While Drake and Kendrick Lamar’s war of words continues to rage on, so far there has been one clear winner of the rap beef — and he isn’t a rapper.
Johnny Lu is the owner of New Ho King restaurant located in Toronto, and he’s received a substantial boom in business since Lamar namechecked his dining establishment in his blistering Drake diss, “Euphoria.”
“Don’t speak on the family, crodie / It can get deep in the family, crodie / Talk about me and my family, crodie? / Someone gon’ bleed in your family, crodie / I be at New Ho King eatin’ fried rice with a dip sauce and blamy, crodie,” Lamar rapped on the six-minute track.
Lu spoke with the local outlet CityNews on May 1 and could hardly contain himself as he spoke about the swell in business over the last couple of days.
“This morning, a lot of people text me and said, ‘Oh look at that! That’s your restaurant?’ I said yes!” he beamed during his interview.
Along with the boom in business, Lu says his “chef [is] gonna be busy” as positive Google reviews from Lamar fans continue to pour in, helping to spike the restaurant’s visibility.
“I feel a sense of euphoria when I be having the fried rice with the dip,” one fan wrote.
Fans have been coming from far and wide to order the dish mentioned by Lamar.
“I came all the way from Markham just to see this fried rice,” said one eager fan when interviewed by CityNews. “Kendrick Lamar, man. You gotta pay respect to K. Dot, man. Ever since he dropped the diss track I was like, ‘I gotta visit this place.'”
While the mentioning of the restaurant might strike fans as just a namecheck of a popular eatery in his rival’s hometown, Lamar very possibly could be digging deeper than most would know, considering that the OVO boss was robbed at gunpoint at the location back in 2009.
