Alan Liu has been running Salad King since 2010, when he took over from his parents Ernest and Linda. The Liu family immigrated to Canada from Hong Kong in 1990, and Ernest and Linda purchased Salad King in 1991. The family weathered recessions, a partial building collapse, and a five-alarm fire that destroyed their original Gould Street location in 2010.
But nothing, Liu says, compares to the past six years.
“Survival is really the name of the game right now,” Liu says during a January interview at the Queen Street location. “Of all the categories of restaurants hit hardest by the changes since COVID, it’s the family restaurant. Not the place charging you $15 to $20 for a drink — the one just trying to feed you and your family an affordable meal.”
Liu describes the current state as being “punch drunk” — a boxing term for getting hit so many times you’re perpetually stunned, perpetually in survival mode. The hits include pandemic lockdowns that broke word-of-mouth customer chains, permanent work-from-home shifts that reduced downtown foot traffic, delivery platform dominance with opaque data practices, soaring food costs, and a commercial property tax structure calibrated to pre-pandemic economics.
What follows is Liu’s analysis of why the family restaurant model is collapsing — and what it means for Toronto’s retail landscape.
The delivery paradox
“I’m not convinced that delivery brings you net more business,” Liu says. “While it expands your service area, it also pulls customers away from local foot traffic. It’s created this break where the local is no longer local — you’re serving an outer area instead. There’s no real way to measure the net effect. The delivery companies have the data, and they won’t share it.”
This is the fundamental problem: restaurants gain theoretical reach but lose the ability to understand their own customer base. The data — who orders what, when, how often — belongs to DoorDash, Uber Eats, SkipTheDishes. Not to the restaurant.
The Yonge Street location seats 170. “We used to fill that multiple times per service. Now we rarely hit 170. I still need to staff for capacity because when it does fill, you need to deliver service.” So overhead remains constant while revenue shifts to a model where platforms take a percentage and run promotions restaurants must fund.
“Two years ago, the industry average was 30 to 40% delivery. Now I’m hearing 50 to 60%,” Liu says. “And the apps run promotions like buy-one-get-one-free that restaurants fund. Your traditional customers and loyalty base go elsewhere because a better deal is available online.”
On quality control for the delivery itself, Liu has given up fighting. In the early days of foodora, there was a relationship with delivery drivers. “If something happened, delivery drivers would come back to help us solve the problem. That’s no longer the case. Create any friction with drivers now, and they’ll Google bomb you. You’ll suddenly see five one-star reviews, and it takes 25 five-star reviews to offset those. We gave up. We can’t fight that battle.”
Salad King adapted operationally. The Queen Street location, opened March 2021, has dedicated back-door access and waiting areas for drivers. The Yonge Street location routes drivers through back stairwells. The menu emphasizes travel-friendly dishes. “Our food has always been takeout-friendly by design. Curries travel well — if they get home cold, just microwave them. Pad Thai doesn’t work. It absorbs the sauce sitting in a container and becomes bland and sticky. So we push the curries and fried rice for delivery.”
But adaptation isn’t the same as thriving. And the delivery shift has severed something more fundamental than revenue streams.
The broken chain
@saladkingto We’ve had a long history abroad and right here at home, and we’re so proud to be a family owned and run restaurant! 🧡 #SaladKing #FamilyBusiness #TorontoRestaurants #ThaiFood #FYP ♬ Opalescent Mist – Kairo Vibe
“Before COVID, Salad King was built on word of mouth. One person would bring another person, then another. That was our strength,” Liu explains. “COVID and three years of lockdowns broke that chain. You no longer had the seniors at TMU bringing in the juniors, downtown workers bringing colleagues. The biggest challenge now is brand awareness. It resonates with a lot of people, but just as many don’t know what Salad King is.”
The off-menu Thai Islamic Noodle illustrates this perfectly. Originally a 1990s daily special, it became so popular customers kept requesting it even after it was discontinued. Liu’s father couldn’t figure out how to reformat the printed menu to include it, so it remained off-menu, passed along by regulars to newcomers. “It became Salad King’s worst-kept secret,” Liu says.
That kind of organic knowledge transfer requires physical presence, repeated visits, conversation. It requires the senior showing the junior where to eat, the local bringing the out-of-towner to their spot. Three years of work-from-home broke that chain, and Liu isn’t sure it’s coming back.
The affordability trap
Liu is adamant about keeping prices accessible. A family of four can still eat at Salad King for around $100. The house-made Pineapple Tamarind Soda ($5.75) and Mango Ginger Ale ($5.50) aren’t competing with $18 zero-proof cocktails. “I’m not here to sell you an image. I’m here to make you feel good and have a good time,” he says. “A $15 to $20 mocktail? That’s working an hour for one cocktail. Let’s make it affordable so people don’t have to spend so much money to have a good time.”
But this commitment creates a vise. In summer 2025, Liu predicted chicken prices could jump 50% by year’s end. Meanwhile, he operates at what he estimates is a 20-30% structural disadvantage. “There’s a bias for Asian food. A lot of my competitors offer cash discounts. We’ve always operated above board — that’s a legacy from my parents. But it puts us at a disadvantage.”
During Ontario’s temporary HST holiday in late 2024, Salad King passed the full 13% savings to customers without raising prices elsewhere. “We can’t compete with someone operating differently. We wish we could earn more and pay more taxes. We wish we could justify the rents we used to justify. But the reality is we can’t sustain that scale anymore.”
So the family restaurant that plays by the rules and keeps prices low gets squeezed from multiple directions: rising costs, platform fees, competitors operating in the informal economy, customers who can order delivery from anywhere.
The tax structure mismatch
This is where Liu’s analysis becomes a policy critique. He’s actively working with the Toronto Association of Business Improvement Areas and local BIAs for property tax relief — not as a handout, but as recognition that the economic fundamentals have changed.
“Historically, businesses have carried a disproportionate tax burden. It’s never been a complaint — it’s been part of the deal. But with changes to how people interact with downtowns since COVID, the dynamics have changed. The population, the volume — you can’t justify the property and taxation costs anymore,” he argues. The work-from-home shift is permanent for many office workers. Downtown lunch crowds haven’t returned to pre-pandemic levels and people don’t go out after work as often. Yet commercial property taxes remain calibrated to the old reality.
“We’ve got this paradox where costs are very high but volume has dropped. That’s keeping away the diversity and vitality of local neighborhoods.” The consequence: only well-capitalized chains can afford downtown retail space. “If you want to open a small restaurant or retail shop in these neighborhoods now, you either need capital to sustain years of losses, or you need significant space like a mini-golf destination. The only operators who can afford downtown neighborhoods now are corporations with deep capital — Cineplexes, franchises.”
Liu wants taxation scaled to the new normal. “The city, province, and federal government need to look at what actually supports small business. If we don’t solve this problem, downtowns will become a lot less interesting because independent businesses can’t afford to be there.”
The restaurant monoculture
On a recent walk from Yonge and Finch to Yonge and Sheppard, Liu noticed something troubling. “It’s all restaurants, nail salons, health services, or Shoppers Drug Mart. When we were younger, you’d have local stationary stores. Nobody buys that stuff anymore, fine. But there are still tactile businesses — trading card games, comic books. Why is there no comic book store from Yonge and Finch to Yonge and Sheppard?”
The answer, he believes, is that only restaurateurs are taking the risk because — wisely or not — there are many ways to enter the business. But that creates a self-defeating cycle. “Restaurants keep opening, but the customer base stays the same. You’re just diluting the market.” He poses a thought experiment: “If everybody in those condo towers went out for dinner every single night, would there still be excess capacity? Probably yes.”
Delivery makes it worse. “People can order from a restaurant blocks away, so now you’re even more diluted.” So downtowns become seas of restaurants competing for a customer base that has both shrunk (due to work-from-home) and fragmented (due to delivery). The restaurants that survive will increasingly be chains with access to capital and economies of scale.
Beyond performative support
@saladkingto Salad King is a family run business that has been around since 1991! We have two locations in downtown Toronto — one next to Yonge and Dundas Square, and the other at Queen St W and McCaul St 🔥👑 #iykyk #saladking #thaifood #smallbusiness #familybusiness #supportlocal #toronto #torontohistory #downtowntoronto #torontofood #torontoeats #toeats #torontorestaurants #fyp #trending ♬ original sound – Salad King
Liu runs promotions like “More is Less Mondays” — escalating discounts from 10% for two people up to 30% for six — specifically to encourage group dining in an era of small condos. But he’s skeptical of performative localism. “When people say they support local, are they actually going local? Every region has a shop local campaign — Corktown, Queen West, Richmond Hill. What does it really mean? It’s just shopping local to you.”
His prescription is direct: “Put on a pair of boots and walk outside. The weather’s not that bad — we’re Canadian, we can handle the cold. Patronize local businesses. Have that experience. Don’t just talk about it. Don’t give yourself an excuse. If you have a choice between a chain restaurant and a small business, actually go to the small business.”
But individual consumer choices won’t solve structural problems, he argues. That requires policy changes around taxation, delivery platform regulation, and zoning that allows for retail diversity beyond restaurants. “We need to work with our government. I’m hoping people can appreciate that complexity.”
Survival mode
When asked about expansion plans, Liu doesn’t hesitate. “There’s so much macroeconomic uncertainty right now. Survival is the name of the game, not growth. We have no capacity to think about expansion.”
He signed the Queen Street lease in January 2020, just before lockdown, with plans to replicate what worked and then iterate. The pandemic made that impossible. The Yonge Street location was designed for volume — woks positioned to churn out high quantities quickly. Queen Street was meant to slow things down, allow for more complex dishes like Linda’s Signature Crispy Beef Panang. “If we were designing a restaurant today, we’d probably do something half the size of what we have now,” Liu says.
Still, Salad King persists. The menu stays largely the same. The prices stay accessible. Customer loyalty remains. “We are constantly testing new ideas — such as our Korean Fried Chicken and our expanded Shareable menu — but much to our chagrin, it’s been challenging to get our customers to try something new. Our customers come back because they’re craving that favorite dish again and again.”
When Liu took over in 2010, a longtime customer convinced him not to eliminate dishes like orange beef in pursuit of authenticity. “He said, ‘I love the Green Curry, but some days I just crave Orange Beef with 10 chilis.’ That perspective changed my view — people have their favorite dishes. Lean into them.”
“Time hasn’t changed your taste,” Liu reflects. “It may have changed your curiosity, but it hasn’t changed what you like.”
The question is whether the economics of serving what people like — affordably, above-board, in physical spaces that build community — can survive the convergence of delivery apps, remote work, and tax structures built for a different era. In the two decades Ernest and Linda Liu ran Salad King, they weathered recessions and even a partial building collapse. But their son says nothing compares to the economic precarity of the past six years. The structural forces squeezing family restaurants, Liu argues, require policy solutions — not just consumer goodwill.
Dustin Fuhs is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of 6ix Retail, Toronto’s premier source for retail and hospitality industry news. As the former Editor-in-Chief of Retail Insider, Canada’s most-read retail trade publication, Dustin brings over two decades of expertise spanning retail, marketing, entertainment and hospitality sectors. His experience includes roles with industry giants such as The Walt Disney Company, The Hockey Hall of Fame, The Canadian Opera Company, Starbucks Canada and Blockbuster.
Recognized as a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert in 2024, 2025 and 2026, Dustin delivers insider perspectives on Toronto’s evolving retail landscape, from emerging brands to established players reshaping the city’s commercial districts.