realise you're looking at a recipe.
• She doesn't shy away from calling it art. One of her dinner-party centrepieces, a mound of grapes and pomegranate made for what she calls the Thalassa Table, came with a simple caption: "pov, food is your art." She's not trying to make the distinction between food and art. For her, they're the same thing.
• And then you eat it. The elaborate plates aren't made to last. The piped tahini gets scooped up, the fruit gets picked apart, the centrepiece disappears. That's part of what makes them work.
• The recipes are still there. Her viral vegan chocolate tahini mousse is a perfect example: a glossy chocolate dome balanced in her palm, photographed against a bare wall - and then, underneath it, the full recipe and method.
• There's more going on than aesthetics. Her content touches on sustainability, zero waste and aperitivo, while her Substack, The Green Greek Chef, gives her recipes somewhere to live beyond Instagram.
• And the numbers back up the reach. 70.6k followers, with 1.4m accounts reached recently. That's a lot of people seeing the work beyond her existing audience.

That's what makes Elleni interesting: the food is designed to be looked at, but never at the expense of wanting to eat it.

See it for yourself, a few of hers:

Ketchup takeaway

Plating for the camera and cooking for the table aren't two different jobs.

Make it worth looking at, and it still has to be worth eating.

Viral posts you might have missed

Three recent posts worth a second look.

First, @socialsami went down the rabbit hole of strange food combinations that somehow taste like something else. Lemon + cinnamon apparently gives you Coca-Cola, and that's just one of the combinations in the video. It pulled 2.1m likes from 470k followers - more than 4x her audience. Turns out people will stop scrolling for the promise that two things sitting in their kitchen can somehow become a completely different food.

Then there's @chef.kennyeats, who made an Oreo cookies-and-cream ice cream taco and teased the full recipe for the following day. The post picked up 246k likes from 470k followers, proving that sometimes the simplest format works.

And @kennylsong reminded everyone that a beautifully shot cooking video doesn't need a gimmick. His Beef Wellington edit pulled 322k likes from 3.6m followers - 322,000 people choosing to stop and watch someone make pastry very, very well.

Biggest gains

Let's get it. Who's on the gain train. Below are the creators with the biggest absolute recent growth from the past 30 days:

Ones to watch

Might not be up in the millions yet, but here's the accounts having a moment as they fly towards 100k and break the barrier:

Foodie's Foodie

Every issue, we save one spot for the creator we think other food people should be watching. Not because they have the biggest following, but because the cooking is just really freaking good.

This time, it's @lahbco - Nasim Lahbichi, who was named the 2026 James Beard Foundation's Emerging Voice in Broadcast Media.

Nasim Lahbichi

@lahbco

Based in Brooklyn and raised in a Puerto Rican-Moroccan household, Nasim has always used food as a way into culture, community and storytelling. You can see it in the recipes: cold harissa tomato soba noodles, Turkish-style spinach and rice with a fried egg, saffron corn pasta with harissa breadcrumbs. The combinations are unexpected without feeling like they're trying to be clever for the sake of it. That's probably what makes his food so good. He's not interested in making 'fusion' recipes just to tick the box. He's taking flavours he's actually interested in and seeing where they can go. His Moroccan and Puerto Rican roots are part of that, but so are all the other food cultures he's encountered growing up in New York. And then there's the personality. One minute he's explaining the cultural history of an ingredient; the next he's calling a saffron corn pasta 'my new personality and hyperfixation'. The recipes are generous, the videos are beautiful, and there is always a story attached to whatever he's cooking. He's also been doing this for years. Nasim started posting during the pandemic, when he was a recent Fashion Institute of Technology graduate, and has since turned those early recipe videos into a serious food career. Now, with a James Beard win behind him and a cookbook on the way, he's pretty hard to ignore.

Follow on Instagram

Basically: if you don't already follow Nasim, you should.

So that's it for this issue. Be sure to subscribe and check back in for more. We've got some great content coming up!

Adina.

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