There are 108 dishes on the menu but don’t miss the ‘quiveringly thick’ French toast at this HK-style cafe

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The first surprise on arriving at Kowloon Cafe is the green double-decker Hong Kong tram parked in the front doorway.

Unlike Kowloon Cafe’s sister restaurants in Chinatown and Burwood, where the latter features a Hong Kong-style 16-seater minibus, now a bar after being chopped into six sections and re-assembled inside, this tram was built in situ.

Restaurateur Howin Chui, who has opened three Kowloon Cafes with business partners Howard Lee and Gary Tsui since 2019, commissioned the tram to spark fun and nostalgia for Hong Kong-style cafes, known as cha chaan tengs.

“The tram was actually easier than the minibus because the tram is more of a rectangular shape,” he says. “And we weren’t trying to drive it in.”

Translated as “tea restaurant” in Cantonese, the cafes feature a Canto-Western menu and began as cheap and cheerful diners feeding everyone from construction workers to tourists and businesspeople.

Chui says Cantonese restaurants have been on the wane here, particularly in Chinatown. Kowloon Cafe, part of a boon in Hong Kong-style cafes in Sydney, aims to fix that.

“We want to give people the authentic food they miss,” he says. “But I also want it to be like yum cha, sushi, Korean barbecue, Vietnamese bread roll, all these things that were not a thing 10 or 20 years ago.

“These type of foods are in the blood and culture of Australians because they’re educated about them, there’s more shops opening and this is a multicultural country. Hopefully one day, Hong Kong food can be in the blood of Australians, too.”

The tram tables are full, so we head to the padded booths lining the left side wall. We are surrounded by neon street signs and 3D shopfronts for banks, real estate offices and a cinema.

The most popular dishes include the crispy butter pineapple bun and the quiveringly thick Hong Kong-style French toast topped with slabs of butter and drizzled with maple syrup, honey and condensed milk from supplied bottles. Named after its pineapple-like crisscrosses rather than taste or fillings, the bun is going gangbusters filled with egg, ham, spam and corned beef.

The menu offers 108 dishes, not counting the variations diners can ask for. Starting with sandwiches, toast and buns, it features HK-style street food snacks, rice and fried rice variations, stir-fried noodles (22 options), five kinds of fresh tomato noodle soup, seven noodle soups, four dry mix instant noodle options, and 15 ways with baked rice and spaghetti and baked rice with toasted French bread.

And that’s not counting drinks. There are 32 hot and cold drinks, from HK-style milk tea and coffee, to Kowloon Cafe’s signature lemon and lime tea, salty lemon lemonade, Ovaltine, Horlicks, watercress with honey, lychee Ribena, and red bean ice with vanilla ice-cream on top.

The menus, also including tea set menus, sit under glass tabletops. Every dish comes in hearty portions. Fat fishballs, stabbed via wooden skewers, are swished through fragrantly creamy curry sauce. A selection of siu mai (steamed dumplings), curry fishballs and steamed rice rolls lolling in tangily sweet and gingery dark soy sauce are a meal in themselves.

But here comes stewed beef brisket with egg noodles, deep-fried chicken wings with chips and stir-fried barbecue pork with vermicelli and XO sauce.

Booming with luscious slow-cooked meat, glistening noodle mountains, or golden fries (with tomato ketchup), they are hoovered up with gusto.

Then (send help) comes a pineapple bun and HK-style super thick French toast with red bean. A waiter, part of the bright, swift and helpful staff, spots the accompanying maple syrup bottle.

“Would you like condensed milk as well?” he ask, disregarding our prone forms.

And so, as Kowloon Cafe begins to burst with chatting, munching diners, pondering pairing spam and egg sandwiches with stir-fry Swiss sauce beef with macaroni, or lychee ice drink with ice-cream, we drench the bread-bin-sized French toast with ribbons of sweet condensed milk and maple syrup and crush its golden fluffiness within.

Chui has plans for six more Kowloon Cafe locations. Get bigger trousers and join in.