From Peruvian to Pizza: Where to eat lunch in Tallahassee // INFLUENCE Magazine
From Peruvian to Pizza: Where to eat lunch in Tallahassee // INFLUENCE Magazine
INFLUENCE Magazine assigned us to photograph a feature on lunch spots in Tallahassee for their Spring 2025 "Food & Wine" section. The story, written by Rochelle Goff, highlighted fifteen local restaurants worth visiting during a lunch break, and our assignment took us to seven of them: Kool Beanz, Hayward House, Leon's at Lake Ella, The Lively Cafe, Maria Maria, Metro Deli, and Midtown & 3rd.
A seven-restaurant food photography assignment in a single production window is a logistical puzzle. Each kitchen operates on its own schedule, each space has its own lighting conditions, and the food at each location needs to look consistent enough to belong in the same magazine feature while still reflecting the personality of that individual restaurant. You're moving quickly between locations, coordinating with kitchen staff at each stop, and making sure every dish is photographed at its best before the plating starts to deteriorate.
We used Profoto lighting across the locations to give us a consistent baseline for the food photography. When you're photographing at seven different restaurants in Tallahassee, the ambient conditions change dramatically from one space to the next. A downtown deli has completely different light than a lakeside café or a Midtown bistro. Having our own lighting meant the food maintained consistent color accuracy and detail across the full spread regardless of what each restaurant's interior gave us to work with.
The variety of cuisines made this assignment especially interesting from a food photography standpoint. Mexican dishes at Maria Maria, creative American fare at Kool Beanz, Cajun-inspired plates at Leon's, upscale bistro presentations at Hayward House; each one brings different colors, textures, and plating styles to the frame. We worked with Canon lenses that let us adapt quickly between the close-up detail work on individual dishes and the wider compositions that showed the food in context with the restaurant's setting.
As Tallahassee photographers, we know a lot of these restaurants well. Some of them, like Kool Beanz and Maria Maria, are places we've photographed for previous editorial assignments. That familiarity helps on a multi-location day because we already know the layout, the kitchen flow, and where the best spots are to set up in each space. It saves time, and on a day where you're covering seven locations, every minute counts.
Multi-restaurant features like this one for INFLUENCE Magazine are a great showcase for Tallahassee's dining scene, and we enjoy being the editorial photographers who help bring that scene to a statewide audience.
This feature was photographed by The Workmans for INFLUENCE Magazine and appeared in the Spring 2025 issue and was written by Rochelle Goff. The Workmans are a husband-and-wife photography team based in Tallahassee, Florida, and we work with publications across the state of Florida, in Washington D.C. and around the United States. You can explore more of our editorial photography in the archive, see more of our work across our website and connect with us on how we can best serve you!
