Egg Tart

01

A pastry case and a steamed-egg filling

A Cantonese egg tart is a Chinese steamed-egg custard baked in a Western pastry case.

The filling is mostly egg, sugar and water, often with some evaporated or fresh milk, strained so that it sets without a single bubble or grain. Sheng Hui, a writer on Cantonese food, describes the surface as smooth and shining under the lights, as if the custard were still slowly moving, and the pastry as flaking “like petals” when you bite. The taste is gentle: eggy, not very sweet, with the fat of the crust doing most of the work.

That makes it quite different from the Macau or Portuguese tart (葡挞), which has cream and egg yolk in a richer custard and a top blistered black in a very hot oven. In Guangzhou, Hong Kong and Macau the two are sold side by side, and a menu that just says 蛋挞 nearly always means the Cantonese one.

Sources [1][2]

02

Guangzhou in the 1920s: a weekly special that stayed

Many people take the egg tart for a Western pastry. Its creators were Cantonese pastry cooks.

Sheng Hui writes that in the 1920s Guangzhou dim sum cooks put Chinese steamed egg into a Western tart shell, and that the first tins were oval, shaped like the small boats on the Pearl River. The word 挞 (taat) is simply a Cantonese rendering of the English “tart.” The Hong Kong historian Ng Ho (吴昊), quoted by the Guangzhou writer Huang Aidongxi, traced it to the competition between Guangzhou’s big Western-style department stores, whose kitchens invented a new “weekly special” (星期美点) every week to draw shoppers; the egg tart was one that stayed. Another account names the Zhen Guang restaurant as making the modern kind around 1927.

Old Guangzhou menus show it already had variants. The Guangzhou Museum’s study of Republican-era menus found items such as a flaky egg-yolk tart and a “melt-in-the-mouth egg-yolk tart,” written with the shorthand cooks used, 旦 for 蛋 (egg) and 王 for 黄 (yolk). From Guangzhou the tart went to Hong Kong. Accounts vary on when: Hong Kong bakeries may have sold them from the 1940s, and between the 1950s and the 1980s they reached most of the city’s cha chaan tengs.

Sources [1][2][3][10]

03

One of the four kings of dim sum

In Cantonese teahouses the egg tart is not an afterthought.

The Cantonese trade calls four items the 四大天王, the four heavenly kings of dim sum, meaning the four that sell the most: shrimp dumplings, dried-steamed siu mai, char siu bao and egg tarts. The list is credited to the dim sum master Chen Xun (陈勋). Asked which items test a dim sum chef most, Chen named the skin and shape of the shrimp dumpling, the puff pastry of the egg tart and the dough of the char siu bao.

Size depends on where you buy it. Teahouse tarts are small, so you still have room for other dim sum; bakery tarts are bigger; and the largest are in cha chaan tengs. Huang Aidongxi recalls being treated to afternoon tea at a Hong Kong café and facing an egg tart the size of a rice bowl.

Sources [1][2]

04

Butter crust or puff pastry

Hong Kong and Guangzhou divide egg tarts by their crust: a short butter “cookie” crust or a flaky puff pastry made with lard.

A butter crust (牛油皮, also called 曲奇皮, cookie crust) is thin, crumbly and fragrant, like shortbread. A puff pastry crust (酥皮, or 千层酥, thousand-layer pastry) was traditionally made with lard; it smells less of butter but shatters into layers, and because the pastry takes up more room it holds less custard. Huang Aidongxi notes that lard was easier to get than butter in the old days, which is why teahouse tarts were a Chinese-Western hybrid from the start.

Puff pastry tarts are built from two doughs. An oil dough of fat and flour is wrapped in a water dough of flour, egg and water, then rolled and folded again and again, with rests in the fridge so the layers stay separate. The most famous example is the Honolulu Coffee Shop’s tart in Hong Kong, said to have 192 layers. The fillings vary too: plain egg, fresh milk, coconut, egg white, even bird’s nest. Taotaoju in Guangzhou once made a “mandarin-duck” tart with egg custard and coconut together in one case.

Sources [2][12]

05

Hong Kong: Tai Cheong, Honolulu and a heritage listing

Hong Kong turned the egg tart into a city symbol, and its two most famous shops stand for the two crusts.

Tai Cheong Bakery (泰昌饼家) opened on Lyndhurst Terrace in Central in 1954 and is known for its butter-crust tarts. They became famous when Chris Patten, Hong Kong’s last British governor, called them the best egg tarts in the world. When the original shop closed in May 2005 over rising rent, it made the news; the bakery reopened and is now a chain. Sheng Hui notes it is also one of the few places still making sa yung, a sugared fried puff that was once as popular as the egg tart.

Honolulu Coffee Shop (檀岛咖啡饼店) stands for the puff pastry side. It opened in Sham Shui Po in the 1940s as a bing sutt, a café serving drinks and bakes but no hot meals, and its egg tart is now its signature. In 2014 the egg tart making technique was entered on Hong Kong’s first intangible cultural heritage inventory, and the government’s heritage office still runs public egg tart demonstrations, as it did at its 2026 “ICH Cuisine” carnival alongside dim sum, mooncakes and milk tea.

Sources [1][4][5][9][10]

06

From Belém to Macau: the Portuguese tart

The “Portuguese” egg tart sold in China was created in Macau in 1989 by a British pharmacist.

Its ancestor is Lisbon’s pastel de nata. When Portugal closed its convents and monasteries in 1834, someone from the Jerónimos Monastery in Belém began selling sweet pastries at a shop next to a sugar refinery, and from 1837 the pastries were baked there to the monastery’s recipe, still kept secret by the Pastéis de Belém bakery today.

Andrew Stow, an English pharmacist who had lived in Macau since 1979, tasted them in Belém and wondered why Macau, then Portuguese-run, had nothing like them. On 15 September 1989 Stow and Margaret Wong, then married, opened Lord Stow’s Bakery in Coloane village. The tart was Stow’s own version, which dropped the flour that thickens a Lisbon custard and the cinnamon on top, cut the sugar and kept the blackened, caramelized spots. The first batch did not sell, because customers thought the tarts were burnt, and they won people over only after being handed out free. Chinese customers called them 葡挞, Portuguese tarts, to tell them apart from the Cantonese egg tart, and the name stuck. Hong Kong visitors carried boxes home, and by 2018 the bakery was making about 13,000 a day.

Sources [6][7][8]

07

How the Macau tart reached KFC

Most people in mainland China first met the Portuguese tart at KFC, and that is a Macau story too.

By the late 1990s Stow and Wong had divorced. Stow kept Lord Stow’s; Wong kept a café called Café e Nata, now Margaret’s Café e Nata. Egg tart fever had swept Hong Kong around 1997, copycats were opening in Taiwan and Southeast Asia, and businesspeople queued to buy the recipe. Wong turned most away, but sold it for a lump sum to a KFC executive who could pick Wong’s tart out of a blind tasting. “Margaret’s Egg Tarts” appeared on KFC menus in Hong Kong and Taiwan in 1999 (some accounts say 1998), and on the mainland in the early 2000s, starting in Shanghai in 2003. KFC built a factory just for egg tarts in 2008 and sold about 300 million in China in 2010.

Andrew Stow died in 2006; Stow’s sister Eileen runs Lord Stow’s, and the two shops remain friendly rivals and fixtures of every Macau itinerary. In 2022 a Lord Stow’s tart cost 10 patacas, Margaret’s sold six for 55, and an old café nearby sold Cantonese-style tarts at 5.5 each.

Sources [8][10][11]

08

How to choose and eat egg tarts

An egg tart is at its best within minutes of leaving the oven, while the custard still trembles and the pastry is warm.

Sources [1][2][11]

09

Hong Kong butter-crust egg tarts at home

Sources [1][13]

10

More from the Cantonese tea table