Jay Chou Lookalike Pancake Vendor Closes His Last Shop After a 50% Rent Hike
Zhou Binglun, a street vendor who went viral for resembling Jay Chou while making 10-yuan pancakes, is shutting his Tianjin shop after his landlord raised the annual rent from 130,000 to 200,000 yuan — the third store his fame has failed to hold down, and a national argument about who profits from a small shop's popularity.
On August 24, Zhou Binglun posted a short video with news his followers had been dreading: his pancake shop at 170 Liaoning Road in Tianjin would close at the end of the month. The landlord, he explained, was raising the annual rent from 130,000 to 200,000 yuan. He bore no grudge — "they raised the rent to make money, and they're not wrong" — but the arithmetic no longer worked, and in the month since he learned of the rise, he said, he had not had a single happy day. With this shop goes his last: Zhou currently has no brick-and-mortar store anywhere in China.
Zhou is a street vendor from Hebei who stumbled into fame in 2023 for looking uncannily like Jay Chou while making egg-stuffed pancakes — a resemblance his nickname wields as a pun, swapping the pop star's surname for the word for porridge (粥饼伦, zhou-bing-lun). The pancakes themselves cost about 10 yuan. His fame turned the stall into a pilgrimage site: fans traveled to buy a pancake from "Jay Chou," filmed him at work, and made his shop a landmark. Fame also brought entanglements he was poorly placed to judge — he once signed with a talent agency, and left within a month, telling an interviewer the contract was beyond his schooling to parse.
The math a 10-yuan pancake cannot carry
The figure his sympathizers kept circulating was simple: an extra 70,000 yuan a year means roughly 7,000 more pancakes sold, every day for more than two months, before the shop earns a single yuan beyond what it did at the old rent. Add labor, ingredients and utilities, and the increase swallows the business whole. A widely shared post argued the landlord had priced in traffic that the tenant, not the location, had created: two years ago Liaoning Road was an ordinary corner; the fans made it a destination.
That pattern has a famous precedent. Commentators quickly reached for Pang Donglai, the supermarket chain so beloved in Henan that when its landlord in Xinxiang raised the annual rent from 8 million to more than 20 million yuan, the chain simply walked away — leaving a building that cycled through tenants without success. The question is now the second-hottest on Zhihu: from Pang Donglai to Zhou Binglun, can China's physical shops escape the rent spiral? Street vendors who go viral, meanwhile, keep finding their livelihoods rearranged by attention — as the 92-year-old Chengdu pancake seller camera-bullied by short-video creators showed last year.
The verdict online was blunt. "A shop's popularity is never the landlord's," one post put it — "it is earned by the person who gets up before dawn, one pancake at a time." Zhou says he will look for another shop in Tianjin, that his family still depends on the griddle, and that next time he will keep his distance from landlords who raise the rent the moment you get famous. The vacancy on Liaoning Road will test the other half of the bargain: whether any tenant can pay what his fame, not the corner, was said to be worth.