The Queen of Tarts

The original Margaret's Cafe is on Macau's Coloane Island, but these days most tour guides take their charges to the Margaret's on the main peninsula of Macau. This branch is owned and operated by an enthusiastic and garrulous woman who is none other than Margaret herself.

Margaret's Cafe opened its doors in 1992, and since 1997 business has been booming. Margaret Wong Stow explains that she married an Englishman named Andrew more than ten years ago, and that both of them enjoyed eating Western breads and pastries. They began to look at recipe books and slowly increased their culinary knowledge, until they developed a rather special kind of egg tart themselves.

Then Andrew thought that since there were no Western-style bakeries in Macau, they should try opening one. "At first people were intrigued by a foreigner opening a bakery there. Then they gradually saw that this foreigner was using fresh ingredients, and was neither using pork lard for the bread nor adding water to the freshly squeezed orange juice. What's more, they began to understand that the whole-grain bread he was making was very healthy." Margaret thus explains how the small shop gradually made a name for itself.

Margaret learned how to make the shop's famous egg tart from a chef at the Portuguese Governor's Residence. By adapting the recipe to meet Macau tastes, she was able to create an egg tart that "tastes sweet without ever tasting off-puttingly greasy." When the locals first approached the egg tarts, the dark crust often deterred them. "Everyone kept saying that it could give you cancer," she recalls. But though they might say that the egg tarts looked strange, once they ate them, they came back for more. Gradually, the egg tarts became all the rage.

But how did the tarts become so popular in Taiwan? Margaret can't really explain it herself. "Everybody says that after they took a bite, they just couldn't stop eating them!" she says. Good food always finds people who will pay for it. Who says Taiwan and Macau are that far apart?

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(facing page) Margaret Wong Stow was born and bred in Macau, but her sister-in-law is from Taiwan. For several years the two have worked together in the egg tart business. (photo by Diago Chiu)