The Wan family's story in South Florida goes back to the late 1960s, when the first location opened on SW 8th Street in Little Havana as Wan's Mandarin House. Over the decades it expanded across the region: North Miami Beach, Hollywood, Fort Lauderdale. By 1996, the Fort Lauderdale location on N. Federal Hwy in Victoria Park had become the anchor, run for nearly 30 years by Christina Wan.
When Christina retired and closed in November 2024, South Florida mourned. Less than five months later, her nephew Alex Kuk, fourth-generation restaurateur and co-founder of Temple Street Eatery, announced the reopening. The name went back to the original: Wan's. The menu stayed exactly as generations of families remembered it. Grand reopening: March 19, 2025.
The story was already one of South Florida's best. It just needed a social presence to match.
The reopening of Wan's was already news. Miami New Times, CBS Miami, the Sun Sentinel, WSVN 7News, Local 10. Every South Florida outlet covered it. Alex Kuk put it simply: "Wan's is about my family's legacy, from my great-grandfather to my grandfather." Our job was to carry that energy onto social and make sure a new generation found them.
We built around the real story: the Mandarin, Szechuan, and Cantonese recipes that hadn't changed, the Victoria Park dining room full of regulars who'd been coming for decades, the fact that a fourth-generation family member had given everything up to keep this place alive. That's content. You don't manufacture that.
Instagram and TikTok launched simultaneously. TikTok got the legacy storytelling. Instagram got the food and the atmosphere. The goal was simple: introduce Wan's to people who had never heard of it. And remind everyone who had that it was back.