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.”