Stow figured he might be able to sell a couple hundred per day, enough to allow him to quit his day job but stay on the island that he had fallen in love with.īy the time the execs from KFC arrived in 1999, in the midst of Asia’s egg tart fever, Stow and Wong had already divorced. At the time, the only Portuguese egg tarts in Macao were sad and forlorn versions hidden away on hotel buffets, or secreted away at the Governor’s mansion. After trying the original pasteis de nata, a small pond of custard baked into a puff pastry shell until the top had turned nearly black with caramelized sugar, he packed 50 steel tart tins in his luggage for the trip home. He figured he’d start a birthday cake business, but that changed after going on honeymoon to Portugal with his new wife at the time, Margaret Wong. Stow was a British expatriate who landed in Macau as an industrial pharmacist and didn’t want to leave. Andrew “Lord” Stow, had stumbled into egg tart fame over the previous decade.
#Chinese egg tart origin tv
Copycats were bragging on TV shows about how much money there was to be made from the trend – the proverbial “golden egg tart”.Īnd then KFC came knocking. After starting in the early 1980s, they now had four shops across Hong Kong and four more across Asia, from Korea to Thailand. Lord Stow’s Bakery, the originator of this new style, had sparked the trend. Everywhere you went, shops advertised the newest and hottest snack to sweep the city – a custard tart with a puff pastry crust that sat somewhere between the Portuguese pasteis de nata and the boring English version, made with a short crust, like a pie, that had found a home on Cantonese dim sum menus.
Egg Tart Fever had taken hold in Hong Kong the previous year. The Portuguese had controlled the island for more than 400 years. This is the story of how that happened.ġ998 in Macau. There is nothing more Portuguese than the egg tart there is nothing more Chinese than the Portuguese egg tart.
Yes, KFC’s Portuguese-style egg tart, which was actually invented by a British guy in the 1980s in Macau, spread through Asia like wildfire in the 1990s and then sold by his ex-wife and business partner to KFC around 2000, from whence it has gone to every train station, shopping mall and ninth-tier city in China. McDonald’s fries, Starbucks' double chocolate muffin, and KFC’s egg tart.
If you can put the politics and all the baggage aside for a moment, there are some things that the fast food juggernaut just does indisputably well.
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