flavor

In downtown Clermont, Frankie Saunders doesn’t get very far unnoticed.

“Yo, Riz!” “Rizman!” “What’s up, Riz?”

Restaurant owners. People passing on the sidewalk. Somebody who saw one of his videos or wants him to come try something. Six years after launching a food page, The Rizman has become a familiar face around town.

And usually, he’s hungry.

Frankie loves burgers. Gyros. Hot dogs. Food trucks. Mom-and-pop joints. He’ll tell you about the French dip with the killer cheese pull at Clermont Cafe. The Detroit-style pizza you absolutely need to try. The taco that requires nothing more than steak, cilantro, onions, lime, and verde sauce because, trust him, that’s enough.

“Oh my God, I love tacos,” he says, then pauses. “Well, I kind of love everything,” he laughs.

Really, Frankie loves the discovery. The strip mall gem. The dish you didn’t know was there. The local business that could use a few more people through the door.

“I like to highlight things,” he says. “And I really like to help small businesses. We’re all struggling in some ways. So if I can help out, that’s what I’m gonna do.”

Do that long enough in a town like Clermont, and people start knowing your name.

Funny, considering none of this was the plan.

Frankie grew up in Chicago, eating at mom-and-pop places with his grandparents and at Taste of Chicago. “Just living in Chicago, period, it’s like so many different cultures and so many different foods.”

But food wasn’t the job. Frankie drove trucks and moved people for a living, eventually moving himself to Florida in 2018.  Then came 2020.

Work slowed. His girlfriend already had a food page and kept borrowing his photos. “She was like, ‘You take really good photos. You should open a page. You might be good at it.’ I wasn’t sure, but I definitely had the time, so I just started.”

Things got weird fast.

Instagram Reels took off, and so did Frankie. He went viral and became “the cheese pull guy,” stretching the cheesiest things he could find for the camera.

Soon restaurants were calling. One owner asked what Frankie would charge to handle his social media. “I was like, ‘I don’t know.’ And I shot him a number, and he was like, ‘Let’s do this.’”

One account led to another. Within six months, Frankie was managing nearly five while still driving a truck, sometimes pulling over to post. Finally, his boss told him he had to choose. “So I took a leap of faith, and I went full force with it.”

“Bebebebebeebooowwww,” Frankie says. “It happened so fast. I couldn’t believe it.”

Six years later, he handles social media and events for Main Street Clermont. He’s had a cookie named after him. A burger, too. But listen to Frankie long enough and the conversation keeps wandering away from Frankie.

It goes to struggling business owners. People who need help figuring out Instagram. Restaurants people walk past without realizing what’s inside. He’ll be outside Montrose Street Market photographing a burger when someone stops to ask, “Where’d you get that?”

“It just makes me so happy to show someone something new,” he says. “I’m very community driven. Community is like everything to me. Because if we don’t have the community, what do we have?”

Then he gets a little more serious.

“I feel like nowadays we lost that sense of togetherness. Everybody’s just out for their own, or nobody wants to help other people out. It’s like we kind of lost that. And I just want that to be a normal thing… If I can help people do that, and eat good food at the same time? Hell, yeah, I’m all in!”