Sean Evans and Keke Palmer spent more than 90 minutes at Lucali, the wood-fired pizza counter in Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens, on Friday evening, hours after the long-teased Hot Ones episode featuring Palmer landed online with what looked like a deliberate, on-camera kiss. The dinner, picked up by celebrity photographers as the two left through the restaurant’s side door, became by Saturday morning the most-discussed celebrity-couple moment of the weekend.
The pair has been the subject of rolling romance speculation since Evans appeared on Palmer’s Baby, This Is Keke Palmer podcast earlier this spring. The Hot Ones host had told Vulture in 2023, in a now-unearthed pull quote, that Palmer was the celebrity guest he most wanted to book, and his on-air admiration during the chicken-wing-and-hot-sauce format that has anchored his First We Feast show since 2015 became, in the words of one Bon Appetit headline, “the cleanest will-they-or-won’t-they pivot the show had ever staged.” Us Weekly reported that the Lucali dinner was the first public outing the two had taken since the Hot Ones taping landed on its server.
Lucali, the Henry Street institution that Mark Iacono has run since 2006, has become the de facto first-date venue for high-profile celebrities navigating the New York paparazzi calendar. Beyonce and Jay-Z, Justin Bieber and Hailey Bieber, and Bradley Cooper and Irina Shayk have all eaten in the back booth at different points across the past decade. The restaurant does not take reservations.
TMZ reported that the two arrived separately at 8 p.m., were seated at a corner two-top, and left together at 9:35 p.m., with Evans on the phone in what photographers described as a happy posture. Neither has publicly commented on the romance, though Palmer’s longtime publicist confirmed to several outlets that the kiss on Hot Ones was “genuine” and “not staged.”
For Hot Ones, the moment is also a marketing inflection. The First We Feast show, which First We Feast spun off into its own brand in 2017 and which BuzzFeed-era YouTube comedy had partially shaped, has spent 2026 trying to deepen its A-list booking pipeline beyond film and music promotional appearances. Pulling a Palmer-Evans on-screen kiss into the canonical Hot Ones format is, by industry executive framing, a structural lever the show had not previously pulled.
Palmer has spent the past year promoting her One of Them Days theatrical wide release on Sony Pictures Classics, the Disney+ animated series Bumpy, and the second season of her self-titled Apple TV+ documentary series. Evans, who has hosted Hot Ones since its 2015 launch, also runs the You Look Lovely Today and Bon Appetit-affiliated content brand, and is in development on a competition show for Peacock that NBCUniversal will roll out in 2027.
The Brooklyn dinner adds to a thick weekend of celebrity activity on the East Coast. Tom Cruise, David Beckham and Paris Hilton were spotted at the FIFA World Cup opener earlier in the day, and Princes George and Louis of Wales coordinated baby-blue outfits with their mother Catherine at a Stowe House appearance. The Eastern Herald’s same-day dispatch on the Tribeca Festival’s celebrity red carpet is also available in our June 13 BET Awards coverage.
Reps for both Evans and Palmer have not yet responded to a request for comment. A second Hot Ones episode reportedly featuring Palmer’s brother Lawrence is expected to drop next week, with the show’s social-media team teasing the air date through Saturday morning.
