The way people search for a city’s best restaurants, coffee shops and stores has experienced a major shift in the past few years. More than ever, social media has become a search engine that people utilize to find their next latte or happy hour. The days of looking at Google reviews and Yelp seem like history (at least for Gen Zers), when anyone can now search TikTok or Instagram and get a thirty-second look at a restaurant’s ambience and dishes.

When Chloe Rice moved to Denver last year from Austin, Texas, with a remote gig, she was looking for the best places to get work done, trying to avoid the drudgery of sitting in her apartment day after day.

Google reviews often told her how good the coffee or food was at a spot, but the logistics of remote working don’t mesh with every place, she discovered. She’d arrive at a coffee shop for a Zoom meeting only to discover it didn’t have wi-fi, or she’d pull out her remote work setup to find out there were only a handful of outlets.

Rice started posting reviews of coffee shops based on workability on Instagram. A few pictures or videos of a coffee shop and a rating out of five followed by an explanation is what started her account, @workfromdenver. “The only limitation for remote workers is that the WiFi password you get is restricted to 2 hours of usage,” she wrote in a post about the Bardo Coffee House on South Broadway.

So 112 coffee shop reviews and 23.1K followers later, @workfromdenver’s influence on the Denver community has only expanded. Beyond the niche of workability in coffee shops, she now posts about why she chooses to work from Denver and what the city has to offer. Showing off day trips, restaurants, bars and things to do, she’s become a prime example of social media’s power in bringing people into the life of a city, and how social media can bring a city to life.

Westword sat down with Rice to talk about her remote work, why she chose to move to Denver, and where she sees the @workfromdenver brand going.

Westword: Why did you pick Denver to live and work?

Chloe Rice: I was lucky enough to grow up skiing in Colorado; my parents would take me. We grew up coming to Steamboat Springs, and I loved skiing. Texas is also very flat and very hot, and I didn’t like either of those things. I found out during the pandemic that I loved road trips, because I didn’t want to fly anywhere. We did a lot of road trips, and I realized I really, really valued being able to be in close proximity to nature. I love a day trip or a weekend trip, and you can’t do that in Texas. I wanted a city; Denver just fit the bill for city life. I can still go out, try cool food and then be like thirty minutes from the mountains.

When you got here and started doing your job, did you just find you were sitting in your apartment a lot? What made you want to find other places to work?

I told myself, ‘If I’m going to move to a new city, I’m going to explore it, I’m not going to sit in my apartment all the time.’ From the get-go, before I even moved here, I was like, ‘I’m going to work from coffee shops at least like three times a week; I want it to be like I have a hybrid place to go.’ I’m pretty extroverted, and I was like, ‘I’ll go crazy.’ But the first couple that I went to, I would find them on Google Maps. I went on Google, and I was looking at coffee shops around me. There were two that were 4.8-5 star coffee shops that I wanted to try, and they looked amazing. I went to the first one, and it was like twenty minutes before I had a meeting. … I get there, and it’s one of those that doesn’t have wi-fi. It was Pablo’s on Sixth. It’s a great coffee shop, but they don’t have wi-fi, and it doesn’t say that on Google. I realized there wasn’t a place to review coffee shops based on their workability.

When did you notice @workfromdenver was starting to get popular?

I realized that people liked @workfromdenver, that there was value to it, around the time I posted somewhat more of a popular coffee shop. I went to this place called Grounds for Dismissal. It’s down in the DTC; they do the coffee flight. It was also the first time I had ever done a Reel. I had no experience with video editing. That was the first thing I posted that popped off.

How do you go about rating a coffee shop or work space?

When I get to a coffee shop I like to do a scan, because the things that I’m looking for, as opposed to your typical Google review about whether or not the coffee is good, are things like are there outlets? Is there a variety of seating? A variety of table space where I can actually fit my massive work setup? Outlets are a big one; password-protected wi-fi is a big one. I work for a tech company that requires wi-fi to have a password.

You do so much more than just content focused on working remotely. Do you want to expand the focus?

At the end of the day, I want it to be more about not just where I am working when I’m in Denver, but why I wanted to work from Denver in the first place. There’s a reason why I really, really wanted to come here, and that’s the value I wanted to capture in the account. The coffee shops are a part of that. I reviewed 112 coffee shops in Denver, but I want the whole thing to be why I wanted to come here. The goal is to be more lifestyle-focused: me going to a coffee shop, going on my day trips, me trying a cool new restaurant.

Denver-based Instagram influencer Chloe Rice (@workfromdenver) has partnered with Westword to help promote the Top 100 Bars and Top 100 Restaurants lists.