We recently connected with Yelena and Justin Williams and have shared our conversation below.

Yelena and Justin, appreciate you joining us today. Do you wish you had started sooner?

We started the See The World Eat The Food blog in 2020 after a year and a half of dating right in the middle of the pandemic. It would have made sense to start sooner since we were already seasoned travelers and both loved writing about local restaurants, as well as restaurants we dined in during our travels. It didn’t help that we began the blog during the pandemic when travel was much harder and many restaurants had to completely change how they approached their business model. Further complicating matters was that, throughout our whole creative experience, we’ve had full time jobs which has made it a juggling act with respect to keeping up with content.

Starting this journey sooner would have definitely opened us up to more opportunities, collaborations, and places to visit. Just when we were getting comfortable with the Baltimore food and lifestyle community, we moved to Greenville, South Carolina and are having to re-build local relationships from the ground up. However, looking back, we wouldn’t have changed anything with when we started our creative journey, as it was a unique time in the world and everything grew organically in a way that couldn’t have happened if it was otherwise. The timing also allowed us to focus more on local road trips and opportunities within the community around us.

Yelena and Justin, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

We are a husband and wife team that, in our free time, writes about experiences, food, and travel across the United States. We are based in Greenville, SC, where we’ve lived since March 2022, and love to highlight local restaurants, activities, and businesses in the area. We got into the world of food and travel blogging because people would constantly ask us where to go for food or what to do in a city they were visiting, so we decided to centralize all of our experiences and ideas into one website.

What sets us apart from others is our genuine demeanor – if you’ve ever met us, you’d know that we’re exactly the same in person as on the internet. We think it’s apparent in our content that we do this because we love it and we want others to find a zeal for new experiences and love life as much as we do. We are most proud of highlighting various local businesses both in our old hometown of Baltimore and our new home of Greenville.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

One of the most rewarding aspects of what we do is highlighting new local businesses to bring them as much business as we can from the start., Back in Baltimore, we spent a lot of time interviewing local business owners and learning about how they started and what they love about what they do. Each story was unique and the passion from each of these people was undeniable. We hope to continue to be able to grow and support local businesses in our new city.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

We built our audience on social media by just being ourselves and putting as much effort as possible into each post. We know that sounds cliche, but people can easily sniff out creators putting on an act or not being genuine. Everything we post would be posted even if we weren’t so-called content creators. We only post about places we love, restaurants that are delicious, and business owners that are beloved by the community because they are great people. People can recognize that and from there you’ll attract a high quality audience online.

Contact Info:

• Website: seetheworldeatthefood.com
• Instagram: justinx0r and seetheworldeatthefood
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/seetheworldeatthefood

Image Credits
Justin Williams, Yelena Williams, Mon Soleil Art