In late January, TikTok star and food reviewer Keith Lee rolled into Dallas, bringing a maelstrom of social media fervor and millions of eyes to North Texas’ restaurant scene.
Lee, who is known for highlighting small, minority-owned businesses, visited and critiqued nearly a dozen restaurants across Dallas-Fort Worth, sticking to his review format of anonymously ordering takeout, eating it in the privacy of a car, and posting a video of his real-time thoughts prefaced with his trademark exordium: “I got it, let’s try it.”
Some of the North Texas restaurants Lee chose, like Halal Fusionz and CeeZoos Bar and Lounge, were fledgling businesses still sorting out their hours and online ordering systems. Others, like Hutchins BBQ, Terry Black’s Barbecue and Absolutely Edible Cakes and Catering, had weathered the volatility of the restaurant business for decades before Lee arrived. Not one knew what to expect when they were thrust into the cosmos of viral internet fame. They all hoped, though, that they would experience the so-called “Keith Lee Effect” — the instant and almost crushing surge in business that follows a positive review from Lee.
With unapologetic candor, a penchant for the underdog, and 16 million fiercely loyal followers, Lee, a former professional mixed martial arts fighter based in Las Vegas, has managed to wield his influence to revive struggling restaurants around the country. He’s done so with an approach that diverges from traditional restaurant criticism in key ways: He usually visits a restaurant just once, and he orders only takeout. Like traditional critics, Lee doesn’t accept free meals, and he usually attempts to remain anonymous when ordering to receive the same experience as a regular customer.
Lee wasn’t the first to enter this new era of social media restaurant criticism, but he has elevated it to incredible levels of influence that have prompted the industry to adapt quickly.
When Lee dishes out praise, scenes of lines curling around buildings and restaurants selling out of food inevitably follow. But what happens to the restaurants he doesn’t review so favorably? And what comes of the attention these businesses receive, good or bad, after he’s moved on?
To understand Lee’s impact, The Dallas Morning News talked with the owners of the 10 North Texas restaurants he reviewed. Their experiences — varied, but patterned — reveal a fascinating reality for independent restaurants in the era of social media criticism. It’s a reality in which a singular opinion, with enough traction, can save or vanquish a business overnight.
Lee, who notoriously does not do interviews, did not respond to interview requests via email or direct message on TikTok from The News for this story.
The successes
Of the 10 Dallas-Fort Worth restaurants that were paid a visit by Lee, half had lines out the door within hours of Lee posting a review. The uptick in business at every one of these restaurants has largely held steady.
Sales at both locations of Hutchins BBQ, one in Frisco and the other in McKinney, are up 40% from last year since Lee called the food “goddamn delicious,” said owner Tracy Hutchins.
“It’s truly incredible,” Hutchins said. “I would have expected it to kind of taper off and kind of get back to normal in late February and March, but that’s not the case for us. I just think we grew a completely new audience. I truly believe this is our new norm. It’s the power of social media.”
The post-Keith Lee increase in business has been so extreme at Halal Fusionz, a relatively new ghost kitchen concept in Farmers Branch, that owner Ahmed Siyaji is looking for a brick-and-mortar restaurant space to move into — a previously out-of-reach goal.
Before Lee’s review, Siyaji’s Pakistani-Tex-Mex concept was struggling to get off the ground. He was barely making ends meet and only had about five orders a day.
That changed when Lee walked in, shook Siyaji’s hand and told him to get ready for a crowd.
With only hours to prepare before Lee posted his positive review of Halal Fusionz and its Nihari x Birria Tacos, Siyaji scrambled to gather supplies and recruit friends to help him in the kitchen. That first day, he fulfilled 200 orders and received dozens of others he couldn’t get to.
Since then, daily business at Halal Fusionz is 18 times what it used to be. Siyaji now has six part-time employees.
“I’m absolutely grateful for what [Lee] does and how he intentionally goes to restaurants that are minority-owned or places that need the spotlight or are struggling,” he said. “He’s like the Batman of food.”
Taste Project, a pay-what-you-can nonprofit restaurant in Fort Worth, has seen a 20% increase in customers and a flood of volunteer applications since Lee visited, owner Julie Williams said. He didn’t try the food at the dine-in-only restaurant, but he posted a video about its mission and called it “one of the dopest restaurants I’ve ever seen” — verbiage now proudly emblazoned on the restaurant’s façade.
Williams said Lee, who came into the restaurant flanked by his bodyguard and his family, “clearly had done a lot of research” on its mission to reduce food insecurity and expand access to healthy food.
In the months since Lee posted his video on Taste Project, financial contributions to the nonprofit have spiked. It recently received hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants to help close out funding for a second restaurant location, and it was awarded a community impact award from the Dallas Mavericks, Williams said.
“There is a direct connection between new financial support and his attention,” she said. “It’s been incredible.”
At Brunchaholics in DeSoto, sales have doubled since Lee’s review of the restaurant’s Soul Food Burrito and fried catfish, said owner Jessie Washington. The shift to this newfound attention was a challenge, though, he said.
“We really weren’t prepared, to be honest. Any business would struggle if 100 people showed up at once,” he said. “We definitely gave out some refunds that first day. But it’s an amazing marketing opportunity, and I feel like my food stands up to his review.”
Nikki Jackson, the owner of Absolutely Edible Cakes and Catering in Rowlett, said she’s hesitant to admit how well her business is doing thanks to Lee — because she can hardly believe it herself.
For the 22 years she’s been in business, November and December have always been Jackson’s busiest months, and they float her financially through the rest of the year. In the eight days after Lee posted a review of two of her cakes in January, sales exceeded the previous November and December combined.
Jackson now averages 100 walk-in customers a day on weekdays and close to 200 a day on weekends. Her wholesale and catering sales have practically doubled.
“It’s unbelievable,” she said. “I keep going back and looking at it and thinking, ‘This can’t be.’ The Keith Lee Effect is still in full effect.”
The fallouts
As much as a review from Lee can incite immense public support, so too can it open the door for intense backlash. Some of the North Texas businesses he reviewed experienced the flip side of the Keith Lee Effect, where the intensity with which his followers rally around a restaurant he loves is channeled into online vitriol. No one experienced this more acutely than Kim Viverette, owner and chef of the newly opened Sweetly Seasoned food truck in Garland.
It wasn’t that Lee disliked Viverette’s food — in fact, he scored her pulled pork sandwich and jerk chicken tacos highly — but what followed his review landed Viverette on the wrong side of Lee’s followers.
After trying Sweetly Seasoned, Lee introduced himself to Viverette and left her a $4,000 tip, as he often does at small businesses he likes. The tip, he said on video, was to be distributed between Viverette and the two people who were cutting and braiding hair in the parking lot next to the truck that day. Those two people were friends of Viverette’s son whom she said she had never met. They showed up after hearing Viverette received an anonymous phone call saying Lee would visit the food truck, Viverette told The News.
Shortly after Lee posted his review of Sweetly Seasoned, the woman who had been braiding hair posted a TikTok video saying Viverette had not given her or the barber their portion of the tip. The response from Lee’s followers was swift and condemning.
Online reviews for Sweetly Seasoned were flooded with 1-star comments calling Viverette a thief and saying her food caused food poisoning. Her cellphone rang incessantly with berating and threatening calls, and people came to her food truck to take video of her. Her social media accounts were inundated with comments saying she should end up homeless and her business should close permanently.
“It has been a nightmare,” Viverette said. “It got out of hand and it went way too far.”
After Lee’s tip hit her bank account, Viverette said she did pay the two people, although she first messaged Lee to clarify that they were not her employees and ask if she was supposed to pay them.
“I said, ‘I know when you came out it appeared as if they were part of my staff, but they were not part of my staff. I don’t even know them. Do you still want me to issue them the money?’”
Lee never responded to her, Viverette said, but he did post a video saying he had made it clear how that money was to be distributed and that in his opinion, the food truck had been struggling not only because of marketing but also because of “personal issues.”
In the days following, Viverette temporarily shut down her food truck and tried to hide from what she described as the “Keith Lee cult.”
“It’s hard for me to talk to people about this because it has put so much of a strain on my life,” she said. “I went into a deep depression.”
She has reopened the food truck and is trying to get her business back on track, but sales are slow, and the harassing phone calls and negative reviews still come daily. If things don’t turn around in a year or so, she said she’ll move back to her hometown of Milwaukee.
“I feel like I was blessed to have [Lee] come,” she said. “I just feel like it was handled inappropriately. I feel like he should have asked me if they were my staff, or if he wanted to give them the money, he should have done it himself. My mistake was not knowing what was going on around me.”
When the masses came after the Sweetly Seasoned food truck, collateral damage ensued. A case of mistaken identity dragged Dallas ghost kitchen Seasoned Street Food into the conversation. Its owners began receiving a barrage of negative reviews and harassing phone calls from people thinking their business was Viverette’s.
Aimee Evola, who owned the ghost kitchen with her husband and business partner Jonathan Evola, said they immediately reached out to Lee to ask him to set the record straight with his audience and tell them they were coming after the wrong business.
Lee never responded or made any sort of public statement, Aimee Evola said. The harassment continued for weeks, and their sales made a sharp and permanent decline.
At the end of March, they closed Seasoned Street Food — and the other ghost kitchen concept they ran alongside it, which also received an onslaught of negative reviews.
Evola said she is hesitant to equate the ordeal to Seasoned Street Food’s demise, but there was a clear nosedive in business when the harassment began, she said.
“I’m not sure if it’s completely related, but things were moving along in a forward-moving motion before this happened, and then everything just started to decline,” she said. “Restaurants are very volatile and finicky. One bad week or one bad day can become such a big hiccup for cash flow and return business.”
For Evola, Lee’s time in North Texas felt like “a tornado came through, and now you have to clean up after it.”
At CeeZoos Bar and Lounge in the Cedars, owner Cee Gilmore’s ambitions to create a music lounge with a notable weekend brunch were dashed after Lee’s less-than-flattering review.
Gilmore said after the review, hardly any customers came for brunch, and his cook promptly quit, so he folded the brunch program and dropped the word “restaurant” from the business name.
Still, he is grateful Lee came, he said.
“Any attention is better than no attention,” Gilmore said. “I was just really hoping for the Keith Lee Effect, but I didn’t get it. It’s alright though. I think it kind of got me and my brother back on our original vision for CeeZoos. It was always the plan for it to be a bar lounge for entertainment, and we kind of got away from that.”
Terry Black’s Barbecue owner Mark Black said he doesn’t think any benefit has come from the review his restaurant received, in which Lee said the jalapeño cheddar sausage had an “overpowering meat flavor” and the mac-n-cheese tasted like a “salty, wet noodle.” Lee did rate the restaurant’s brisket and ribs highly.
“Are we going to lose business because of it long term? Possibly,” Black said. “I don’t think it will be any percentage that we notice.”
The way Lee tried the food at Terry Black’s was less than ideal, Black noted.
“To be honest, his order was picked up late and it was a to-go order eaten in the car. It had been sitting for 30 to 45 minutes, and he ate one noodle off the top of the cold mac-n-cheese and dragged it,” he said.
The experience of a restaurant like Terry Black’s, which is not formatted for takeout dining, is lost in such an approach, he added.
Black said that when his restaurant is typically reviewed, “[the critics] go into the pits and show the whole process because what we do is very intensive. It’s not like cooking a burger or steaks.”
At Roots Southern Table in Farmers Branch, a James Beard-nominated restaurant from celebrity chef Tiffany Derry, little if anything has changed since Lee gave it a lukewarm review and said the duck fat fried chicken and short rib were not the best he’s had but also not the worst — a frequently used critique of Lee’s.
“We were already busy and are still busy,” said Derry, who also runs Roots Chicken Shak and the new Radici. “We have lots of people who dine with us regularly, which is the highest compliment you can get as a restaurant. It feels like business as normal.”
Thunderbird Pies, a Detroit-style pizza spot in East Dallas that was Lee’s first North Texas stop, is back to business as usual, too, after Lee gave its pizzas low ratings for crust that was too bouncy and sauce that tasted too strongly of onions. But the return to normal came only after the restaurant endured a week or more of relentless negative online comments, said Jeff Amador, chief marketing officer for the restaurant group that owns Thunderbird Pies, Cane Rosso and Zoli’s.
“It seems like everyone has forgotten now,” Amador said. “We obviously wish [Lee] liked our food better and that we got the boost and attention and long lines you see when he likes a place. We didn’t get that, but we didn’t lose any followers or customers.”
Coming out of the ordeal unscathed, Amador said, is a win. And for the record, he said, there are no onions in Thunderbird’s marinara, just a small amount of shallot.
The new reality
Many of the business owners The News talked to for this story said they see Lee’s social media-driven approach as the new frontier of restaurant criticism.
“Restaurants have to be prepared for this now,” said Williams of the Taste Project. Although, she added, it’s hard to be prepared for something if you don’t know when or if it will happen.
There is inescapable vulnerability and unpredictability for restaurants in a world where anyone with a phone and a social media platform can be a critic. One mistake can live online forever in an echo chamber void of clemency or context, but one positive viral post can pay dividends. Lee’s stamp of approval is especially transformative.
Without a culinary or journalistic background, Lee has cultivated a devoted following with his food takes. His everyman approach draws masses, and other content creators have taken note. Scores of Lee-esque food reviews now fill social media feeds, although few have the influence Lee’s do.
But the TikTok restaurant review emerged well before Lee started recording himself eating takeout.
A “new category of eviscerating restaurant criticism” surfaced when TikTok creators entered the arena, said a 2022 article from Bon Appetit’s Sam Stone. Heavy-handed, hyperbole-ridden critiques took root on the social media platform years ago and have persisted.
Lee’s reviews differ from this flavor of criticism. Rather than assigning blanketed critiques of “good” or “bad,” he scores dishes with a point system that leaves room for nuance, and he often seeks out restaurants in the shadows over those that are flashy or widely known.
He doesn’t embody the bombast of his counterparts, but his harsh opinions of the food landscapes in cities like Atlanta and San Francisco have been widely criticized.
His content, as a 2023 article from Eater’s Amy McCarthy and Jaya Saxena noted, fills the space between dwindling staff critic roles at media outlets and the pay-to-play world of influencers. His success is proof that there is still an appetite for being told where and what to eat, and that the people who get to do that job and the way they do it have changed.
Regardless of how restaurant owners feel about Lee — whether they see his reviews as welcomed marketing or under-developed opinions with potential to harm — his model is here to stay. It’s a new era, said Black of Terry Black’s, and restaurants are wise to embrace it.
“You have to go with the new-age way of doing things and stay on top of it,” said Black. “You have to adapt.”
