It was a series of questions about tinned fish during a Saturday night dinner service that alerted Amanda Burton, a co-founder of Rooted Rotisserie in Baltimore, that this was an strange order — though she didn’t think it could be life-changing.
Two young men had come into the casual restaurant and asked an unusual number of questions. But their insistence on ordering the warmed tinned fish with a side of bread to go really caught her attention.
“I explained that it’s the kind of thing you want to eat immediately, but they still wanted it to go, so we packed it up,” Ms. Burton said.
Then the Keith Lee effect kicked in.
Mr. Lee, a vastly influential social media food critic, loved Rooted, so the crowds poured in. In a video posted on Aug. 25 to his TikTok account (followed by 16.6 million people), he sat in a Sprinter van parked near the restaurant and reviewed what Ms. Burton recognized as the “odd” to-go order: a half-order of rotisserie chicken, duck confit gumbo, curry wings, an assortment of side dishes and the tinned fish.
“This tastes fantastic,” Mr. Lee said after tasting the roasted chicken brushed with herbs and preserved lemon, giving it a “9.2 out of 10” rating. “This is one of my favorite restaurants I’ve had in a while, and I’m happy we came,” he said as the video cut to him entering the restaurant, where he thanked Ms. Burton and her husband, the chef Joe Burton.
Mr. Lee also offered them a cheerful warning: “Y’all need to get ready. It’s gonna get crazy.”
The next night that Rooted was open, a line of people waited at the door for the 4 p.m. start of service. Once inside, customers excitedly mentioned Mr. Lee’s review as the catalyst for their visit.
The 27-year-old Mr. Lee, easily the most successful of a new generation of restaurant reviewers, has made a high-profile and lucrative career traveling to cities around the country to review casual restaurants on his TikTok and Instagram accounts, which have a combined reach of 18 million followers.
He explicitly highlights affordable, mom-and-pop business owned by people of color, Black people in particular — the kinds of restaurants he calls “family-owned spots” that “have great food and great customer service but could use some help with marketing.”
He has been credited with saving businesses from closing, and has inspired namesake menu items at national chains like Chipotle Mexican Grill and Pizza Hut. Restaurants he reviews positively have reported sales increases as high as 900 percent.
Lyndsay Green, the restaurant critic for the Detroit Free Press and the only Black food critic working at a major newspaper in the United States, said Mr. Lee’s influence represents an important change. “Historically there has only been a certain demographic that gets to say what tastes good,” she said. “He’s changing that narrative.”
But as his profile has grown nationally, some have questioned his methods and credibility as a critic. Viewers and members of the food media have criticized how he picks restaurants, his qualifications to render judgments on the food scenes of entire cities, and perhaps most important, how he tastes — generally taking just one bite of a takeout dish in his car before declaring a score from 1 to 10.
Others, like KJ Kearney, the creator of the acclaimed website Black Food Fridays, haven’t been impressed. “The barrier of entry to be a food influencer is so damn low,” Mr. Kearney said. “There are people who have the palate of a 16-year-old trying to tell me where I should or should not eat.”
Mr. Lee, who declined repeated requests to be interviewed for this article, was born in Southfield, Mich., and moved to Detroit as a child. And while he has said that home life as one of four siblings was tight-knit, he was “kicked out of six schools” because of “a problem with authority.”
His father went to jail after a neighborhood fight over a stolen bike, leaving the family without a source of income, prompting their eviction. In high school, he fell in love with wrestling, inspired by his older brother, Kevin, who went on to become a professional mixed martial arts fighter. “It saved my life honestly,” Mr. Lee said in a podcast interview in 2023.
Mr. Lee ended up in Las Vegas, and started fighting professionally. He was starting to find success, but fought only two matches before the pandemic disrupted the industry.
Hoping to become more comfortable in front of cameras and build a following for his fledgling fighting career, Mr. Lee started recording videos of himself and posting them on TikTok. His early efforts sketch an endearing portrait of a young man: Mr. Lee dances with his pregnant wife, Ronni, and cooks in his small home kitchen with his newborn fastened to his chest. The videos chronicle his stints as a delivery driver for Postmates and DoorDash during the pandemic.
But it was his videos reviewing takeout items from Las Vegas restaurants or showcasing menu “hacks” at national chains — delivered with a signature staccato cadence and deadpan presentation — that brought him a first taste of internet fame. “I talked into the camera stoic at first because it helped me relax,” he said when I interviewed him for an article in 2023.
Mr. Lee began to flesh out a recognizable content brand. Viewers watch as he sits in his car or Sprinter van, opens a takeout box, shows the item to the camera and then takes a polite bite of food, before scoring it.
He also began to articulate a vision for the kind of restaurant he was interested in reviewing, and why. He saw his videos as a source of free marketing to lower-priced, independent restaurants mostly owned by Black people.
Creators like Mohamed Traore, of @MosTasting, a cooking and restaurant review channel that has more than a million followers between TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, see Mr. Lee as an inspiration. “I respect Keith Lee and what he’s doing,” Mr. Traore said. “I want to shine a light on places doing a good job, and he’s doing the same thing.”
There is no question Mr. Lee’s reviews can be powerful. Following the positive review, Rooted Rotisserie went from having 10 reservations for a given night to being completely booked for the next three weeks.
“I’m probably the first person to experience the Keith Lee effect,” said Frank Steele, owner of Frankesons Pizzeria in Las Vegas. In January 2023, Mr. Lee positively reviewed the restaurant in a TikTok post that has drawn 9.5 million likes to date. “After that our phone started blowing up, and we had a line of 500 to 600 people deep before we opened the doors,” Mr. Steele said. “We had to shut down early every day because we ran out of product.”
Brands have also taken notice of Mr. Lee’s power with consumers. In addition to the partnerships with Pizza Hut and Chipotle, he has signed lucrative deals with companies like Microsoft and Chime based on the success of his reviews. He generally doesn’t disclose figures, but has said that a deal he made with the fast-food chain Wingstop in 2023 involved “six figures.”
“Working with Keith Lee was a no-brainer for us,” said Elyse Slayton, head of brand communications for Pizza Hut U.S. “In addition to his content that has really been shaping the food industry, his personal brand was a perfect fit and felt really authentic to who we are at Pizza Hut.”
Not everyone sees Mr. Lee’s style of restaurant reviewing as a positive development.
He has likened himself to Anton Ego, the restaurant reviewer villain in “Ratatouille,” but Ms. Green of the Free Press said that Mr. Lee’s methodology departs markedly from the rigor most professional critics bring to the job.
“I have the ability to go to a restaurant over the course of weeks to try all of the menu,” she said. “The idea is to go multiple times, try dishes multiple times and get a sense of a restaurant’s consistency.”
In some ways, Mr. Lee does adhere to traditional norms for restaurant criticism. He pays for his food, he does his best to stay anonymous and he chooses the restaurants himself. In other ways, he rewrites the rules to fit his brand. After tasting the food at Rooted, for instance, he visited the restaurant in person and gave Ms. Burton and the staff a $6,000 tip, which he filmed and included in the review video.
For the past year, he has been visiting cities like Atlanta, San Francisco and Los Angeles to review restaurants. The trips have drawn considerable criticism when he has called out entire cities for their lack of hospitality or food that appeals to him.
In 2023, Mr. Lee cut his visit to the Bay Area short because he said the region was not “ready to host tourists right now,” that people were “just focused on surviving” and that six of the restaurants he visited left him with “nothing constructive” to say in his reviews.
Many people were offended by his estimation and took to social media.
“The bay is a melting pot of hella cultures. We got a deep bench of crazy restaurants,” one user posted on X, adding “if u go to 6 spots and can’t make any positive content, I’m either blaming lack of palette or lack of planning.”
Mr. Lee’s visit to Atlanta felt to many like a wholesale takedown of the city’s food scene, when he named it the worst stop of his food tour in 2023 causing an outcry in the city and beyond.
Last month, Mr. Lee’s visits to Washington, D.C., and Maryland also drew criticism when he said the restaurants there offered “slim pickings” for those who don’t drink.
Jeanine Prime, the owner of Cane, a Trinidadian restaurant in Washington, received a middling review from Mr. Lee. She, and others on social media, wondered if he had done any research into the kind of Trinidadian food her restaurant serves before visiting.
“Critics should be well-versed in certain cuisines, this history, the culture behind what they’re eating,” Ms. Prime said.
Mr. Kearney of Black Food Fridays said his own videos, specifically designed to speak to Black diners about Black food history, are researched and planned out for weeks. Cultural knowledge, he added, is especially important when discussing dishes from the African diaspora.
“There are people who haven’t been to a cooking class ever, not even a grandma teaching them how to make something trying to tell some chef that they did this wrong,” Mr. Kearney said.
Mr. Lee has taken judgments about the sophistication of his palate in stride, though he has attempted to rebut them.
On a recent visit to Chicago, he visited (in the dining room this time) and reviewed the city’s location of Nobu, a chain of high-end sushi restaurants with 55 locations on four continents. He begins the video, “There was a narrative in Twitter going around that I only eat fried food, which in reality, I don’t, not even close.”
After his meal, which cost more than $1,000, Mr. Lee concluded summarily, “I personally give the whole place 5 out of 10. Especially for the price, I’m not a huge fan.”
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