How Can Hong Kong’s Traditional Cafés Be Saved? Tai On Coffee Offers an Answer

It’s late on a Monday morning and a low buzz of conversation fills Tai On Coffee and Tea. Customers are seated in vintage wood booths, munching on egg tarts and breakfast sets of luncheon meat noodles, as a ballad by Cantopop star Hacken Lee plays over the stereo. On the surface, it’s the picture of a classic Hong Kong-style café, and indeed, Tai On has stood at 830 Canton Road in Yau Ma Tei since 1969. But a closer look reveals this is anything but a typical bing sutt or cha chaan teng. 

For one, there’s an espresso machine on the back counter, serving up specialty-grade Americanos and lattes instead of milk tea. There are illustrations by local artists on the walls. And the egg tarts are anything but traditional: large enough to be eaten with a spoon, they come in flavours like milk tea, Ovaltine and hojicha. “We are trying to keep some cha chaan teng elements, but in the end it’s a café,” says Tai On’s owner, Tiffany Yeung. “Instead of making not very good milk tea, we decided to do something different.” 

Like neon signs, Cantopop and tong lau, family-run cha chaan teng and bing sutt are a quintessential part of the Hong Kong experience, offering affordable drinks and dishes in a time-warp atmosphere that harks back to the boom years of the 1950s and 60s, when these types of cafés first emerged to fill the hungry bellies of a rapidly industrialising city. 

But like many archetypal Hong Kong things, the first generation of bing sutt and cha chaan teng are at risk. Every year, more and more disappear as their owners retire. The most recent loss was Hung Wan Cafe on Shanghai Street, famous as the filming location of the 1998 Stephen Chow comedy The Lucky Guy; it was shuttered last Christmas after many decades of operation. “I am very tired and I feel it is the right time to call it an end,” its 70-year-old owner told local reporters.

It was the closure of another iconic cha chaan teng that prompted Yeung to take action. China Cafe, on Canton Road in Mong Kok, was a perfectly preserved example of 1960s Hong Kong style. Hand-carved wooden characters announced the café’s presence above glass and metal display cases filled with freshly baked buns. Inside, customers sat on metal chairs and in wood booths around glass-topped tables – the better for easy cleaning, displaying the menu and tucking a receipt after customers ordered. The floors and walls were covered in brightly coloured mosaic tiles; ceiling fans whirred lazily from the high ceilings, above a mezzanine from which patrons could observe a large advertisement for Black & White brand condensed milk.

When the café’s owners announced its closure in 2019, Yeung had already left a career in finance to open a teahouse. “But doing F&B was not actually my main interest – I was more interested in culture,” she says. She helps run a group called Hong Kong Historical Shops, which documents old businesses, and leads walking tours around old neighbourhoods like Yau Ma Tei. She approached China Cafe’s owners about purchasing the business, but they weren’t interested. 

“The old generation doesn’t like people taking over their business because they want a perfect ending for their legacy,” she says. How could they trust a stranger not to tarnish their name? Yeung understood the rationale, but she was disappointed. “I felt very sad because the China Cafe was so pretty and authentic.”

But Yeung was soon presented with another opportunity. When she found out that the family that owned Tai On had emigrated to Australia and was planning to shutter the café, she offered to keep it running – and to her surprise, they agreed. 

Taking over the café turned out to be the easy part. Yeung quickly realised why so many traditional cha chaan teng have been closing: it’s a tough business. These iconic restaurants have long relied on the grit and perseverance of their owners, who worked long hours for decades to keep things going. And they served a customer base that is disappearing as quickly as the cafés themselves. With several other cha chaan teng operating nearby, including the popular Wing Fat Cafe just a few steps down Canton Road, Yeung decided she needed to do something different if she wanted to keep Tai On alive. 

A neighbourhood institution

Yau Ma Tei was a very different place when a man named Chan Kwong-yiu opened Tai On. Born near Shantou in eastern Guangdong in 1945, Chan moved with his family to Hong Kong when he was 14. He began working as a delivery boy for his aunt’s grocery store on Woosung Street.

“The shop was open 24 hours a day,” he told the Hong Kong Memory oral history project in 2011. With teeming nightlife and the city’s largest floating village in the nearby typhoon shelter, Yau Ma Tei was Hong Kong at its most wild and untamed. Chan rode his bicycle between guesthouses, dancehalls, Shanghainese bathhouses, opium dens and mahjong parlours, supplying them with groceries day and night. When he returned to the grocery store for a rest, Chan had to fight for a seat with a prostitute known as the Queen of Temple Street, who supplied his aunt with free bowls of chicken congee in exchange for a place to solicit customers away from the prying eyes of police. 

After a decade of working odd jobs around Yau Ma Tei, Chan saw an opportunity. Fusion restaurants serving what would later be known as “soy sauce Western” cuisine were becoming popular. Some had been started by migrants from Guangzhou, like Tai Ping Koon, while others were opened by the wave of Russian migrants who had come to Hong Kong from Shanghai after the Communist revolution of 1949. Most of these restaurants were relatively upscale, but a new wave of more affordable cafés were opening around Yau Ma Tei. Tai On was one of them.

Named after the building in which it is housed (daai6 on1 大安 literally means “big peace”), the café served patrons of the many nearby cinemas, as well as families living in the typhoon shelter and workers at the nearby Yau Ma Tei Wholesale Fruit Market, better known as the Gwo Laan (gwo2 laan1 果欄). With a so-called “small” restaurant licence, otherwise known as a bing sutt licence, Tai On was only allowed to serve previously cooked food, so its menu was limited to coffee, tea, buns and simple noodle dishes like macaroni and ham. 

The café was originally open from 6:30am, when workers finished their night shifts at the Gwo Laan, to 9:30pm, when the last film screenings began at the neighbourhood movie theatres. But the cinemas eventually closed, and the typhoon shelter was reclaimed for development, and so Tai On became a daytime café that relied mainly on market workers and neighbourhood residents for business. In the 1980s, Chan reduced the café’s footprint from two shopfronts to one, but he managed to keep it going until he joined his family in Australia and handed over daily management to a relative. 

Same same but different

When Yeung took over in 2022, Tai On still had its loyal regulars, but business was slow. Working conditions were rough, too: the café’s bread and pastries were prepared in gas-powered ovens in a sweltering bakery on the first floor. She installed air conditioning and switched to electric ovens, but the café’s antiquated electrical wiring couldn’t handle the extra power consumption. She decided to renovate.

“We closed the shop, took out everything, renovated and put it back and made it the same as before,” says Yeung. There were minor cosmetic changes — the wood booths now have cushioned backs and there are new bamboo ceiling fans — but it otherwise looks the same as it did before. “We tried hard to keep the vibe,” says Yeung.

The menu is certainly different, though, even if it is inspired by traditional bing sutt fare. The egg tarts go for HK$28, nearly three times the price of those at a traditional bakery – although Yeung notes that they contain about twice as much custard as a typical tart. The novelty of a contemporary café in a bing sutt’s clothes has inspired criticism from people who see the new Tai On as a kind of pastiche, or else a force for gentrification in what is still a working-class neighbourhood. 

“We have our own bakery. We make the egg tarts from scratch and we use Japanese eggs. So we can’t make it too cheap because it’s expensive to make,” says Yeung. “We received a lot of criticism in the beginning. When we heard this we thought, are we actually doing something bad? But now more people know what we’re trying to do.”

For whatever grumbling that may have greeted its reopening, the new version of Tai On has plenty of fans. When author Christine Wong published a book of plant-based recipes for typical Hong Kong dishes, she held the launch party at Tai On. “I’m grateful that they’ve preserved an intrinsic part of Hong Kong’s history while adding modern twists to appeal to future generations,” she says.

That sentiment is echoed by artist Kitty N. Wong, who collaborated with Tai On to create a series of Christmas-themed illustrations late last year. “Because Hongkongers are loving nostalgia these last few years, a lot of restaurants and cafés will just decorate with all these little knick knacks that are mass produced – its not real or unique and it’s just a gimmick,” she says. “[When] I learned [Tai On] really was an old bing sutt they took over and wanted to preserve and reinvent, that was so cool to me.”

“The whole project is an experiment,” says Yeung. “I want to see how you can keep something old but in a different way. I can’t say I’m changing the world, but I do this because I like it and want to keep it going. Because I know one day there will be less and less of this around.”

All photos by May James for Zolima CityMag