![]() ![]() The main executive tasked with getting her recipe charmed her, proving that he could pick her tart out of a lineup of imitators in a blind taste test. I’d say, sorry, I’m not interested.” But when KFC arrived, it was different. “I’d ask them, what do you do?” she told me. To Wong, selling off the recipe to any old business person looking to cash in didn’t make sense. At the height of egg tart fever in the late 90s, all types of businessmen made their way to her café, offering consulting contracts and begging to learn. KFC was not the first company to approach Stow’s ex-wife about learning to produce their now iconic tart. Come and help me.’ “If Andrew had a crystal ball,” his sister laughs, “he would have called them Macau egg tarts.” Andrew’s sister, a voluble woman with a knack for a story, told me she got involved when on a trip to visit him in 1993, he said ‘These damn egg tarts are taking over my life. Chinese customers, needing a way to distinguish them from the British-style custard tarts, the ones with a short crust (still made in Hong Kong), started calling them 'Portuguese' egg tarts, creating a confusing taxonomy that persists to this day. Lacking a direct translation for “custard” into Chinese, Andrew and Margaret just called them egg tarts. I said no, don’t throw them away - let the people eat them and they’ll see. No one wanted to be the first to buy them,” she recalled. ![]() “The customers thought they were burned on top. ![]() What do you want?” A blunt talker, she chastised me for mumbling and then told me about the first batch of egg tarts. When I called her café last month out of the blue and asked for Margaret, the reply was “Yea, I’m Margaret. Chinese customers were put off by the burnt appearance and the day’s entire batch sat, unsold, on the baking tray. That first day of business, in 1984, could have gone better. The executives begged Margaret to teach them the recipe she and Andrew had perfected over the past decade, the one that swapped out the flour-thickened custard and the Portuguese sprinkle of cinnamon for one that Stow, ever the “arrogant Brit” - according to his sister, Eileen Stow - and a scientist by training, had trial-and-error'ed, cutting down on the sweetness but still maintaining the signature black patches of brulee'd sugar. He kept the Lord Stow’s franchises and she held on to an unassuming café named, simply, Café e Nata: coffee and egg tarts. 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. 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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