A woman who posts as @prettyanta_ says she drove six hours from Columbus, Ohio, to Charlotte, North Carolina, for one reason: to find out whether rapper DaBaby’s restaurant, No Knife Chicken & Waffles, was really worth the hype. “I drove 6 HOURS from Columbus, Ohio to Charlotte, NC just to see if DaBaby’s No Knife Chicken & Waffles was REALLY worth the hype,” she wrote, tagging the location at 700 Atando Ave in Charlotte and asking her followers, “Would you drive 6 hours for some chicken & waffles?!”
DaBaby, whose given name is Jonathan Kirk, is a rapper from Charlotte, and the restaurant sits in his hometown. The video shows Anta holding a togo container from the restaurant in her car after making the drive, without narrating her reaction to the food on camera in the portion visible in the clip.
Her comment section turned into a running debate over whether the restaurant lives up to its reputation. “I am convinced he opened this restaurant as a social experiment,” one commenter wrote, drawing roughly 10,000 likes. Another was more blunt: “I haven’t heard one person say the food was good,” a comment that picked up nearly 8,000 likes of its own and well over 100 replies. A third commenter called for an outside opinion, writing, “Where is keith lee?? I need a honest review cause these mfs be crazy, not its pretty,” referencing the food reviewer whose detailed, deadpan taste tests have made him one of the most trusted voices on the platform for judging whether a restaurant lives up to its online buzz.
Other commenters pushed back on the pile-on. “He making money just for yall to say it’s nasty,” one wrote, suggesting the wave of negative reactions online says more about viewers piling on than about the actual food. That comment alone drew more than 1,400 likes, roughly on par with the comments criticizing the restaurant, underscoring how evenly split the replies were between people defending the business and people mocking it. Several more commenters separately repeated the call for Keith Lee to weigh in with his own review, treating his verdict as the kind of neutral, trustworthy read neither side of the debate could provide on its own.
The repeated calls for Keith Lee reflect his particular standing on the platform. Lee built his following reviewing small, independently owned restaurants with the same detailed, understated format for every stop, and a positive review from him has been credited with sending lines out the door of previously unknown restaurants, while a critical one can do the opposite. Commenters invoking his name on a post about a restaurant owned by a celebrity were effectively asking for the one kind of review they considered immune to a famous owner’s influence either way.
Anta’s six hour drive puts her at the center of a broader pattern: creators treating a single restaurant’s reputation as something worth testing in person rather than taking secondhand reactions at face value. Her trip became its own piece of content precisely because so many other people online had already formed strong opinions about the restaurant without visiting it themselves, giving her firsthand trip more weight in the comment section than another retweet of someone else’s take would have carried.
Anta did not say in her caption whether the drive matched her expectations or whether she would recommend the trip to others, leaving her own verdict unstated even as her comment section argued the question on her behalf. The restaurant’s mix of defenders and critics in her replies suggests opinions on No Knife Chicken & Waffles remain sharply split among the people who have seen the viral posts about it, regardless of how many have actually eaten there.
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