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Christina Petsos | Photo by Jordana Canales, Orlando Life
Christina Petsos Helps Orlando Feel a Little More Like Home
If you follow Orlando food, local businesses or things to do around the city, there’s a good chance Christina Petsos has shown you a place you didn’t know existed. Better known online as Somehow I’m Everywhere, Petsos has built an audience of more than 100,000 people by sharing the restaurants, businesses and experiences she finds throughout Central Florida. She’s also a professional photographer, videographer, food writer and yoga instructor. To understand what keeps her doing it, though, you have to go back quite a bit further than Instagram.
Long before Christina Petsos was helping people discover experiences around Orlando, she was five years old raking mulch at a community park in Cape Canaveral.
There is still a newspaper photo somewhere at her parents’ house documenting it.
“My parents instilled that in me,” Petsos said. “As a very young child, I was always doing volunteer work with them.”
Her mother was a pharmacist. Her father worked at NASA, where he managed the Payload Hazardous Processing Facility and worked around projects that included the Mars rovers and International Space Station. Petsos remembers visiting him for Take Your Kid to Work Day and getting to see the International Space Station while it was being built.
But she also remembers her family simply showing up when something needed to be done in their community.
“We’ve always just been a family that wants to help and do something better for the community,” she said.
That part of her story helps make sense of a career that otherwise looks like it has gone in almost every possible direction.
Petsos worked in child protection before entering the police academy in 2015. She spent nearly three years in law enforcement and later joined the U.S. Army, where she became an officer. She eventually moved into public affairs and marketing while serving.
Somewhere along the way, she also competed in six bodybuilding competitions.
That is actually where another part of her life began.
The restrictive diet required for bodybuilding competitions meant Petsos spent plenty of time thinking about the food she couldn't eat.
When she wasn't competing, she would seek out the foods and restaurants she had been thinking about and take pictures of them.
“I just had a bunch of pictures of food,” Petsos said.
Instagram accounts focused on food were beginning to become popular. She remembers following early Orlando accounts such as Suzy the Foodie and Orlando Food Guys and eventually deciding she wanted to create something of her own.
The early photos weren't exactly what people who follow her today would expect.
“If you go back and look at the really old stuff, it’s bad,” she said, laughing.
Photography, however, wasn't new to her.
Christina Petsos | Photo by Jordana Canales, Orlando Life
As a kid, Petsos was constantly borrowing her parents' DSLR camera. On a 6th grade field trip to Jetty Park, she made the questionable decision to wear it around her neck while jumping off a swing. The camera hit her knee and split in two.
“I don’t know how they ever trusted me with a camera again,” she said. “But it’s worked out.”
She became more serious about photography in college, taking portraits and shooting engagements. As her food account developed, so did the way she looked at what was in front of her.
“I really started to realize that food is art,” Petsos said.
She began paying attention not only to how food tasted, but how chefs plated dishes and expressed themselves through them. That appreciation eventually developed into professional food and product photography.
But her social media presence began becoming something more while she was stationed in Savannah.
Petsos was highlighting local restaurants and businesses when COVID arrived and suddenly many of those businesses were trying to figure out how to survive.
She started sharing which restaurants were open, where people could order takeout and which businesses could use support.
“These places are trying to survive,” she remembers thinking.
Her account grew significantly during that period, but what she discovered she could do with it mattered too.
“I feel like I can help other businesses be discovered,” she said.
That idea followed her to Orlando.
Petsos grew up in Cape Canaveral and regularly visited Orlando to see extended family. When she returned to Central Florida after leaving active duty in 2021, she was coming back to a city she already knew, but one that was changing.
Independent restaurants were growing. Neighborhoods were developing their own personalities. Orlando's food scene was gaining national attention.
Petsos began exploring it.
Today, more than 100,000 people follow her social account, Somehow I’m Everywhere, where food is still a big part of what she shares, but no longer the only part. She takes people into restaurants and businesses, but also shares events and experiences that give people another reason to get out and explore Central Florida.
For Petsos, helping people discover those places is still tied to the same motivation that existed when she was helping businesses in Savannah.
“I never got into it just for myself, and I never would have continued it if it were just for myself,” she said.
She sees her role as helping businesses get discovered, but also helping people connect with the city around them.
Local businesses need people to walk through their doors, especially at a time when many independent businesses are struggling to stay open. But the people who live here need those places too.
They become the restaurant we keep going back to. The coffee shop where we get to know someone. The neighborhood bar where friends meet after work. They become part of our routines and eventually part of the way we experience the place where we live.
They help make Orlando feel like home.
Petsos has spent years helping people find them.
She points to Kaya in the Mills 50 area as one of her favorite examples of what can happen when a business becomes part of its community. She praised owners Chef Lo and Jamilyn for what they've created and for the way they support other people around them, host markets and work with others in the neighborhood.
“They embody community,” Petsos said.
She sees that same support throughout Orlando's Asian communities, where businesses regularly show up for one another and encourage people to support others around them.
Petsos feels that connection is one of the things successful local businesses tend to have in common.
“You have to build your community,” she said. “You have to show people why they need to come.”
It also speaks to something she believes Orlando is still figuring out.
Petsos sees a city made up of different pockets. There are food communities, sports communities, wellness groups and neighborhoods with their own identities. She would like to see more things that bring those groups together and give people a stronger shared connection to Orlando.
At the same time, she believes those connections are already there for people willing to look for them.
For someone new to Orlando, her advice is to start with whatever you're already interested in. Find a run club, a book club, a wellness group or another community built around something you enjoy.
“There’s a group for everything,” she said.
Yoga Instructor
Petsos has also found another community through yoga.
She practiced yoga at different points throughout her life, including during her years in gymnastics, but became deeply committed to the practice over the past few years. She eventually completed yoga teacher training because she wanted to better understand the practice and its philosophy.
There was another motivation too.
She wanted to teach baby goat yoga.
“Who doesn’t want to hang out with baby goats?” she said.
During her training, Petsos discovered she enjoyed teaching and began picking up classes. She credits yoga with bringing more peace into her life and helping her accept the things she can't change while focusing more attention on the things she can.
As for what comes next, Petsos says, “I have no idea.”
She wants to continue creating content and helping businesses however she can. She wants to travel. She wants to teach yoga.
For someone whose life has included child protection, law enforcement, military service, bodybuilding, photography and content creation, perhaps not knowing exactly what comes next isn't particularly unusual.
What has remained more consistent is her desire to participate in the place around her.
At five years old, that looked like helping her parents rake mulch at a community park so other people could enjoy it.
Today, it might mean introducing someone to a restaurant they have driven past a hundred times without noticing, showing them an experience they didn't know existed or reminding them that there is much more to Orlando than the version of the city most visitors see.
Defining Orlando Life
When asked how she would describe the Orlando Life, Petsos offered an example that probably explains her account better than any carefully written description could.
She can finish a photo shoot early on a random Tuesday, go ride VelociCoaster and then leave the theme parks to eat at a locally owned restaurant.
“What other city can people do that?” she said.
“There is always something else here to find.”
