Keith Lee is sitting in the passenger seat of a car outside Juanderful Tacos in Phoenix. “I’m going to show you everything we got, and we’re going to try it and rate it 1 through 10,” he announces to his 16.1 million TikTok followers, his hands brought together in a steeple. He presents four partly unwrapped tacos for viewers’ consideration: pollo, carne asada, cabeza and a pollo quesataco. He attacks the quesataco first, sprinkling a pinch of chopped onion and cilantro over its innards, topping everything off with salsa verde and a squeeze of lime. He displays the taco’s cross-section for the camera, then carefully introduces one end of the oozing canoe — a mass of meat, cheese and salsa already lugeing toward the limits of its enclosure — into his mouth.
The bite is comprehensive. Every ingredient makes it in. It is also clean: There is no residue left around Lee’s lips. A few seconds of moistly entranced chewing follow before Lee brings his nontaco hand to his mouth and announces — from behind a guard of fingers laced with a single streak of green sauce — “It’s so fresh, crisp, seasoned: 8.7 out of 10. I need about six of these though, I ain’t gonna lie to you. Six or seven.”
He is comfortably one of the cleanest professional eaters at work today.
Lee proceeds to eat the three remaining tacos, pausing only to rave about their quality. But each time he does so, it’s from behind one hand, which is always politely shielding his mouth. He even apologizes for the watery fleck of salsa still trailing across his fingers: “Excuse my hands. I got messy.”
In the comments, Lee’s followers try to prepare Juanderful Tacos for the torrent of business that restaurants face once they’ve received a Keith Lee tick of approval. (“Get ready tomorrow!”) Among the growing ranks of online food influencers — all the professional and semiprofessional eaters jawing straight into the camera on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram — few are bigger or more influential than Lee. He turned to food reviewing as his first career, in mixed martial arts, was coming to an end, and in the short time since, he’s amassed not only millions of followers but also the power to change restaurants’ fortunes and provoke hysterical debate in some of the cities he visits. He’s admired for the attention he pays to small, independent businesses; for his closeness to his family, which accompanies him on cross-country food tours; for his appreciation of good service and generosity with tips.
Yet there’s been little discussion of his uniquely dainty eating style, which is a key element of his aesthetic and a leading source, I believe, of his success.
Like many of the reviewers who’ve achieved popularity on social apps, Lee performs most of his food criticism in his car — a cramped and inhospitable environment for consumption of the saucy, sticky, fried and gloop-rich takeaway foods that dominate critical attention in straight-to-camera TikTok reviews. The “money shot” of food being inserted into mouth, usually to a soundtrack of proto-sexual groans, has long been a key element of food TV. But lately, online food culture has entered an “oral” era that puts the fleshy, wettened mouth — at once destructive and violated in the act of ingestion — at the center of the spectacle. There seems to be a growing emphasis, among popular food accounts, on the messiness of the overflowing orifice as individual eaters shovel food down their throats; online, the mouth has become a canvas for thick spacklings of various juices, pastes, condiments and whips.
If you think I’m exaggerating, consider a recent post from @sanaaeats, in which the popular culinary influencer (1.6 million followers across TikTok and Instagram) feeds herself fingers of chicken, Texas toast and crinkle-cut fries drowned in a jumbo cup of Raising Cane’s sauce — the camera lingering on each bite just long enough to reveal the viscous splatter around her mouth. Then there’s @lukefoods (1.3 million followers): “Come to me, baby, come to me,” he croons, in the driver’s seat of his car, before dunking a paddle of naan into a portable motorized fountain of butter chicken, then wedging the smothered bread into his mouth in a way that leaves his lips ringed with a rusty smear. Even among those reviewers not confined to their cars, the lure of the deep oral reveal remains strong. The Staten Island native @meals_by_cug (4 million followers), whose food account doubles as a pastiche of Italian American culture, frequently delivers his one-liners through a mouth filled with half-chewed rigatoni or meatball parm, while the English food reviewer @mashtag_brady (2.2 million followers) posts videos of food not only entering his mouth but exiting as well. (A recent account of his attempt to eat a raw oyster for the first time — “This is going to be mingin’, mate” — concluded with him announcing to the camera through a beard of brown vomit: “Well, I didn’t like that.”) The attention economy rewards sensationalism, pushing sloppy eaters toward ever-sloppier stunts of consumption — but also satisfying, I think, a collective craving for mess, disorder and irresponsibility amid the bland conformism of algorithmic culture.
Amid this mouthy excess, the discreet, almost demure way in which Lee feeds himself — the precise bites, the careful chewing, the mouth politely covered as he offers his critique of the food inside — seems quaintly old-fashioned. This isn’t to say that Lee never gets stuff on his face; we all do. But he is comfortably one of the cleanest professional eaters at work today. For one recent review, when the restaurant failed to provide any utensils, Lee managed to eat a beef pancake, chicken and vegetable won tons in chili sauce, a spiralized coil of cucumber, chicken xiao long bao (“Excuse me if I pronounced that wrong”) and chicken potstickers, all using nothing but his hands. Where other food influencers might have used this as an invitation to take a bath in their dinner, Lee’s fingers and mouth remained almost completely spotless, to the very end.
The grace of Lee’s eating style is all the more striking when you consider the messily physical business to which he previously devoted himself. As an MMA fighter, Lee contested 13 professional bouts (eight wins, five losses) using the nickname Killa. In his final fight for the Bellator promotion, in August 2021, he lost to Jornel Lugo. The contest lasted only five minutes, and ended once Lee, who was 24 at the time, lost consciousness under the force of Lugo’s chokehold, his arms flapping weakly in a doomed attempt to forestall defeat. In footage of the bout, Lee stumbles around the arena in a daze once the fight stops, his face ripped and busted, a bright jam of blood covering his mouth and nose.
As a food critic, Lee has discovered precisely the kind of delicacy and control that are stripped away in the ring. The mouth is recovered; the arms are restored to a position of protective strength. Killa, now an Eata, has traded the enclosure of the MMA cage for that of the front seat, the brutality of the chokehold for the elegance of the coiled cucumber. Where his peers marinate in excess, he maintains order. His discipline at the point of ingestion makes him stand out against the internet’s fat-saturated foodscape.
Violence cannot be avoided entirely, even when it comes to food; Lee attracts such attention that he recently announced that a security team would accompany his family on a forthcoming trip to Atlanta. (“There’s people with us that are legal and licensed,” he said. “We don’t want to have to use them, but we will.”) But in the bubble of his car, as he’s eating, Lee creates a perfectly serene space in which the viciousness of the world outside is kept at bay. Before the dashboard’s rapt millions, whenever tacos or patties or potstickers are up for discussion, civility and decorum briefly have the upper hand.
Aaron Timms is a writer in New York. He is working on a book about modern food culture.
The post The Mixed Martial Artist Who Became the King of Tidy Eating appeared first on New York Times.