R&B Trap Brunch bamboozle

There's something more than just Keith Lee happening

Keith Lee was in the Bay Area and everyone is in their feelings about the end result. Alan Chazaro wrote for KQED his take on Keith Lee’s visit after his departure.

I wrote an Op-Ed for Oakland Voices before he made his exit with a video that he went to six different locations, but was more disturbed by the homeless encampments and the fact that Bay Area residents are simply surviving. The fact that every publication has written about it

Yes. This is all we’re going to talk about and not for the reason you think.

But there’s something related that I’ve had this on my heart for a while now. It didn’t came to full fruition until my trip to Atlanta, Georgia and when I connected the dots at home in the Bay Area. Keith Lee, MMA fighter and food influencer was serendipitous in the conversation somehow.

In Atlanta we encountered the “clubification” of restaurants. The Sunday afternoon before a music festival was spent at Boogalou in Atlanta. The up sale game which started with a $40 valet service before we got out of the car at a location that didn’t require it. We parked at the end of the block around the corner for free.

In the middle of the afternoon there were patron with sparklers, hookah, swings at the bar for seats and three women who were holding their seats in place with one sad unfinished lemon drop. Once the drink was done, they would have to make their exit. So it sat.

I have an untold story about one that my cousin took me to an R&B brunches in Suisun City, Ca where I found myself paying $35 to eat on paper plates, “bottomless mimosas” that had a bottom because of slow service and a server that said we couldn’t have more because “everyone didn’t eat yet.” I thought I was at a buffet restaurant, not Sunday service at the local church.

Lee’s commentary about Atlanta’s food scene began to spark while we were visiting Atlanta. Then when Lee went on a tour it was as if he was visiting his cousins. The Bay Area are the cousins that you can take everywhere because we know how to act in public but you can’t stay at our house long.

I stopped at Mama T’s on Telegraph for the first time and asked them how things were going after the visit. They confirmed they saw a pick up in business on a Friday afternoon and had a 20 minute wait for pick up. While there was a some visible impact by locals supporting Mama T’s afterward, I don’t believe Lee’s tours were completely about the food.

It was about normalizing and accepting things that we absolutely have the power to change.

These visits were about the state of how we have become accustomed to doing bad business and allowing the mediocrity to become the norm. Businesses are barely surviving partly and we don’t know how to course correct when something isn’t working.

We complain that Black businesses aren’t doing well or supported because of systemic issues, but we’re afraid to say that the business was actually not so good for the sake of having a Black business present. We don’t like “airing our dirty laundry.”

We have normalized what we experience not only in the food scenes but in other aspects of our lives. In politics in Oakland, there’s a petition going around to recall the mayor because its become normalized for people who have more money and too much free time to remove her, rather than hold her accountable to fix the errors her administration made.

It happens in personal relationships where we accept people who don’t hold us to a higher standard because they make us feel good in the moment. We pine after our exes because they knew a piece of us that we had long since outgrown. We remained loyal to people, objects and bad restaurants just so that we could mark a length of time.

When it’s finally exposed it drives so many of us to become offended, hurt and that cousin whose house you can’t stay at.

We love familiar things until something doesn’t go right. We love pressure until it really challenges us. We pretend to want better lives until it makes us think too much about what we need to give up, change or otherwise leave behind.

Bed bugs stay around forever too. That doesn’t mean you want them to.