Inside the World's Oldest Running ‘Soya Sauce Western', Tai Ping Koon Restaurant

Tai Ping Koon is a story as old as modern-day Hong Kong is.

With four locations dotted across Hong Kong, Tai Ping Koon has been serving “soya sauce Western” - a blend of Chinese ingredients and faux-Western recipes – for more than seven decades in the city, an extension of the 161 years the brand has existed in south China.

Born in 1860, the Tai Ping Koon brand and restaurant chain has become synonymous with the growth and adaption of Cantonese cuisine throughout an influential colonial period that shaped Hong Kong’s demographic and culinary makeup.

Currently run by fifth-generation Andrew Chui of the Chui family, Tai Ping Koon began business as a rackety restaurant serving Western cuisine to local seafarers and European traders in Guangzhou, then known as the British Canton.

Today, the chain, which was born with their Sheung Wan restaurant 83 years ago, endures a strong legacy as an inimitable fusion Cantonese-Western establishment. Tai Ping Koon has been claimed to be "one of the world's oldest continually operating Chinese restaurants,” a status unchallenged to this day.

At their four restaurants, Mr. Chui has retained Tai Ping Koon Restaurant’s signature dishes like sugary soya sauce-covered Swiss Wings, Boiled Corned Ox-Tongue, Oven-baked Pigeon, Baked Portuguese Style Chicken with Rice, Baked Souffle, Smoked Pomfret, all dishes foreign to the Western tastebud, but ever-so familiar to an adult born in colonial Hong Kong.

Tai Ping Koon is unabashedly a restaurant chain that is neither Western, nor Cantonese, but a complex fusion of the two cuisines that have existed in Hong Kong for time.

From Canton With Love

Chui asserts it was Tai Ping Koon who may earn the title for being the first restaurant in Hong Kong to cook Western food with Chinese ingredients. He lays the claim to being the first restaurant chain to introduce Western cuisine to Chinese in Hong Kong, when foreign food was a treat for only the upper classes.

Tai Ping Koon was founded in 1860 in the 10th year of the Xianfeng Emperor rule during the Qing Dynasty in China, a tumultuous period of political in-fighting and foreign influence.

Working as a chef at a western trading company in Guangzhou, chef Chui Lo Ko and founder of the Tai Ping Koon brand began business in Tai Ping Sha, Guangzhou, serving Western dishes with a Chinese twist: roast pigeon, smoked pomfret, steak with a gloopy pepper sauce, Portuguese-style baked chicken, and signature sweet soya-sauce drenched chicken and beef.

During the height of the Sino-Japanese war in China, Chui’s grandfather saw an opportunity for the export of the brand to Hong Kong and opened Tai Ping Koon’s first chain restaurant in Sheung Wan in 1938.

Eighteen years later, the Guangdong branch had closed and Tai Ping Koon’s home was made permanent in Hong Kong.

What began as a high-class establishment serving Hong Kong’s affluent Western and local celebrities, businessmen, and politicians, shifted into an affordable venue for tasting the memory of Hong Kong’s inventive and popular cuisine.

In their Sheung Wan, Tsim Sha Tsui, Yau Ma Tei, and Wan Chai restaurants, Tai Ping Koon retains the menu and unique approach to Westernized local flavours, which have seen success over the chain’s storied career. Chui is uniquely proud of Tai Ping Koon’s past and the legacy he strives to uphold.

It was a marinade sauce called “Swiss sauce,” a blend of soy sauces and sweet tones that coated pork and beef steaks, thick rice noodles, and caked baked rice dishes, originating from the original Canton site in 1860, that was to become Tai Ping Koon’s signature flavour and enduring legacy of the ancient soya sauce Western chain.

A Lunch-Time Spot Stuck in Time

Tai Ping Koon’s Sheung Wan restaurant is located on Stanley Street, a slender lane in Central that mostly houses lunch spots and offices.

The restaurant is hidden behind an opaque white curtain and brown doors with large windows, and a white and brown storefront cover with Chinese and English names of the chain restaurant, roughly translating to the “Pacific House Restaurant” (太平館餐廳 / taai3 ping4 gun2 caan1 teng1).

The Stanley Street chain restaurant captures the manic lunch-time rush of Central and Sheung Wan salarymen in search of a quick and affordable lunch.

Visitors from 11 AM to 2:30 PM can enjoy a wide selection from three menus, ranging in price and luxury. For the rushed takeaway-only crowd, a styrofoam box of Tai Ping Swiss Sauce Beef Noodles, Curry Shrimp Stir Fry, Swiss Sauce Pork Slice Rice, Oxtail with Rice, or Black Peppercorn Pork Rice costs no more than HK$50.

For those with time and a taste for fine dining during a lunch hour, no requirement to break the bank is necessary. Whilst the a la carte dinner items are priced accordingly to Hong Kong’s cost of living and competitively with neighbouring Cantonese restaurants, the “Lunch Set” fills you up.

A Tai Ping Koon Swiss Sauce Chicken Wings set for HK$102 is what attracts most to the restaurant. Four chicken wings doused in the secret sweet brown sauce (and 20 of preparation), rice or noodles on the side, the choice of borscht or cream of corn soup, and either orange juice, tea, or coffee.

Other options, at an equally enticing price and taste, include Salty Ox-tail Rice for HK$102, Curry Beef Brisket Rice for HK$95, and Grouper in Tomato Sauce With Rice for HK$103.

Affordable for most workers in Central, some menu items have never changed since 1945, a few years after their penetration into the Hong Kong market.

For the budding analysist or historian, much has not changed on the surface of Tai Ping Koon’s operation and look: very British.

A lunch-time waiter who was busy shuffling dirty plates from finished tables to the kitchen told The Beat Asia that he has been working at the Sheung Wan restaurant for 50 years, ever since he began at the age of 24 in 1971. He walks with a limp, an accident endured in his past, and is dressed up in an impressive black waistcoat and white shirt. He spoke English with a posh Queen’s tongue accent.

Other waiters and staff don waistcoats, three-piece suits, or freshly ironed shirts, the former costume of waiting staff in Hong Kong’s colonial past. Beyond the hidden storefront of the restaurant, a waiter is sat at a desk lit in a soft orange light that is both welcoming and induces a nostalgia of the men's and golf clubs of London or New York.

“Our restaurant overflows with countless stories and values. Every outlet is hung with black-and-white photos to not only offer a touch of vintage aesthetics, but also a lesson in history for our patrons,” explains Mr. Chui, discussing the status Tai Ping Koon has within the story of Cantonese-Western fusion food in Hong Kong.

Each table is served with a placemat, with the Tai Ping Koon logo centred and the “160 Years” that the brand has lived on for. A history book in traditional Chinese is available for purchase at each restaurant for HK$148, “remembering the 100-year legendary story of Tai Ping Koon.”

British Flavours with Cantonese Affordability

Britain's 156-year-old colonial dominance of Hong Kong from 1841 had an undeniable and extensive influence on all facets of daily Chinese life in the city.

Six generations of Hong Kongers born under colonial rule in the city saw a recursive adaption of Chinese flavours and spices altered from the import of British and Western cuisine.

Following the World War 2 and the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, the city’s traditional Western restaurants grew popular with the high elite British and upper-class society, feeding customers British and American recipes with Chinese-sourced meats and fish.

The income of the impoverished lower-class of Chinese in Hong Kong were relegated to the neighbourhood cha chaan teng (茶餐廳 / tea restaurant), an affordable form of Western food in the city for high-dining-hungry foodies. Common local ingredients and seasonings were used to imitate Western cooking methods for cheap and fast “Western” food with local Cantonese characteristics.

Favourites include the heavily imitated silk-sock milk tea, egg, ham and corned beef sandwiches, spring rolls, creamy soup with macaroni and sliced ham, Hong Kong-style French toast, and chow fan.

To satisfy a demand for affordable and fast Hong Kong-style Western food, soya sauce Westerns grew in popularity – a bridge between the affordability of Hong Kong eateries and the bona fide “Western experience.”

With the arrival of two million mainland Chinese immigrating to Hong Kong, fleeing the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and ‘70s, the curious tastes of Chinese newcomers and newly wealthy Hong Kongers for Western flavours birthed what Canto-Western cuisine is today in Hong Kong.

The movement saw the opening of Hong Kong’s most recognized steak houses and other Western-style restaurants, including the city's oldest British pub, Jimmy’s Kitchen, 52-year-old Sai Ying Pun eatery Sammy’s Kitchen, Hong Kong-style steakhouse Boston Restaurant, former iconic Goldfinch Restaurant, and the infamous Tai Ping Koon chain.

Hong Kong’s First Fusion Food

Western dishes became popular amongst locals, made by Cantonese chefs experimenting with British, American, and French recipes with limited training of Western techniques and flavor combinations.

Appetizers would be limited to white or red soup – Russian borscht and cream – and a twee bread and butter set for customers to snack on.

Main dishes would consist of meat, a steak or pork chop, or fish, seasoned with soya sauce, white sauce, or peppercorn sauce. Baked rice, spaghetti or teppanyaki with a lean red meat are a distinct popular main. Carb-heavy side dishes included a baked or mashed potato, French fries, or sauteed bok choy, broccoli, salad.

Popular dishes, “Western food in soya sauce” with the added inclusion of Cantonese elements, included stewed ox tripe, chicken liver rice, borscht soup with soya sauce, wok-fried spaghetti with meat sauce, cream corn soup with pink ham, and sirloin steaks with souffle and a dollop of mustard.

The soya sauce Western (豉油西餐 / si6 jau4 sai1 caan1) could be claimed to be “Hong Kong’s earliest fusion food,” says Lau Kin-wai, food critic and columnist at the Hong Kong Economic Journal, “Chinese people were trying to handle what they saw as exotic food at the time. They were applying their own flavours and culture to the Western dishes they were exposed.”

By all accounts, Tai Ping Koon is a dictionary-standard definition of a soya sauce Western restaurant. Their Sheung Wan location is distinctly Cantonese in its flavour – hints of soya sauce, Shaoxing wine, oyster sauce, star of anise, grouper, pork shoulder, and ox tongue – yet Western (or British) with waiters taking orders in three-piece suits, smooth polished wood plastering the walls, soft chandeliers hanging above, and a set table with cutlery – no chopsticks.

Their menu across Hong Kong Island and Kowloon features appetizers and main courses that would provoke strange reactions to French, Russian, British, and American first-time visitors; foreign to a Western tourist, yet comfort food for the average Cantonese customer.

The Famous Swiss Wings

Tai Ping Koon’s most famous and most frequently ordered dish, found at all four of its branches, is the Swiss Chicken Wings, HK$102 for four wings. The chain’s “Swiss sauce,” a mix of celery, bay leaves, Shaoxing wine, and soya sauce, typifies the principle of a soya sauce Western: Western ingredients with Chinese elements.

Many recipes on the chain’s original menu formalized in 1964 at their second location in Yau Ma Tei have remained unchanged, including ribeye steak with black pepper sauce and the Swiss soya sauce, an urban legend in itself.

Fifth-generation owner of Tai Ping Koon, Andrew Chui, recalls the story of a Western customer eating at the Sheung Wan restaurant in “early last Century.” He ordered and was eating the restaurant’s famous “TPK Style Chicken Wings in Swiss Sauce,” professing to a nearby waiter that he found the wings “Sweet! Sweet!”

The restaurant staff, unable to speak fluent English, believed the man to be shouting “Swiss! Swiss!” With the clumsy faux pas of mishearing the English-speaking diner, the staff at the Sheung Wan took inspiration from the customer’s apparent liking to a Swiss delicacy and renamed the sweet soya sauce chicken wings as “Chicken Wings in Sweet Sauce.”

As the restaurant chain adapted with the times and tastes of Hong Kongers, new menu items began employing the “Swiss sauce.” The chain’s Signature Dishes, unchanged for decades, display fan-favourite TPK Style Pigeon in Swiss Sauce, TPK Style Fried Flat Noodle with Sliced Beef in Sweet Sauce, and Beef with Swiss Sauce over Rice.

The “Swiss Sauce” endures a legacy of a Cantonese foodstuff similar to roast goose, char siu bao, rice noodle rolls, pork and century egg congee, and steamed chicken feet.

The Tai Ping Koon restaurant chain would not be the cultural powerhouse it is today within the enduring field of Cantonese-Western fusion without the fuzzy history and family recipe of the sweetened soya sauce base “Swiss Sauce.”

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