Shangshangqian — Joker Xue's hotpot chain — closed its last store after 14 years

Shangshangqian was founded in 2012 by singer Joker Xue with friends, and became the template for celebrity hotpot: queues of fans, a pilgrimage store on Shanghai's Nanjing East Road, and at its 2017 peak around ¥1.5 million of daily takings — roughly ¥540 million a year — across nearly 30 stores in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Nanjing and other cities, eight of them company-run and twenty franchised.

The engine was fame, and fame moved on. Xue left the shareholder roster in 2019 and stepped back from management; the chain stopped opening new stores after 2021. The product sat in a crowded, homogenized category, a 2020 check found coliform bacteria on tableware at one store, and rents kept rising against long-running losses. By December 2023 two stores remained. The contraction accelerated from November 2025; the Guangzhou store shut on December 15 as its lease expired, leaving only the Shanghai flagship.

On May 29, 2026 the last store closed and the brand's listings vanished from review apps; staff handed out commemorative paper bags and said there were no plans to reopen. The retreat around it is industry-wide: Chen He, Zheng Kai and other celebrity restaurateurs have scaled back their ventures, and nearly 190,000 hotpot outlets closed across China in the year to May 2026, with the national store count down by more than 57,000 net.