Food critic Keith Lee is saving struggling restaurants one TikTok review at a time

Yasser Zermeno was almost ready to shut down his family’s struggling restaurant, Aroma: Latin American Cocina, a cozy place tucked into a strip mall on the outskirts of Las Vegas. But before he turned out the lights for good, his 20-something daughter insisted they try one more thing.

In late 2022, she reached out by email to someone she’d seen reviewing nearby restaurants on TikTok. Maybe his attention would help.

A short while later, Keith Lee’s video went online. Sitting in a sparsely decorated room, the young man in a hooded sweatshirt and camouflage pants digs into various takeout dishes he’d just picked up from Aroma. He licks his fingers, rolls his eyes between bites and rates everything rapid-fire on a scale of 1 to 10 while offering pithy critiques. “Cotija cheese is cheesy,” he says. “The tostada itself is salty. That is delicious.”

As soon as the video began circulating on TikTok, everything at Aroma changed. Within days, the restaurant went from being nearly deserted to totally packed, an astonishing transformation. “At that time, I didn’t know who Keith Lee was,” Zermeno said.

These days, among restaurant owners in Las Vegas – and far beyond – what Zermeno was experiencing has a well-established name. People in the food industry call it, “The Keith Lee Effect.”

Over the past year, thanks to his 16 million followers on TikTok and two million on Instagram, Lee has emerged as one of the most prominent members of a rising class of food influencers who can transform a restaurant with a single video. As to why his videos resonate with so many viewers, Lee, for one, finds it somewhat mystifying.

“I honestly can’t tell you – I have no idea,” Lee said. “I’m just myself, unapologetically. I literally just set up the camera and eat food and pray about it and let it be what it is. I don’t really do much else. There’s not a lot of tactics or strategies that go behind it.”

As more consumers turn to social media for recommendations on where to eat, Lee and the new power brokers of TikTok restaurant criticism are cashing in. Last year, advertisers spent roughly US$6.61bil on TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese internet conglomerate ByteDance Ltd, a figure projected to grow to US$10.8bil in 2025, according to estimates by Insider Intelligence. Increasingly, big food brands are part of the mix.

So far, Lee has worked on promotions for Wingstop Inc, Domino’s Pizza Inc, DoorDash Inc and Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. For each of his TikTok plugs, Lee can charge his sponsors roughly US$250,000 to US$300,000, according to estimates by data-science marketing company Captiv8. (Lee declined to comment on his rates).

“Keith Lee’s followers really go and do what he recommends,” said Chris Brandt, the chief brand officer for Chipotle. “They take action in a way I’ve never seen with almost any other influencer.”

Before he got into food reviews, Lee was a fighter. In 2017, while in his early 20s, he started competing professionally in mixed martial arts. In the years that followed, Lee accrued an 8-5 record with 3 knockouts, according to ESPN. During some lean stretches, Lee later told the syndicated radio show The Breakfast Club, his family got by on food stamps.

Between fights, Lee began posting occasional videos on social media about his life in Las Vegas. At first, he figured it was just a good way to learn to cope with his social anxiety and fear of public speaking.

In the early days, Lee’s content ranged from cooking sessions at home to culinary expeditions around town to satisfy the cravings of his pregnant wife. Food and family were constant themes. The production quality was low. But something about his homegrown style of talking about his favourite local spots to eat struck a nerve. With each passing month, Lee’s TikTok audience grew.

Eventually, word got out among Las Vegas restaurateurs that a video from Lee could drive hordes of hungry people to their doorstep. One day, Lee received an email from someone at Frankensons, a floundering pizzeria, asking him how much he would charge for a review. According to Lee, he replied that he’d do it for free.

In his subsequent assessment, posted on TikTok in January 2023, Lee rated several of the pizzeria’s menu items above a nine, including the lemon pepper wings, which he gave a perfect 10. By the next day, Frankensons had a line out the door.

Because TikTok’s algorithms constantly resurface popular videos, the impact of Lee’s reviews tend to be long-lasting and can pull in ravenous consumers from outside of Las Vegas. To this day, more than a year after Lee’s initial take on the Frankensons, the pizzeria maintains a dedicated space where people can stash their luggage after arriving straight from the airport.

With his impact growing, Lee kept traversing the city, finding family businesses to resuscitate. Over time, he helped to revive Buldogis, an Asian-fusion hot dog restaurant, generated more than US$30,000 in donations for a food truck and rallied his followers in support of Dynamite Korean Street Food & Sushi/Grill after the owner died from cancer.

In early 2023, Lee made a TikTok video with Jimmy Donaldson, aka MrBeast, a wildly popular YouTuber with more than 240 million followers, who has pioneered a new kind of online stunt philanthropy. Sitting at a table together, Lee and Donaldson reviewed food from Aloha Mamacita, a restaurant in Las Vegas that had recently been burglarised. After trying the tacos, Donaldson says that “on a scale of Taco Bell to 10” he would give Aloha “a 10”. For the grand finale, Donaldson hands the restaurateurs a briefcase full of cash.

Lee’s ability to improve the sagging fortunes of small businesses was proving to be irresistible to news producers, and feel-good coverage of his restaurant rescues spread from local news outlets to national ones. In January 2023, he starred in a spot on ABC’s Good Morning America, surprising a Brooklyn bakery with a US$10,000 check from Duncan Hines.

Corporate sponsors were taking notice. Last spring, Lee and Alexis Frost, a fellow TikTok and Instagram star, partnered with Chipotle to jumpstart a quesadilla promotion on the chain’s app. The result, according to Chipotle’s Brandt, was one of the company’s biggest digital sales days of all time, with quesadilla sales nearly doubling in the weeks after the launch. In March 2023, a Chipotle in Las Vegas even temporarily renamed itself “Chipotlee”.

Across his social media output, Lee tries to keep a clear line for viewers between his paid commercial endorsements, which are labelled as such, and his food reviews for which he does not accept payment. As his profile has grown, he’s also done more to avoid getting preferential treatment from restaurants, often arriving at a new spot with no advance notice and sending in family members to retrieve the takeout food he’s about to critique. As he has previously explained on TikTok, his goal is to present the view of a normal, paying customer.

Recently, Lee has been expanding his palette to the rest of the country as part of the “Keith Lee and Family Food Tour”. In August, he travelled to New Orleans, followed by stops in several cities around the US. Along the way, Lee quickly learned the downside of his growing fame. These days, everything he says about food has the potential to blow up into a raging controversy.

In New York, Lee ordered a chopped cheese sandwich with salmon from a deli. Afterward, irate regional sandwich purists went wild, alleging that the inclusion of salmon was heresy.

In Atlanta, Lee noted some idiosyncrasies of the local food scene and took issue with the service at one spot, setting off an uproar that took on the air of an international diplomatic incident. “I feel like Atlanta restaurants, they don’t like to make money,” the rapper Cardi B weighed in on Instagram.

Lee says he’s been listening to the criticism, incorporating feedback from fans and tweaking the way he structures his tour stops. Last month, he made a trip to Toronto, and more international destinations are on the horizon. Amsterdam, he hinted, could be on deck.

“I enjoy those moments of sitting down and eating food with my family,” Lee said. “And I don’t want that to change no matter how crazy, or how different, my life may look at the moment.”

Historically, the next stop for a rising food star would be a TV series, and Lee is currently fielding offers. A number of TV producers have reached out to him recently. “We’re in conversation with one, but the main thing we’re doing right now is working on something by ourselves,” he said. “If we get a TV show, it’d be directly designed around the restaurants and around the family aspect.”

In the meantime, even as his influence has soared, Lee’s style on TikTok has stayed consistent. His reviews remain straightforward and unfussy. His one recurring visual flair when doing reviews on his home turf in Las Vegas is his daughter’s Paw Patrol-branded folding chair, which he wedges into as he makes his way through various cartons of take-out food.

These days, his team consists of around 10 people, all family members except for his manager, agent and lawyer. He’s currently on the hunt for a videographer, Lee said, someone who can help shoot additional behind-the-scenes footage for his fans. Many viewers seem to mistakenly think that the food tour is an extravagant operation. “Like with 30 cameramen walking around,” Lee said. “It is literally just us.”

When it comes to resuming his professional fighting career, Lee said he remains open to the possibility, but his family is strongly against it. “I don’t even think that it’s up for question with them,” he said. “I have two kids now, a 3-year-old and a 1-year-old, and they’re starting to get old enough to understand what fighting is and how dangerous of a sport it is.”

Social media can also be full of unpredictable hazards. Currently, the future of TikTok remains up in the air after President Joe Biden signed bipartisan legislation in April that will ban the app in the US unless its Chinese owners give up control. TikTok has said it plans to sue in response.

“I believe the biggest proof that TikTok shouldn’t go anywhere is the impact that we’ve been blessed enough to leave behind,” Lee said.

Whatever happens, admirers credit Lee with helping to popularise a new style of restaurant criticism. After years of cable TV chefs dominating the national conversation on food, the TikTok crowd is now ascendant.

“I mean the dude’s definitely on another level, definitely in his own lane,” said Philip Tzeng, a fellow Las Vegas influencer. “It’s refreshing.” Tzeng now has an appreciative nickname for Lee. He calls him “Vegas Foodie Jesus”. – Bloomberg