Chiu Quon Bakery

Hong Kong style pastry at the Chinatown counter

The counter at Chiu Quon Bakery is stacked with Hong Kong style bakes: baked BBQ pork buns, Portuguese egg tarts with scorched custard tops, red bean buns, coconut buns, almond cookies and sponge cake. The Chiu family opened the bakery in 1986 after immigrating from Hong Kong, and it is now the oldest Chinese bakery in Chicago’s Chinatown, still family run. This is not a generic café-bakery with a laptop crowd; it is a pastry shop built on traditional Hong Kong baking, with baos, dim sum items and cakes filling out the trays. Red bean mooncakes appear when the season calls for them.

A line that keeps moving

The pace is counter driven and busy, shaped by a steady flow of customers rather than a slow sit-down café model. Turnover is part of the experience: people come for buns, tarts, cakes and dim sum style items, then keep the line moving. The range extends past individual pastries, with custom order cakes and single servings of cakes and desserts, including fruit birthday cake, mixed fruit cake and honeydew cake. The bakery has held its place through the 2009 recession and the pandemic, and it turned up on screen in season three of The Bear, which brought new faces to the same trays the neighborhood has been buying from for decades.

Order the pork bun first, then the egg tart

Start with the baked BBQ pork bun, the item most often singled out as the signature, then follow it with a Portuguese egg tart and its brulée-like top. That savory and sweet pair gives a quick read on what the bakery does well. Add a red bean bun for another classic filled bake, or a pineapple BBQ pork bun for a sweeter crackled top over the same savory filling. Coconut buns, almond cookies, sponge cake and the fruit cakes broaden an order without leaving the Chinese bakery lineup. A practical approach is to take the pork buns and egg tarts early, since they move fastest, then build the rest of the box around red bean, coconut or whatever is coming out of the back that day.