Egg waffles are street food items first sold in Hong Kong in the 1950s, but in the past couple of years have become Instagram gold
T he bubblewrap waffle is a snack with all the trappings of 2018. It is Instagram-friendly, has a daft name and is rooted in deep and meaningful culinary history that it plays on in order to fill a need which didn’t exist before.
Before you ask – and I did – bubblewrap waffles are indeed named because of their resemblance to the packaging. Every so often Sunny Wu, founder of Bubblewrap in London’s Chinatown, will receive a phone order for a metre-long roll of packaging.
It opened in 2015, first as a stall and last year as a bricks and mortar shop. Shortly after opening, Wu lost her voice because she had to explain the history to every customer. Back then, she was selling two a day, sometimes none. Now, over a weekend, it’s hundreds; Wu has considered live-tweeting the queue.
To understand the egg waffle – to use its proper name – is to understand its provenance. The most commonly held theory suggests egg waffles, or gai daan jai, were street food items first sold in Hong Kong in the early 1950s. They were originally conceived as a way of using up broken eggs, with people adding them to flour, milk and sugar to create a batter. These waffles used to be made on a hexagonal waffle iron and cooked on charcoal.
