A celebrated San Francisco chef has stepped down from all three of his restaurants after screenshots of verbally abusive messages directed at an influencer surfaced on social media. An Instagram message posted by one of those restaurants, Hamburger Project, stated that he is “relieved of his role as executive chef,” effective immediately.
Until Friday afternoon, Geoffrey Lee was the creative force behind Ju-Ni, a 10-year-old omakase restaurant in the Western Addition that for five years held one Michelin star, and the casual spin-offs Handroll Project and Hamburger Project, which opened in late 2024. The drama leading to Lee’s exit began Dec. 11, after content creator Kat Ensign (@katwalksf) criticized the quality of Hamburger Project’s food on Instagram and TikTok. Lee responded with personal attacks, which Ensign screenshotted and shared in a Dec. 23 post that has logged more than 100,000 views.
“She is so weird, it seems unstable,” Lee said in one message, screenshots of which have since been shared on Instagram. Elsewhere, he stated that she has “the most annoying Karen voice” and urged her to stop going to Golden State Warriors games because the team loses when she attends.
Ensign said she ate at Hamburger Project on Dec. 10 and posted a mildly negative review, calling the smashburger “good but not great” and “not for me.” About two weeks later, she said, Lee began to comment on content she posted that had nothing to do with his food. “It was random things on every post, responding to people’s comments — my weight, my appearance,” she said in an interview with The Standard on Friday. “Nothing about my experience [at Hamburger Project].”
Reached by phone on Friday, Lee denied commenting on Ensign’s physical appearance. “There’s been accusations that I body-shamed her,” he said. “That’s entirely fabricated so she can control the narrative.”
The Standard was unable to independently confirm those allegations, which Ensign said were sent via direct messages that Lee edited before she could get a screenshot. “He took that down,” she said, “but he had his kid send me a voice memo.”
Lee stated that he was merely responding to Ensign’s criticism with some shade of his own — and things got out of hand. “She came in within the first three or four days of Hamburger Project being open and made a public review of the restaurant, kind of insulting me and calling them ‘Ozempic burgers’ for clickbait,” he said. “A few days later, I mentioned there are a lot of people who like it, and maybe it’s just you who doesn’t?”
It escalated from there. Weeks on, the chef has struck a more apologetic tone. “I signed up for therapy to make sense of all this ordeal,” he said. “Clearly, my opinions do not reflect those of everyone else in the restaurant. When I made the comment, it was me standing up for the rest of the team.”
The dispute boiled over during the past few days, after another content creator, Maggie Z, a friend of Ensign, amplified the message to her 25,000 Instagram followers. Lee then began to message her as well. “I find influencer culture to be some of the scummiest in our community,” he said in a direct message to Maggie Z. Then, upon uncovering a message she’d sent long before, offering to collaborate, he followed up with, “This is a distasteful way to try to get attention from me again.”
Facing growing criticism, Lee set his Instagram account to private and was initially going to take an indefinite leave of absence before the decision to part ways with his restaurants was announced Friday afternoon. All three restaurants have since been “Yelp-bombed,” with users leaving one-star reviews laden with negative comments about the owner.
“I learned a lesson,” Lee said. “I shouldn’t have replied back. But I don’t believe that just because I’m a chef-owner, my voice should be silenced. What I was trying to figure out is what makes this influencer exempt from my critiques, but she’s allowed to come into my house, my restaurant, to criticize my food.”