Following a confrontation with a local food influencer, chef Luke Sung of the 3-month-old Hayes Valley wine bar and restaurant Kis Cafe has stepped down, effective immediately, according to an Instagram post Thursday.
“Our chef’s behavior is unacceptable, and he is no longer part of the team as a co-owner, a chef or in any other way,” the post says. It adds that the restaurant will close “soon” for restructuring but is open largely out of support for its beleaguered staff.
Sung was once one of the city’s top chefs but had been out of the spotlight for more than a decade until Kis Cafe opened. His rapid fall from grace came after a content creator who publishes under the handle @itskarlabb ignited a social media firestorm by posting a five-minute video to TikTok in which she details an awkward encounter she allegedly had with a host and chef at a local restaurant.
Though she does not name Kis Cafe in the video, her fans and supporters quickly determined that the chef referred to in the post was Sung, who earned plaudits and two James Beard nominations in the early 2000s for his pioneering Cal-French restaurant Isa. Her supporters began to flood the wine bar with negative reviews across several platforms.
According to @itskarlabb’s video, she arrived early for a “collaboration,” which typically involves an agreement between a restaurant and an influencer, who gets free food in exchange for a post. Sitting at the bar and awaiting her husband, she overheard the host and another employee discuss who she was and how many online followers she had. “He was saying I had too little followers, and [the collaboration] was a mistake,” she says of the host.
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She greeted the chef, who allegedly played some of her TikTok videos at full volume before telling her didn’t he think her work was up to his standards. “He goes on to say that my audience and my followers are not the kind of people that are going to be at his restaurant,” she says, an insinuation that her fans couldn’t afford to eat there.
The chef then allegedly asked, “Do you know who I am?” and mentioned that he had been a James Beard nominee. “He said his daughter had 600,000 followers, and ‘I’m not at that level,’” she says.
Reached for comment Thursday afternoon, Kis Cafe co-owner Eric Lin said his update on the restaurant’s Instagram was intended to protect staff members who had borne the brunt of the online fallout for two days. “It breaks my heart when my staff are having to listen to those voicemails, and my friends are getting harassed on Instagram because they came out to eat here a month ago and sent supportive messages,” Lin said.
The Standard has reached out to the email address associated with @itskarlabb but has received no response. The account had approximately 22,000 followers earlier in the week and more than 150,000 as of Thursday afternoon. Additionally, @itskarlabb posted a follow-up video thanking her followers for their support.
Kis Cafe, in the former Petit Crenn space, lacks a website; its Instagram page has only two posts. As of 5 p.m. Wednesday, both had filled up with negative comments, many of them mocking the business’ relatively small follower count.
Meanwhile, its Yelp rating has fallen to less than two stars, while Google Reviews users have pummeled it to a 1.1-star rating. As is its standard practice in such situations, Yelp has locked down Kis Cafe’s profile, posting an “unusual activity alert” that disables further reviews while it investigates the matter.
Isa, the Marina restaurant Sung sold in 2010, has experienced blowback of its own. Its Yelp page is similarly locked down, and TikTok user @spilledwinethoughts weighed in on one of @itskarlabb’s TikTok posts, pleading with commenters to spare her family’s business. “We aren’t related to him in any way at all and have no communication with him,” the user wrote. “Please guys don’t leave nasty comments there about Luke.”
This is not the first time in recent weeks that a San Francisco business has encountered a surge of online criticism in which Yelp has intervened. In June, the Polk Street seafood counter Swan Oyster Depot was besieged with negative commentary after local food influencer Kat Ensign observed a hat with the numbers 45 and 47 on it, implying support for President Donald Trump. In December, Ensign’s claim of alleged verbal abuse by chef Geoffrey Lee spurred him to step back from all three of his restaurants, including the Michelin-starred sushi restaurant Ju-ni.