What brings the Cha Cha to a Cha Chaan Teng?

By definition, a cha chaan teng is a quintessential Hong Kong diner, a greasy spoon café that serves Hong Kongers at all times of the day. 🥘

But it isn’t just that. As a city, we’ve lived a few lives in the last five years, and whatever has been thrown at us, we’ve survived, and cha chaan tengs have survived. 💥

They are the literal bread 🍞 and butter 🧈 of Hong Kong. You can go any time of the day for a snack, a meal, or a simple yuen-yeung ☕️. But do remember to go early if you want a pineapple bun with that giant knob of salted butter because they tend to run out soon!

Cha chaan tengs follow their own rules and their own cuisine. It started off as soya sauce Western food, where you get a class of cha (tea) as soon as you sit down, and then you can order French toast, pork chop baked rice, satay beef curry noodles or tomato macaroni soup. These are not ingredients you would normally find in a Cantonese kitchen, but a mishmash of colonial ingredients left behind given an HK twist because we were never normal, to begin with.

So we at @asparkofmadness wanted to give homage to the soul of Hong Kong cha chaan tengs and have tried to bottle the essence up in our Crack Mayonnaise jar. We spent a lot of time perfecting the recipe for this condiment, as we wanted to give you all these tasting notes in one lick – spicy, tangy, salty, creamy, nutty, umami, zesty and smoky. Exactly how a cha chaan teng gives you a little bit of everything. 💥

We’re sharing this story as a proud partner of @hknevernormal, an initiative dedicated to celebrating the extraordinary nature of our city. Follow @hknevernormal for more inspiring stories.

A Spark of Madness