Australian Dairy Company

47號 Parkes St, Jordan, Hong Kong

Australian Dairy Company in the Jordan neighborhood was founded in 1970 and owes its name to the imports of high quality dairy products specifically from Australia.

Breakfast at Australian Dairy Company thankfully starts early, with doors opening at 7:30am and welcoming hungry patrons until 11:00pm. The restaurant is closed each Thursday, so take this into account when planning your visit. Australian Dairy Company is known for fast (and I mean, FAST) service and is a place where locals and now many tourists come for Hong Kong café style breakfast. There are a few breakfast set menu options to choose from, but what I recommend ordering (and what basically all the locals were eating as well) is the set menu including macaroni soup with ham, toast, and eggs done your way. We opted for scrambled because Australian Dairy Company cooks them so well this way, but a fried egg sunny side up is also a timeless option. The breakfast set comes with your choice of beverage and we opted for the hot Hong Kong style milk tea.

During this trip to Hong Kong, we were lucky to have enough time to make a repeat stop at Australia Dairy Company for something other than breakfast! We returned to the eatery again for dessert and enjoyed both the stewed milk and stewed egg pudding. The stewed milk was quite sweet, so I preferred the version we tried on our day trip to Macau. If you have the stomach space (which was definitely the limiting factor during most of this trip), come try the desserts as well as the classic breakfasts at Australia Dairy Company!

Wing Kee

Hong Kong, Yuk Wah Cres, 12號地下A-B舖

Trekking up to the Diamond Hill area to visit Wing Kee wasn’t the easiest but upon arrival, we were rewarded with what we came for: breakfast! Wing Kee is known for its signature (and uniquely non-classic) clay pot satay beef instant noodle. I know, it’s a mouthful to say. It’s an even bigger and richer mouthful to eat. The noodles are drenched in a thick, curry-consistency satay dressing that’s a marriage between sauce and stew, and topped with slices of oh-so-tender satay beef. It’s a rich option for the first meal of the day, for sure, but was worth the stomach space. Pro tip: The satay noodle clay pot dish isn’t officially served until 10:30am and we arrived too early, but the restaurant owner was nice enough to make it early for us! We also tried my usual and favorite Hong Kong cafe breakfast pick: rice noodles with pickled mustard greens in pork broth.

Tai On

Hong Kong, Yau Ma Tei, Canton Rd, 830地下

Tai On is a aesthetic and culinary fusion of “old-school” and “new-age” Hong Kong. The Tai On cafe has been Hong Kong style cafe (a “bing sutt” or “cha chaan teng”) since 1969, but has been under the care of its current and more modernized owner since 2022 after the cafe’s original family owners emigrated to Australia in 2019. In a landscape where Hong Kong locals and visitors are becoming increasingly nostalgic on one hand, but classics like the truly original Hong Kong cafes of the 1950’s and 1960’s are quietly disappearing as their owners retire on the other hand, Tai On decided to offer modernized versions of classic Hong Kong cafe dishes in a retro aesthetic paying homage to its roots.

The new Tai On cafe is designed to look like its 1960’s original self, but with upgrades like cushioned seating and better air conditioning. The ambience was like stepping into a Gen Z version of the classic Hong Kong cafe. Soft jazz acoustic covers of American pop music drifts in the background amidst the spraying and rumbling of a modern espresso machine, quite different from the stained metal pots of coffee and tea you usually see at Hong Kong cafes. Framed watercolors of Hong Kong scenes adorn the walls, instead of the typical faded posters and Sprite advertisements usually glued haphazardly to the walls. The yuen yang was offered not in a paper cup, but as a huge latte complete with latte art. The breakfast menu options read decidedly more like something I’d see in Brooklyn, and I was honestly skeptical of both the descriptions and the prices.

I shouldn’t have judged before I tasted. We ordered two breakfast sets: tomato macaroni and pickled mustard green rice noodle soup, each served with the option of a mini butter pineapple bun or the classic toast with eggs. The tomato macaroni with spam was so good! It was savory and not heavy, and the spam was thickly chunky and delicious. It was fun seeing how the new owners of Tai On got creative with new-age takes on classic Hong Kong cafe food. We saw pineapple buns with rum, matcha, chocolate, or raspberry chocolate. Egg tarts came in flavors like caramel lava, taro coconut milk, HK-style milk tea, Horlicks, matcha, red bean matcha, and hojicha mochi. After trying the classic pineapple bun and caramel lava egg tart, we concluded that the bakery options actually weren’t as good as their original versions. I would still return for the hot cooked dishes, though.

Sing Heung Yuen

2 Mee Lun Street, Central, Hong Kong

Sing Heung Yuen is an outdoor eatery, almost like a breakfast version of a “dai pai dong” outdoor food stall. You come here for the experience of eating in this unique environment, rubbing elbows with locals. Balance your bum on a rickety stool with no backrest and only 2-3 chair legs touching the uneven stony pavement at any given time, perched at a folding table sheltered under a tarp.

This place loves tomatoes– they had tomato versions of many classic Hong Kong cafe breakfast items. We tried the tomato soup macaroni and a tomato version of my favorite rice noodle soup with pickled mustard greens. The food wasn’t as refined in flavor but the surprising star of the show were the beverages! Iced lemon tea was laudable and my iced Sprite with salted preserved lemon makes the list of “favorite drinks of the trip.”

Lan Fong Yuen

2 Gage St, Central, Hong Kong

Lan Fong Yuen now has a second location in Tsim Sha Tsui, but the original location is in the Central area of Hong Kong. The Central location boasts the iconic metal food cart parked on the street outside the storefront, where you can order milk tea to go.

I recommend making a quick pit stop to this food cart to sample the Hong Kong milk tea, and save your stomach for a meal somewhere else. The seating inside the Lan Fong Yuen cafe is even more cramped than usual for Hong Kong cafes and the price-to-portion size ratio for its food options is reportedly high.

Lan Fong Yuen’s famous milk tea can even be purchased in the United States. The traditional technique of pulling the milk tea through stocking filters is visible from inside the metal food cart. The milk tea is heavier on the creamer flavor, and very yummy.

Hop Yik Tai

121號 Kweilin St, Sham Shui Po, Hong Kong

Hop Yik Tai, located in Sham Shui Po, is an unassuming eatery specializing in cheung fen, congee, and zong zi (sticky rice dumplings wrapped in bamboo leaf). Cheung fen are steamed rice noodle rolls typically made from a watery rice flour batter steamed to thin sheets in square metal trays before being rolled up and served for breakfast or snack. You may be more familiar with cheung fen that are rolled up to form logs the length of the whole serving plate, larger than the size of an oversized American eggroll. Hop Yik Tai’s cheung fen are smaller, more tightly rolled, and nicely bite-sized to pick up with either chopsticks or bamboo skewer. The key to a quality cheung fen is texture. The rice noodle roll needs to be smooth. **Silky smooth. The rice noodle roll is steamed to a bouncy, elastic consistency that is never mushy. Sauce is self-administered, and you should use both the peanut butter-based and the hoisin-based sauces along with a good sprinkling of sesame seeds. Even before adding any sauce, the rice noodles were delicious already- very fragrant of fresh rice. Everything we ate in Hong Kong was so fresh!

Hop Yik Tai was one of those instances where we expected to eat a small snack of a light breakfast but everything was so good that we just kept ordering more food until we were too stuffed to continue. We also enjoyed two types of congee. The fish congee was good but had lots of little bones you have to be careful for. The century egg congee was my favorite, with the smoothest and least smelly century egg I’ve ever had. Congee is rice-based, of course, and was amazingly fresh and fragrant just like the cheung fen. Hop Yik Tai knows how to prepare rice, and somehow elevates a simple dish with simple ingredients to the next level of freshness and superb texture.

Cafe de Coral

Multiple locations across Hong Kong

Cafe de Coral is a chain restaurant and not quite a Hong Kong cha chaan teng, per se. It’s more like a fast food restaurant serving up a combination of western and Cantonese dishes. We tried our Cafe de Coral’s breakfast menu and sampled two set plates: one with pickled mustard green pork soup with a side of soy sauce noodles and the another with congee and cheung fen rice noodle rolls. I will say that the “xia mi” small dried shrimp in the cheung fen at Cafe de Coral were very high quality! They were full little shrimp, not misshapen or crushed, and were very flavorful without crossing the line into becoming stinky.

Men Wah Bing Teng

(Multiple locations but we visited the location inside MOKO shopping center, Hong Kong, Mong Kok, Prince Edward Rd W, 193號新世紀廣場MTR層M39號鋪)

Men Wah Bing Teng originated from a single “bing sutt” in the Kowloon area of Hong Kong in the 1970’s. There are now several locations scattered across both Kowloon and Hong Kong Island, and for good reason. The food is amazing! We visited Men Wah Bing Teng for afternoon tea and it tops the list as my husband’s favorite experience eating BBQ pork with egg over rice. at Men Wah Bing Teng in moko shopping. My order of instant noodle with seared chicken sounds like it would be underwhelming but it was anything but! Noodles were al dente and seasoned perfectly and the chicken was so very moist with a hint of char. We finished off our afternoon teatime with a cookie crust egg tart. We prefer the flakier pastry crust over a cookie crust, but this one was still done well.