Luke Sung, a longtime chef and restaurateur in San Francisco, became the target of an angry mob on TikTok who led a review-bombing of one of his new ventures in Hayes Valley after he insulted one micro-influencer. He's now speaking out.
It seemed like a fairly toxic situation from the beginning when we heard about TikTok personality Karla Marcotte and the uproar she caused after a tearful video in which she talked about being turned away from a Hayes Valley restaurant she had intended to "collab" with — all because, ostensibly, she didn't have enough followers and the chef disrespected her.
That uproar led to the newly open KIS Cafe shutting down for a pivot without Sung as a partner, an apology from Sung, and then, last week, the temporary closure of his other restaurant in the neighborhood Domo, which he is also now stepping away from, he says.
Cancel culture is one thing when a business owner or chef has materially or substantially harmed someone — or, as was the case with several prominent restaurateurs of the last decade, behaved wildly inappropriately with their staff. But when we're talking about one incident of a chef and minor influencer having an unpleasant interaction over what would have been a free meal and a little bit of publicity, and that incident leads to jobs being lost and businesses shutting down — one of them that's been around for 17 years — it feels like things have gotten way out of hand.
Certainly, if nothing else, the San Francisco chef and restaurant community is going to be walking on eggshells for a while hoping to avoid similar fates themselves. And will that lead to more reliable or interesting content?
Sung spoke to the SF Standard's Sara Deseran this week — Deseran herself has been in the local food world for over a decade, and co-founded the Tacolicious mini-chain of restaurants with husband Joe Hargrave. He tells her that after shying away from the media the last few weeks, he "can't imagine it being any worse" in terms of the online hate he and his family might endure. (It turns out that Sung's own daughter, Isa, the namesake of his longtime Marina District restaurant, is also an influencer.)
Sung has apologized to Marcotte and he acknowledges that he may have spoken inappropriately from a place of pride about his business, because he wasn't sure that Marcotte and her following were a terrific fit — and his partner had apparently booked the visit at the restaurant without telling him. And, he says, there was "a lot of 'do you know'" this and that in his tone, and that he likely intimidated her — but he says she didn't seem to know much about him or the restaurant before arriving, and his daughter the influencer would have done more research.
But he also adds the detail that after Marcotte's husband arrived a few minutes late, she announced "We're not going to eat here," and on her way out the door, she allegedly told Sung, "The restaurant world is really small. There will be consequences."
Given the tears she subsequently displayed in the TikTok video walking away from the restaurant, it certainly makes one question whether her motivations were pure, or coming solely from a place of injustice, when she posted the video that led to the maelstrom.
Marcotte has yet to comment publicly on the situation, other than to thank all her new followers — she went from 15,000 to 473,000, with over 4.7 million likes, after this viral moment. And it looks like other local restaurants are seeking out her attention now, like Brazilian steakhouse Fogo de Chao — which she says she was invited to in a new video posted Monday — and possibly Coqueta, where she also recently dined.
