The culinary gems of WeChat
The Chinese social media platform reveals trends that haven’t reached English-speaking foodies
Joanna Luo is a few minutes late to our first meeting at Cuppa Tea, a Hong Kong-style tea shop at Yonge and Carlton Sts. She apologies profusely, but she has a good reason. She reaches into her bag and pulls out a sealed cup of fresh taro milk from Hey Sugar, a Chinese bubble tea chain that opened its first Canadian location last year in North York.
“You have to try this. It’ll give you an idea of why WeChat is a good source for food,” Luo says about China’s most popular social media app.
Most people in the GTA are used to the artificial purple-coloured drinks that simulate the starchy root vegetable commonly used in Asian desserts, Luo says. But in China, using real taro cooked down to create a starchy, thick and creamy milk-based drink, is all the rage right now. “You wouldn’t know that in mainstream publications here.”
Ask any Chinese person in the GTA where to find out about new local Chinese restaurants and they’ll open WeChat, the Chinese social media platform with more than a billion active accounts that, among its features, enables instant messaging, photo editing, group chats, article postings and even paying bills online. The app isn’t without its drawbacks, in particular the censorship of news stories that the Chinese government doesn’t like. Regardless, Chinese restaurants are aware of the importance of having a WeChat presence. Some will create an account to promote new products or deals while others will reach out to influencers to spread a good word about their food.
Joanna Luo, 29, is one of the few Toronto-based WeChat influencers. Her Toronto Diary lifestyle page has more than 110,000 followers. She knows what her predominately Chinese audience wants when it comes to food and writes from that point of view. In fact, when it comes to Chinese fare in Toronto, Luo finds that what’s new in Western food publications is already old news for her.
“A chef at a hand-pulled noodle place was telling me that the mainstream (media) were so impressed by noodles thin enough to thread a needle,” she says. “But for us, it’s so normal to see that.”
Luo focuses on more splashy, novelty
restaurants with Instagrambait menu items and decor that resonates with her followers, predominately 18- to 25-yearold, female Chinese international students who want to know what’s there to do in Toronto before committing to studying abroad or are already here and are accustomed to getting their news from WeChat.
Last week, Luo wrote about Feng Cha, a new Chinese bakery and bubble tea chain with locations in Markham and Scarborough. In the post are copious photos and GIFs of a pink, doughnut-shaped bun with a strawberry filling; a bun that has both chocolate and mango fillings; ombre-layered drinks in purple and pink hues; and a bun shaped like Peppa Pig, a British children’s cartoon character that has a particularly huge following in China (so big that a feature film about Peppa celebrating Chinese New Year hit Chinese theatres last month). Luo says there’s a trend among Chinese bakeries to produce soft and milky, slightly sweet breads with a soft crust, inspired by European bakeries and enjoyed as a snack or during afternoon tea. She says another new bakery called 7 Baker at Wellesley and Yonge Sts. also makes this style of bread.
Two months ago, she wrote about a Japanese soufflé pancake spot Hanabusa Café in Kensington Market. While she considers that trend already played out and reaching saturation in Toronto, when she learned that Hanabusa did a pancake with the now trendy taro filling, she focused on that. Last month, she covered awayuki strawberries, a whitish-pink strawberry from Japan prized for its sweet and less acidic flavour, selling out at T&T supermarket even though they cost $70 for a box of about a dozen berries. More recently, she bought dozens of potato chips including multiple brands of fish-skin chips and special editions of Lay’s with flavours like durian and beef noodle soup for a taste test.
“Chinese people have a high purchasing power,” she says. “A lot of international students here have more money because their parents support them so they can go out to eat a lot. It’s much different from the 24 to 35 group that mainstream markets want to attract because they think that’s when they have money to spend. The Chinese market is different.”
Non-Chinese restaurants and businesses have also gone to Luo hoping for a boost in sales, including a Japanese ramen shop hoping to get its Chinese clientele from its bustling downtown core location to check out the newer offshoot in the Annex neighbourhood. Luo came to Toronto nine years ago from Guangzhou to do a double major in history and economics at the Universi- ty of Toronto Mississauga. She started Toronto Diary on Weibo, China’s version of Facebook, as a hobby, posting about new restaurants she tried out in her new city. She began to gain a following (her Weibo account now has more than 370,000 followers), in particular from young Chinese users who were interested in coming to Toronto for school and wanted to see what the food scene was like.
About three years ago, she created the WeChat page. It became a full-time job when Luo began monetizing it. On top of her regular articles on restaurants and supermarket finds, she began creating sponsored content, running ads and getting paid by local businesses that hired her to promote them and write about their offerings. She does this by focusing on menu items she thinks will resonate with millennial diners, and doing a write-up with photos and GIFs, which are really popular on the app.
For this service, she charges more than $1,000 and because of her large following, clients come to her. Luo now has 12 freelance writers working for her, pitching restaurants to check out, food products to taste test and writing articles to meet her goal of posting six articles every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
After our meeting, she’s off to Waterloo to check out a relatively new spot called Lot 88 Steakhouse & Bar where food is cooked over a hot stone placed at the table. “It’s very popular in Taiwan and I’m surprised that they have it (here),” she says. “I think there’s a selling point there for my readers, especially in Waterloo where there are so many students.”
There are other lifestyle-cen- tric accounts on WeChat that report on Toronto restaurants, such as Super Life, which has more than 120,000 followers in the GTA alone, and relative newcomer ChiHuo, but these are akin to media companies that also cover cities in the U.S.
Toronto Daily strictly focuses on the GTA. But it could soon face more local competition as BlogTO started its own WeChat and Weibo accounts last year.
Sweven Media, a Torontobased marketing firm that works with Chinese restaurant chains entering the Canadian market, tries to bridge the cultural gap between Chinese and non-Chinese diners in the city. Operations manager Zh e Kuang He says the firm takes a different approach when pitching stories in English publications. To get editorial coverage, they hand out press kits and then they just hope that the story gets picked up. He uses the hot pot chain Da Long Yi, which is really big in China right now, as an example.
“In WeChat, all we have to say is that they’re opening a new spot in Toronto and everyone there will already know what it’ll be like,” he says. “On the western side, we might have to explain the brand a bit more in a pitch.”
“There are hidden gems you’ll find on WeChat, especially Chinese brands. A lot of these owners are Chinese and aren’t familiar with western media so the first thing they do when they come to Toronto is reach out to WeChat influencers to break the story first,” he says.
He notes that WeChat isn’t held to the same standards as traditional media and so some accounts don’t disclose when something is an ad (for her part, Luo makes it clear whenever publishing content from an ad agency). For He, WeChat is a good place to find out about new places, but he maintains an air of skepticism.
Oscar Jin, co-owner of the Yunshang Rice Noodle House franchise that has 14 locations across Canada and New York State, has reached out to Toronto Diary to write about a new North York location opening this month.
“I’d say at least 70 to 80 per cent of our clientele are Chinese, so to approach the Chinese community directly, WeChat is a huge source,” he says. “It’s working so far, but of course, you can never have enough customers. That’s the advantage and disadvantage of WeChat: you can get the Chinese audience, but it’s hard to reach a non-Chinese base.”
He adds the upshot is that a larger variety of restaurants can be found on the app, from traditional spots to novelty dessert places that hit on whatever is trending in Chinese communities.
I meet up with Luo again a week later, this time at Deer Cake. This small bakery in Unionville specializes in intricately decorated cakes and some fun flavours, such as bubble tea, complete with tapioca pearls on top. Owner Lulu Zheng hired Luo to write about her shop, do a photo shoot of products and make GIFs.
Zheng confirms the importance of WeChat and shows me a slew of messages from customers placing orders on the app.
More than half of her business comes from WeChat users, she says. She already followed Toronto Diary so she knew its reach when she hired Luo. While Luo takes photos of the bakery’s house-made pineapple cakes, a Taiwanese treat best described as a light shortbread cookie with a pineapple jam filling, Zheng gives me one to try. It’s incredibly buttery and contains way more pineapple jam than usual. It’s one of the best I’ve ever had and it’s because of Luo that I found out about this place.
Before I leave Luo to finish her work at Deer Cake, she tells me to check out one of her favourite restaurants, Dong Kee Chinese Restaurant on Midland Ave., just south of Steeles Ave. E. in Scarborough. It’s not new, nor does it have Instagramfriendly decor, but Luo says it’s worth it to make a reservation and call ahead to order the eel rice, which is cooked slowly in a large clay pot.
She’s not sure if a western audience would be into the eel or offal, but she knows it’s what her WeChat audience craves.