Keith Lee's ignorance is not a qualification

Y'all need to chill about this man.

Noted TikToker and takeout enthusiast Keith Lee first popped on my radar a year and a half ago, when my sister sent a video of him living both our dream and getting a free box of 12 Cinnabons sent to him from Cinnabon. I didn’t finish the video, partly out of burning envy, but mostly because I didn’t love his style. To this day, I find his ratatat cadence irritating and his near-constant close-ups jarring. But that style seems perfect for TikTok. And something about his approach to food reviews, as opposed to the handful of other ways he tried to strike it big on TikTok, really connected with people, to the tune of some 16.6 million followers. He has fashioned himself as the people’s Gordon Ramsay, seeking out struggling, family-owned restaurants that “need marketing.” Crucially, he only does takeout. His fans often describe him as “down-to-earth” — “he’s not a foodie!” is a common rejoinder from his defenders. On the flip side, “I can’t stand that chicken tender eatin ass” has been my favourite criticism so far.

This is as close as I can stand him, and I’m sad to say he gets much closer than this. Like, all the time.

I will say this—I am a foodie for sure. I love cooking and eating, I have a stand mixer with meat grinder and pasta maker attachments, and I always have at least one duck breast in the freezer. I also love Velveeta down, and would happily pick Spam over foie gras any day of the week and twice on Sundays. My love for food is capacious and indiscriminate, so I feel confident saying my Keith Lee skepticism doesn’t come from a place of snobbery. But, let’s be real: it doesn’t come from a place of love, either. I just don’t like the man.

I’m also always wary of someone whose lack of expertise is listed as a selling point. I’m not saying people need credentials to be taken seriously, but, for me, they need to have a knowledge and/or love of what they’re talking about. Otherwise, why am I listening to them? Keith Lee doesn’t appear to suffer from an abundance of charisma or dynamism, so his personality isn’t a draw for me. He has his little gimmick, plus a 1-10 rating system that, oddly, requires a lot more explanation than he’s willing to give. Maybe he knows he can get away with being precise, because people will mistake it for clarity. I myself am curious to knowwhy he’s giving a jerk chicken dish an 8.7 out of 10. But people love ratings, and people love championing ignorance as populist bonafides, so here we are.

In any case, Keith Lee didn’t really pop back up for me until October 2023, when he went on a trip to Atlanta and burned his way through that city’s restaurant scene like the reincarnation of General Sherman. Keith Lee’s commitment to his casual food preferences was a bad fit for Atlanta’s clout-based economy, and between the people who have been longing for Atlanta to get taken down a peg and the people who just love mess, his visit ruled my corner of social media for a good week.

@proudypointhexLike?? How could a restaurant be like that?? These rules are so trivial #fyp #keithlee #foryoupage #realmilkandhoney

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And then I stopped hearing about him again until he hit up my old stomping grounds, the DMV. And this is where the wheels really started to come off this thing. Because this is where Keith Lee announced that he had had such awful food experiences that he couldn’t upload the majority of the videos he had made, because they wouldn’t be “productive.” This is also where he complained that it was slim pickings in D.C. because he doesn’t drink alcohol. Mind you, D.C. is absolutely a happy hour-obsessed city, but the establishments that require you to drink alcohol with your food couldn’t be so numerous that you would struggle to find somewhere to get some carryout. It’s giving self-righteous, it’s giving prude, it’s giving the exact kind of judgmental energy that his fans accuse the rest of us of bringing. And this is far from the first time he’s left a city in a huff, saying that there was nowhere for him and his family to eat.

This recurring predicament seems like a pretty straightforward situation. We have a content creator who has hit the limits of his business model’s scalability. If he wants to keep doing city tours, something needs to change. Either he needs to shake his ass on out of the sprinter and eat some sit-down meals, or he needs to actually start doing some research and prep ahead of time. His current system of heedless crowd-sourcing isn’t getting the results that he wants. If he were an instigator who made controversial content for views, or enjoyed going back and forth with people, that would be one thing. But he is burning time, money, and digestive ease for way less content than he wants to put out. He’s out here eating salmon chopped cheese. This just isn’t working.

And then, in the midst of me writing this piece, Keith Lee hopped back in the sprinter to let you all know that he’s read your tweets about his childish palate and propensity for fried foods. Well, get thee behind him, haters. In a stunning turn of events, Keith decided to not just go to a sit-down restaurant in Chicago, but to go to the celeb hangout masquerading as a restaurant known as Nobu.

Now, Nobu is as bewildering a choice for a Chicago food tour as Tyra Banks’s pop-up ice cream shop, Smize and Dream, was for D.C.

Again. I’m not coming from a place of snobbery.

And most of his review was as frustratingly limited as usual. (“I could see that being really low to some people, like a 3 or 4, but I could see it being very high.” Great, thanks.) But the man really came alive when the nigiri plate arrived! He says that he eats nigiri all the time, and explains how he dips the nigiri fish-first into the soy sauce rather than rice-first, otherwise the rice becomes a sauce bomb. And that’s the first time I’ve seen him betray a love for food, and an insight about eating it that makes the experience more enjoyable. In other words, an actual review. So it is possible! I’m not asking him to be Anthony Bourdain, or even Guy Fieri. I’m just asking him to be for real.

And to back the fuck up.