South African breakfast: A way to eat meat, gravy and pudding at 9am

Northerners rejoice - it's brunch, it's cultured, it's a roast before noon

In the three months I’ve lived here, it’s rained a lot in Hong Kong.

If you’re a fan of seasonal eating - by that I mean salads in summer, roasts in winter, etc - you’ll be hard pushed to plan ahead and know what you might like on Monday when ordering your food shop on a Sunday (we’re yet to get that one right).

The shifts in weather here will give you whiplash, and you might well hanker after a barbecue at 1pm but be nailing your outdoor furniture to the floor so it doesn’t do a Dorothy by 2pm.

All of this makes having breakfast out your safest option once the weekend’s arrived. Odds are, if you get up and get out of the door quickly enough, you can make it to a breakfast spot before the weather’s decided what to do with itself.

And if you’re lucky enough to find somewhere glass fronted like we did, you can time your exit strategy post-meal just right with a coffee in hand while you wait.

Why BAKED

It’s the first time we’ve eaten in at BAKED, a South African cafe in Wan Chai, but not the first time eating something they’ve made. Through the week they have freshly baked cookie dough in the window - usually the only thing they sell to takeaway - and I buy one on a Monday night while walking the dog home. A dangerous habit to acquire when you own a dog that requires a lot of walking.

Suffice it to say it was a level of good that has me back for breakfast on a rainy Saturday, and back for cake every Monday.

But this article is about its breakfast and I admit I wouldn’t be able to pick a South African food stuffs out of a line-up. I’ve just never eaten it (that I know of). So eating South African food in Central Hong Kong is perhaps a peculiar place to start - but I’ve done well by one former British colony thus far, maybe it’s time for another.

Whatever the reason, or the history, the menu at BAKED reads like a Wishlist of everything you wish you could eat at most times of any given day -

There’s a lamb shoulder and aioli sandwich, pan fried French toast with saffron oranges and cinnamon, and gruyere scrambled egg baps with chives and chilli. They also serve something called a ‘Bakoven’ which appears to be chicken kebab with all the greatest hits of the condiment drawer (hummus, chilli sauce, garlic sauce, you get the picture)..

All of these things I hope to eat one day but on this day we had the ‘Gravy Train’ (northerner’s instinct) and the ‘Thank Me Later’ (it mentioned curry).

Hopping on the Gravy Train

This breakfast dish was holy heck, please can we share it, ‘should we order another?’, ‘what’s even in this?’, ‘can I eat it forever?’ Levels of delicious. To read it on the menu, you’d be forgiven for thinking this was a poor man’s Nando’s, but you’d be wrong.

It’s chicken livers (bear with me), in a very spicy peri peri sauce, with a poached egg, coriander, and enormous chunks of door-stopped sourdough to dip. All of it is served in a skillet - and we all know nothing bad is served in a too-hot-to-touch skillet. The chef here recommends we eat it with avocado, but I think that’s for those who would appreciate the cooling taste because it doesn’t really add anything.

We’re told this is a very popular dish in South Africa and does have Portuguese roots. Wherever you’re from, this is a comfort eat. And if you don’t usually like liver (neither of us are typically fans), you should definitely have it done well - here does it very, very well.

While we both agreed that it fulfilled out liver-quota for the next four weeks, we also agreed we’d be back again in September for round two.

The portion is sizeable, but leaving the hunks of bread when there’s sauce to be mopped up is for a more disciplined eater than me.

Curry Side Up

The second dish we had was the Thank Me Later. This was also pretty fantastic, but packed much less of a punch - which is no bad thing at breakfast time.

It was a Cape-Malay minced beef curry topped with a fried egg and coriander on toasted sourdough. The fried egg was perfectly cooked and the curry itself was somewhere between a bolognese and a Greek stefado, but with a few more spices thrown in for good measure.

It was super tasty and, if you want something more exciting than an avocado or halloumi, you’d struggle to find anything quite as interesting, flavourful and hefty on toast in Central.

We finished all this off with a sourdough cinnamon bun that was sort of a cinnamon bun, treacle pudding hybrid.

Perhaps we should have just known the cakes would be good here after the cookie dough addiction came to pass, or maybe that’s why it’s called ‘BAKED’… because they’re really, really good at baking. All I know is that this cinnamon bun is every bit glutenous enough to be served after a roast dinner and under custard.

If you like steamed puddings that incapacitate you for several hours afterwards, typically with a syrup-y base, you’ll really really like this. It’s served hot out of the oven, with a lemon syrup that falls to the bottom soaks the sponge, and is topped with cream cheese icing and pistachios.

I loved it, but it divided the group. It’s not for the faint hearted, and if you just wanted a light pastry with your coffee you’ll have to try another establishment. The baked goods here could moonlight as paper weights.

Maybe next time, I’ll buy two: one to eat and the other to hold my furniture down in the next storm.