Restaurant · Guide Updated July 2026

Why Wilson K Lee Retired from Food and Beverage (And What Happened Next)

After five-plus years in the food and beverage industry, building a channel to 100,000 subscribers and helping hundreds of entrepreneurs open and grow their businesses, I stepped away. This is the honest story of why I made that call, what I felt in the moment, and what it means for the content and courses I left behind.

Why Did I Retire from Food and Beverage Content?

Passion left before I did. That is the most honest way to put it.

Over the holidays before this announcement, I took real time off. I spent time with my newborn son Weston and gave myself space to reflect on what actually made me happy versus what I was just continuing out of habit. The answer was uncomfortable: I was no longer passionate about food and beverage.

What made it worse was the shape of my work. For a long time, I had shifted from being an operator to being a coach. I was coaching, mentoring, and consulting, but I was not in the action myself. I was watching the industry from a distance and advising others on moves I was not making myself. That felt like a disservice to the people following me. If I am sharing strategies I am not personally practicing, the advice gets hollow fast. I was not willing to keep doing that.

The F&B industry had also, for me personally, stopped feeling challenging. I had seen the good, the bad, and the ugly over five-plus years. I knew the patterns. That familiarity is useful for the people I was helping, but it was not feeding me anymore.

So I made the call to retire the channel and my career in the space.

How Did the Channel Actually Get to 100K?

It took about three times longer than I planned.

When I first brought on my producer Jason, one of the first goals I gave him was direct: hit 100,000 subscribers by the end of that year. We did not hit it by the end of that year. It took nearly three years to get there.

I say that not to complain but to be straight with anyone building a content channel alongside a business. The F&B niche is narrow. My content was, by my own admission, dry and technical. There is not a huge audience for the operational details of running a food business. The fact that 100,000 people chose to invest their time in what I was sharing is something I remain genuinely grateful for.

That channel created real opportunities. It let me help hundreds and thousands of entrepreneurs. It put me in a seat on the board of a publicly traded company. People flew in from places like Brunei to meet with me in person. None of that happens without the audience that built up over those three years.

What Happened to the Courses and Coaching?

The courses kept running. The live coaching did not.

I was clear about this in the announcement. The content inside the courses covers business fundamentals that do not expire when I walk away. Anyone who enrolled kept access to that material, and those programs continued to operate.

What stopped was the weekly live coaching calls and any future live sessions. I was not going to keep showing up to coach on a topic I had mentally left. That would not have been fair to the people paying for that access.

Where Did I Go After F&B?

Blockchain technology, specifically the NFT space.

I have always been drawn to being at the front of a wave, being in industries where the real action is happening. In early 2022, that felt like blockchain. I found it genuinely exciting in a way that F&B coaching no longer was. I announced I would be moving to a new Twitter presence and a new YouTube channel focused on that space.

My producer Jason noted something during filming that I thought was worth keeping: restaurants were eventually going to need to care about blockchain too. He was right that the two worlds were not necessarily permanent strangers. But at the time of the announcement, the shift was complete and I was not looking back.

What Did It Actually Feel Like to Walk Away?

Harder than I expected, even though I knew it was right.

I got emotional on camera. I told Jason it had been three or four years of working together on this, and closing that chapter gave me what I can only describe as “a lot of feels.” I compared it to a party where the lights come on and you know it is over. The party was not ending, I said, it was just moving somewhere else.

What made it hard was not the decision itself. Reinventing yourself as an entrepreneur is something I believe in completely. What made it hard was knowing it was the last time we would be in that specific setting, talking about that specific thing, in that relationship. That part I did not want to rush through.

I also want to be honest: the comment sections on that video, both then and years later when new viewers found it, asked hard questions about the NFT pivot. Those are fair questions. I will not speak to outcomes I did not document on this channel. What I can tell you is that the decision to leave F&B was made for the right reasons, grounded in honesty about where my passion actually was.

The Bottom Line

Staying in a business or a content niche you have mentally left does not serve you or the people following you. I had five-plus years in the industry, a channel that took three times longer than planned to reach 100K, and a genuine run at helping operators build real businesses. When the passion moved, I moved with it. The rule I would give any operator facing a similar crossroads: do not coach what you are no longer willing to do yourself.

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Source — YouTube · the full breakdown, free

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