How the East 81st Deli Chicken Salad Video Changed the Lives of the Business and Star, One Year Later

It’s a never-ending source of confusion for Tenisha Godfrey how 34 words changed her life forever.

The video, as most of us know, is excruciatingly simple: Godfrey, standing at the counter of the East 81st Deli, on August 28, 2022, tells TikTok what she’s eating. (“It’s a chicken salad…”) She shares the address. (“81st and Superior.”) She lists six of the ingredients that deli owner Wael “Vinny” Herbawi sprinkled on top. And that’s it. That’s the video.

But its basic components entered some magical viral soup, and the promo blew up.

On the deli’s page alone, it garnered 21.7 million views and 418,900 shares in the past year. It’s been replicated and memed thousands of times, and has been used—almost always without permission—by the NFL, the Cavs, and even Trident.

“I still don’t get it,” Godfrey said, sitting at a table at KafeLA off St. Clair in October. She wore purple sequined boots and a black hoodie that read “SUPERIOR” in bronze letters. “I guess they like the way that I speak, the way that I talk, and I guess the sound of my voice. Because even when I go live on TikTok now, they be like, ‘Your voice is so soothing.'”

A year after the chicken salad meme exploded onto phone screens everywhere, those involved in its creation have seen their lives change magnificently, from new cars to overdue home repairs to entirely new business opportunities. But the fruits of random fame have brought, especially for Godfrey, both the urge to adopt an influencer’s lifestyle and attempts to secure the legal loose ends that come with it.

After all, in the months following the viral fame and attendant news coverage, the Lizzo bump last October, Godfrey’s bespoke merchandise line, gifts from Telfar and Yitty, and her own “It’s a Chicken Salad” promo with Weight Watchers, Godfrey knew she had to claim ownership over her “likeness” (her words), before corporate America and the influencer elite did.

By February, she hired Shannon Davis, a business lawyer based in Atlanta, to file a $250 trademark application for a slew of phrases Herbawi’s video made a part of the TikTok phenomenon. She started with “Y’all better come get one of these,” a demand to order Herbawi’s salad. (Or her salad, according to Godfrey.) Because of Davis’ sympathy to the debut influencer—especially one a product of chance—she opted to counsel Godfrey totally pro bono.

“I think she’s brilliant,” Davis told Scene in a phone call. “There are too few influencers that are really able to capitalize off a moment. I believe that if she’s able to do that and monetize her influence, I believe she should go for it.”

And she has.

Which, in Godfrey’s mind, was God-given. Believing she “manifested” the Chicken Salad fame last year, Godfrey affixed herself to the entrepreneurial guise she witnessed from the influencers that boosted her: Nas Navy, Antoni Bumba, the “twerkologist” CJ The Trainer. She was flown, all-expenses-paid, to Houston and Atlanta to be a guest promoter at nightclubs. (“At 2 a.m.! That’s my bedtime.”) She once promoted a friend’s charter school at the Beachwood Mall, despite the growing concerns of her social anxiety. “I had 150 people surrounding me,” Godfrey recalled, “saying, ‘Excuse me? Are you the girl from TikTok?'”

Breaysia Godfrey, Tenisha’s 24-year-old daughter, was there with her mother that day, and recalls the strangeness only TikTok celebrity can bring. “We were bum rushed,” Breaysia said, in a quiet tone of lament. “I don’t like it. I’m very timid and shy; I don’t like the attention on me.”

She added, “But I like it for my mom. Whatever makes her happy.”

Growing up off East 85th and Superior—she lives, today, just a few blocks down—Godfrey laughs in a reverent way any time she thinks of the YouTubers and TikTokers who’ve flown from far away, from Detroit or London, to order the salad at the East 81st deli using her soon-to-be-trademarked slogan.

She now sees herself as a promoter of Cleveland restaurants that may not often get the social media glance they deserve.

“Even when this was going viral, I didn’t expect people to actually come to Cleveland,” Godfrey said. She laughed her voluminous laugh, thinking of when YouTuber K’Hood dropped by and expressed surprise at the neighborhood’s lack of, well, glamour. “They’re probably thinking, like, ‘Oh, this girl got us in the hood,'” she said. “And I’m like, ‘Yes, you’re in the hood, baby. This is not Bay Village. You are on Superior.”

Over at the East 81st Deli, Herbawi, who goes by Vinny to friends, has been inching closer to expansion ideas ever since his TikTok marketing ploy—that is, filming customers gloating about his cooking—went swimmingly. Sales of the TikTok Salad (what it’s now labeled on the menu) spiked from 50 a day to “over 300.” East 81st’s profits nearly doubled in a year’s time.

“I can say that I’m now driving a $100,000 car,” Herbawi said, smoking a cigarette in his parking lot in October. A few feet away is a graffiti-style sign advertising the deli, with “It’s A Chicken Salad, The 81st Way” painted under it. In the empty lot to the east, Herbawi’s planning an expansion, a kind of Brooklyn-style deli, with a matching clothing store on the other side of Superior. “It’ll bring us triple the amount,” Herbawi said. “We’ll be doing those viral numbers every single day.”

Herbawi, who watched Godfrey’s family grow up, said he harbors no ill feelings about her capitalizing on what’s essentially his video. He himself had returned from a 13-year stint in a federal prison last May to grow East 81st into small empire on its block. He understands Godfrey’s pursuit of trademark—”It’s money, all about money”—knowing that, after 20 million views and countless imitations, East 81st could’ve tapped more into its own fame.

“TikTok didn’t give me nothing,” he said. “I mean, if I would’ve monetized it at the right time, I could’ve made a half a million on just views. It’s three cents a view, bro.”

After his cigarette, Herbawi walked inside to assemble yet another TikTok Salad for a customer sold on the hype. He added the croutons and the Ranch and house dressings in a diagonal. Then goes on the banana peppers, the jalapeños, the meaty chicken Herbawi reheats in the microwave. Eating the salad itself brings a kind of funny sensation—this is the salad from TikTok!—but the reaction is more concise: It’s damn good.

But why this salad? Why Wael Herbawi and his humble deli off Superior? Why Godfrey and her lovable Cleveland patois? If a meme by definition is a representation of a cultural moment, then there must be something distinct about this cast of characters, something so Cleveland in its essence that it must endure.

Or, maybe it won’t. As Herbawi snapped the plastic container shut, and bagged the salad to-go, he seemed to remind himself of his own self-reliance. “Nothing,” he said, “can stay viral forever.”

Godfrey knows this, too, or at least her plans connote such. When she’s not searching for a day job, or calling up restaurants to promote, she’s planning the bones of a unisex athleisure line for plus-sized people. She’s even just recorded a debut rap song with the help of a local producer, Heybert Flex.

“If you would have asked me this a year ago before I went viral, I was comfortable with what I was doing,” Godfrey said. “I wouldn’t even be like, ‘Oh, I want a gym line.’ It’s more just, ‘I’m glad to be alive. I’m working. What else do you want?'”

She laughed, and flipped her hair over her shoulder. “But now there’s just so much that I want to do. You know what I mean?”

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This article appears in Oct 11-25, 2023.