In the comments, Lee’s followers try to prepare Juanderful Tacos for the torrent of business that restaurants face once they’ve received a Keith Lee tick of approval. (“Get ready tomorrow!”) Among the growing ranks of online food influencers — all the professional and semiprofessional eaters jawing straight into the camera on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram — few are bigger or more influential than Lee. He turned to food reviewing as his first career, in mixed martial arts, was coming to an end, and in the short time since, he’s amassed not only millions of followers but also the power to change restaurants’ fortunes and provoke hysterical debate in some of the cities he visits. He’s admired for the attention he pays to small, independent businesses; for his closeness to his family, which accompanies him on cross-country food tours; for his appreciation of good service and generosity with tips.
Yet there’s been little discussion of his uniquely dainty eating style, which is a key element of his aesthetic and a leading source, I believe, of his success.
Like many of the reviewers who’ve achieved popularity on social apps, Lee performs most of his food criticism in his car — a cramped and inhospitable environment for consumption of the saucy, sticky, fried and gloop-rich takeaway foods that dominate critical attention in straight-to-camera TikTok reviews. The “money shot” of food being inserted into mouth, usually to a soundtrack of proto-sexual groans, has long been a key element of food TV. But lately, online food culture has entered an “oral” era that puts the fleshy, wettened mouth — at once destructive and violated in the act of ingestion — at the center of the spectacle. There seems to be a growing emphasis, among popular food accounts, on the messiness of the overflowing orifice as individual eaters shovel food down their throats; online, the mouth has become a canvas for thick spacklings of various juices, pastes, condiments and whips.
If you think I’m exaggerating, consider a recent post from @sanaaeats, in which the popular culinary influencer (1.6 million followers across TikTok and Instagram) feeds herself fingers of chicken, Texas toast and crinkle-cut fries drowned in a jumbo cup of Raising Cane’s sauce — the camera lingering on each bite just long enough to reveal the viscous splatter around her mouth. Then there’s @lukefoods (1.3 million followers): “Come to me, baby, come to me,” he croons, in the driver’s seat of his car, before dunking a paddle of naan into a portable motorized fountain of butter chicken, then wedging the smothered bread into his mouth in a way that leaves his lips ringed with a rusty smear. Even among those reviewers not confined to their cars, the lure of the deep oral reveal remains strong. The Staten Island native @meals_by_cug (4 million followers), whose food account doubles as a pastiche of Italian American culture, frequently delivers his one-liners through a mouth filled with half-chewed rigatoni or meatball parm, while the English food reviewer @mashtag_brady (2.2 million followers) posts videos of food not only entering his mouth but exiting as well. (A recent account of his attempt to eat a raw oyster for the first time — “This is going to be mingin’, mate” — concluded with him announcing to the camera through a beard of brown vomit: “Well, I didn’t like that.”) The attention economy rewards sensationalism, pushing sloppy eaters toward ever-sloppier stunts of consumption — but also satisfying, I think, a collective craving for mess, disorder and irresponsibility amid the bland conformism of algorithmic culture.
Amid this mouthy excess, the discreet, almost demure way in which Lee feeds himself — the precise bites, the careful chewing, the mouth politely covered as he offers his critique of the food inside — seems quaintly old-fashioned. This isn’t to say that Lee never gets stuff on his face; we all do. But he is comfortably one of the cleanest professional eaters at work today. For one recent review, when the restaurant failed to provide any utensils, Lee managed to eat a beef pancake, chicken and vegetable won tons in chili sauce, a spiralized coil of cucumber, chicken xiao long bao (“Excuse me if I pronounced that wrong”) and chicken potstickers, all using nothing but his hands. Where other food influencers might have used this as an invitation to take a bath in their dinner, Lee’s fingers and mouth remained almost completely spotless, to the very end.
