It was 5 p.m. and Nikki Jackson’s trademark positivity was waning. She usually closes her Rowlett cake shop and catering business for the whole month of January because of slow sales, but on Tuesday, she flicked on the lights, fired up the oven and waited.

He’s going to come, she thought. He just hasn’t come yet.

Jackson was running on two and a half hours of sleep and had spent the morning cooking and baking. Keith Lee is coming today and I’m going to feed him, she said to herself as she peeled sweet potatoes and dredged chicken thighs.

For weeks, Jackson told anyone who would listen that viral TikTok food critic Lee would visit her shop, Absolutely Edible Cakes and Catering, to try her food during the widely anticipated Dallas stop of his national tour. If she said it enough times, maybe he would.

Jackson had seen what Lee — who often focuses on small, Black-owned restaurants — could do for a business in just one short review shared with his nearly 16 million followers. So, she made videos asking Lee to come. She asked friends to email him. She was determined to manifest a visit. Her business needed the help.

She had also seen Lee’s first two reviews of Dallas restaurants, neither of which was very flattering, and wanted redemption.

I’m gonna save Dallas one bite at a time, she thought.

But as the hours ticked by on Tuesday and there was no sign of Lee, she started to lose hope.

“Do I hear you crying?” Jackson’s sister asked her on the phone.

“My eyes are just dripping,” Jackson said as she sat in her empty shop.

“You gonna get yourself together right now,” her sister told her. “He’s coming.”

Jackson’s sister prayed with her over the phone, asking God to steer Lee’s car right to the bakery.

At 5:42 p.m., Lee walked through the door.

“OK,” he said, smiling. “Where’s Auntie?”

Without her knowing it, Lee had just tried Jackson’s signature Sweet Potato Thang and her red velvet cake in the parking lot. Earlier that evening, before Jackson was set to close up shop, he sent his family in to pick up two of her desserts to try.

Lee has built his online following by posting video reviews of food he orders anonymously. He rates each dish individually, on a scale of 1 to 10, as he tries them.

He gave both Jackson’s sweet potato pie and red velvet cake 9′s, and he wanted to meet the woman responsible for making the desserts that blew him — someone who rarely likes sweets — away.

Jackson felt like she was going to faint. She had dreamt of Lee’s visit and diligently planned for his arrival. Now that he was there, she was in shock.

Wearing a pink shirt that said “Keith Lee!!! Where you at?!? I’m gonna bug ya ‘til I hug ya!!” she wrapped her arms around Lee’s neck and cried.

“You ain’t gotta bug me no more,” he’s heard telling her in the video he later posted on TikTok. “God is working. He is doing what he’s supposed to do when he’s supposed to do it. There ain’t no mistake that I’m here.”

She’d been in business 22 years, Jackson told Lee, but she still hears that people in Rowlett don’t know her business exists. During the slow months, she bakes desserts only to have to throw many of them away.

Jackson said Lee and his family, who live in Las Vegas and are together on the tour, visited with her for nearly four hours. She told Lee her story and asked him to try the other food she’d prepared from her catering menu in hopes that he’d come: fried chicken, collard greens, mac-n-cheese, oxtail short rib and cornbread dressing.

Lee told her he doesn’t do live reviews because he’s brutally honest with his feedback, Jackson said in a Dallas Morning News interview, but he obliged after she pressed him. He gave rave reviews for her fried chicken and mac-n-cheese, she said. Jackson sent Lee and his family home with the rest of the food.

“I can’t turn into a fried chicken restaurant,” Jackson told The News, “but I have been thinking of doing a fried chicken food truck. Maybe it’s time.”

Twelve hours after Lee posted his video review of Absolutely Edible Cakes, Jackson was in her catering van picking up 600 pounds of sweet potatoes. Who could say if she’d experience the “Keith Lee Effect” or not, but she wanted to have enough Sweet Potato Thang ready just in case. As she drove through Rowlett, people honked and waved at her — something that’s never happened in her 22 years of business.

“I’m on a high right now,” she said. “I kept my faith, and he came.”

Here are the North Texas restaurants Lee has reviewed so far:

• Thunderbird Pies in East Dallas
• Terry Black’s in Deep Ellum
• Halal Fusionz in Farmers Branch
• Hutchins BBQ (locations in McKinney and Frisco)
• Absolutely Edible Cakes in Rowlett