Mike Lee

I speak on where food is headed and what's driving it there: AI in the kitchen, regenerative agriculture, GLP-1 drugs, the slow rewiring of how we cook and what we call healthy. I take the signals most rooms scroll past, follow them a decade out, and bring the story back to what it means for your business.

The best talks send a room out thinking bigger, with sharper questions and a clearer sense of what to do next. I've keynoted Menus of Change, Google Food Lab, and EvokeAg, plus corporate offsites and private dinners, for audiences from a single board to a hall of a thousand. Formats range from main-stage keynotes to executive sessions and hands-on workshops, each built for the room.

It started in 2008, when five of New York's secret supper clubs packed 165 people into a bi-level loft near the Empire State Building for a 12-course dinner. You found the door by walking into a bar on 35th Street, finding the guy learning how to cook everything, and asking him for a map. That was us.

I built it at night. By day I worked at Amex Labs, American Express's innovation team, prototyping where the company was headed. Even then I was exploring the future on two clocks, the way I still do.

For the next decade we cooked wherever an idea pointed. A six-course lunch on a moving L train. The Doppelganger Dinner, seven courses where the omnivore and vegetarian plates were built to look identical down the line. A year-end Last Meal run out of my own apartment in Crown Heights, where a Chicago hot dog came back as beef tartare and cured egg yolk got microplaned over caviar into a pile of yolk snow. The Illegal Eater filmed us. NBC's 1st Look came to my kitchen to cook baby eels, sous-vide beef heart, and cricket-flour cookies on camera. Our short film, I Am What I Eat, won Best Short and Best "Made in NYC" at the Food Film Festival.

Around 2015 the menus started pointing forward instead of inward. The Future of Protein, at the Museum of Food and Drink, was a five-course meal that walked guests from the wild proteins of 1850 to engineered protein in 2065, with insects somewhere in the middle. I billed it as the first dinner of a new project called The Future Market. The supper club had turned into a foresight practice. I have been running that practice ever since.