Her parents immigrated to Canada and opened a Hong Kong style fast food stall in Scarborough in 2015. Then social media found it. Anna Ping talks to host Susan Tung about what happens to a family business when the customer base changes underneath it, and about choosing the stall over the design career she had planned.
Anna’s parents immigrated to Canada and started Great Fountain, a Hong Kong style fast food stall in Scarborough, in 2015. Hong Kong style fast food is a specific tradition and a demanding one: high volume, fast turnaround, no room to hide behind presentation.
Then the internet arrived. Social media transformed both the customer base and how the business engages with it, and the demographic skewed noticeably younger.
That is not a pure win and Anna is realistic about it. A younger crowd found through video comes with different expectations about queueing, ordering and what a visit is supposed to feel like. The kitchen that served the old customer base has to serve this one too, at the same time.
She originally wanted a design career. She chose to work alongside her parents instead. The episode does not pretend that was a simple or purely happy decision, which is what makes it useful to anyone facing the same choice.
Working with parents is its own discipline. The business relationship and the family relationship share a building and cannot be separated at the end of a shift.
Two constraints dominate the operational half of the conversation.
The trade-off underneath both is customer satisfaction against cost control. Push too far either way and you lose. She talks about how the pandemic sharpened all of it.
Anna’s ambition is to open a sit-down restaurant, and she frames it as a thank you to her parents rather than as an expansion plan. That is a different motivation from most growth stories and it is worth hearing stated plainly.
| Entity | What it is |
|---|---|
| Anna Ping | Daughter of the owners of Great Fountain, and now part of running it |
| Great Fountain | Hong Kong style fast food stall in Scarborough, opened 2015 |
| Susan Tung | Host of this episode |
| Hong Kong style fast food | High-volume, fast-turnaround tradition the stall works in |
| The demographic shift | A younger customer base arriving through social media |
| Cost management | What determines profitability when the economy is volatile |
Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.
Great Fountain is a Hong Kong style fast food stall in Scarborough, Ontario. Restaurant Talk is produced by Save Fry Oil.
Ping, Anna. Interviewed by Susan Tung. “Tradition vs Innovation.” Restaurant Talk by Save Fry Oil, 2025. https://restaurant-talk-by-save-fry-oil.castos.com/episodes/viral-chinese-restaurant-great-fountains-anna-pingvcy
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