On January 4, MMA fighter turned-TikTok food critic Keith Lee announced that he would kick off the Keith Lee and Family Food Tour 2024 in the Bay Area. This announcement drove fans wild, and thousands flooded his comment section with suggestions of local restaurants for Lee to try out. However, the food critic’s trip came to an abrupt end due to three reasons – the region’s lack of tourist safety, “disappointing” food stops, and an allergic reaction to shellfish.
Keith Lee was an MMA fighter for six years and retired in September 2022. Lee, despite being in the spotlight while in the MMA arena, struggled with social anxiety and had a fear of public speaking. To combat these issues, he turned to TikTok content creation in 2020 and began reviewing food a year later. He does food reviews in his car, stating what he likes and dislikes about it, then rates it on a 10-point scale. Lee has gained over 15.6 million followers and received nearly 700 million likes for his in-depth and honest reviews of “mom-and-pop” shops that need a boost in business. He even earned a spot on the 2023 Forbes 30 under 30 list in the category of food. The food critic focuses on Black-owned businesses but has visited many other cuisines as well.
As a melting pot of different cultures, the Bay Area has a rich and diverse culinary scene. The region has hundreds of minority-owned restaurants, so it was no surprise that Keith Lee would be making a stop in the Bay on his national food tour. Lee arrived in the Bay Area on January 9 and posted three reviews of restaurants across San Francisco and Oakland. However, none of these restaurants particularly stood out to Lee, as he gave the food an average rating of 6 out of 10.
No more than three days after arriving in the Bay Area, Lee announced that he and his family would cut their trip short. He stated that the food he ordered from a restaurant that he did not name was cross-contaminated with shellfish, which he is highly allergic to. “The second I ate it,” Lee said, “I blew up like a balloon.” Lee expressed that his family specifically asked if the restaurant cooked seafood on the same grill, and he believes that they either did not clean it or the cooking utensils were never replaced. He was sent to the emergency room, which was the deciding factor in his family’s decision to cut their trip short. Typically, Lee stays at each destination for one to two weeks, and this is the first time that he has abruptly ended a trip.
Another reason for Lee’s early departure was that he believed that the Bay Area was not an ideal spot for tourism at the moment. He expressed his discontent with the conditions homeless people lived with, such as living in tents and burnt-up cars on the streets, and wished that the city would step in to fix this issue. The food critic also expressed his discontent with the culinary scene of the Bay Area. Lee filmed six other food reviews that he stated he did not feel comfortable posting – which is due to nothing he ate being “constructive.” “I’ve never been big on completely tearing down anybody and I feel like those videos are doing that,” Lee voiced in a TikTok.
Elania Del Real, a senior at Wilcox, is a big fan of Keith Lee. “I was so excited when he first announced that he was coming here,” Del Real expressed. “There’s a lot of good food spots here in the Bay Area, he just didn’t go to the right ones.” Lee did not visit the southern region of the Bay Area, where there are hundreds of local-favorite restaurants. San Jose, the largest city in the South Bay Area, is a vibrant and diverse culinary scene. “It sucks that he didn’t try out the restaurants down here and get a real taste of what our food is like,” Del Real continued.
During Keith Lee’s trip to the Bay Area, he not only brought attention to the region’s culinary industry but also to how unattractive the region has become from a tourist’s perspective. Hopefully, Bay Area lawmakers will realize how the region’s poor conditions have negatively affected their tourism and push for change.
