DALLAS — In Downtown Dallas, the owner of a small Japanese sushi restaurant feared he’d have to shut down due to a halt in business since the beginning of the pandemic. That was before his grandson uploaded a short video to TikTok asking Dallasites to support the struggling business and people started showing up the next day.
When 80-year-old Kang Lee’s 17-year-old grandson told him he wanted to help his restaurant by making a TikTok video he wasn’t quite sure what that meant. He was very surprised when just a day later he saw a flood of new customers, all saying they’d seen him on the popular social media app.
As a high school senior Andrew Kim knows the power of social media, and how a viral video can create exposure. In March, while visiting his family in Dallas, he was disappointed when he saw his grandpa’s once busy downtown Japanese restaurant Sushiya empty on a Friday night. He knew he had to help.
Kim doesn’t get to see his grandpa often. He lives in Minnesota and only gets to visit his family in Texas a couple times a year. One of his favorite childhood memories is visiting Sushiya and enjoying its famous fried rice.
During the pandemic, Kim’s family in Minnesota made the choice to postpone a visit to Texas until this year. March was the first time he’s seen his grandpa in over a year. When he learned the restaurant's business had been slow since the beginning of the pandemic he hoped his more than 600,000 followers on TikTok could make a short video viral, and they did.
“It wasn’t a new idea that I had, it had been something that I always kept in the back of my mind. Since starting social media it’s something that I’d wanted to do but I’d just never gotten the chance in times we’d previously visited,” said Kim.
The 13-second TikTok video posted March 19 has no spoken words, rather word bubbles over footage of the restaurant, edited with a song trending that week on the app. The first bubble reads, “Come visit my grandpa's sushi restaurant.”
“The first night after the video was released, the restaurant was crazy busy, totally unexpected, everybody was just so nice and friendly,” said Tina Kunkel.
Kunkel’s mother is part owner of the restaurant with Lee and she helps out often. She recalls a busy weekend more than a month after Kim’s TikTok went viral when many of the customers said they were visiting because of the video.
“I recently had a mother and daughter come in and they said they had driven all the way from Louisiana just because of the TikTok video and to come help support the small business,” she said.
Now with more than 6 million views, Kim is very proud to know the video is still getting Sushiya some much needed business almost two months later.
“It was really surprising that it had a real life effect at all,” said Kim.
Kim is Lee’s oldest of six grandchildren, and for as long as he can remember, Kim’s looked up to his grandpa. He feels honored he could finally put his social media following to good use.
“I’m glad that out of all the videos I’ve made, that one is the most viral,” said Kim.
Lee said this boom in business has been a happy surprise. He’s feared his 14-year-old business would become one of the more than 10,000 Texas restaurants that have shut down during the pandemic.
According to a survey conducted by the National Restaurant Association, 85% of Texas operators say their profit margin was significantly lower in 2020 than it was prior to the COVID-19 outbreak.
Just next door to Sushiya sits an empty space that was once a Mexican restaurant known by locals as “Enchilada’s.” The owners posted a sign on the door saying they were forced to close after serving the downtown community for 29 years because of the pandemic. At the end of the same block, a sandwich restaurant closed last July and hasn’t opened since.
As for Sushiya, business is just starting to pick back up, and Lee is now convinced the uptick in business is largely in part to Kim’s TikTok.
“The thing with virality on social media is that it doesn’t necessarily have to come from someone with a ton of influence or someone who has a lot of money, it can just be someone with a message that other people resonate with,” said Kim.
Although traffic at Sushiya isn’t exactly back to its pre-COVID business, Lee said he’s thankful for the short video. He thinks of it as a gift of love from his grandson.
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