Sweet adaptations to challenges at Houston’s Asian bakeries
For Lunar New Year, indulge in an unexpected source of joy.
Not too early. Not too late. At the Kamalan Bakery on Bellaire Boulevard, owner Shiann Lian always starts the first batch at 8 a.m. — two hours before opening. Any later, and customers won’t see the full range of treats he create. Any earlier, and they can’t fully savor the joy of new bread.
“We want people walking right in to that fresh, hot-bread smell,” he said.
This winter, after a tough, disconnected year, visiting Houston’s Asian bakeries has been an unexpected source of joy. After months of living mostly in two dimensions, walking into one of these shops, with their kindly fragrance and endlessly inventive wares, reminds me of what I’ve most missed about my city. Even in a pandemic, they feel safe: most are tiny, with few people inside, in strip malls where the doors swing open and shut constantly. They’re inexpensive — I can dart out with a whole bagful of beautiful, sweet-smelling finds for less than $10. They’re fun — I love sharing masked smiles at the creative, adaptable business people who’ve made the treats in my hands.
And each bakery, I’ve discovered, tells a story about the ways history, conquest and entrepreneurship flavor foods that I love. When I choose the day’s indulgences, I think about the generations of events that led to their particular mix of ingredients. I think of the persistent bakery owners battling through adversity now. And I wonder how,
over the very long term, one of the tangible products of hardship can be something universally soothing.
Tucked into Dun Huang Plaza near Beltway 8, Kamalan was first opened by Lian and his wife, Amy, after they arrived from Taiwan 25 years ago. (He does the breads; she makes the cakes.) The couple had owned bakeries back at home. Nevertheless, Lian enrolled in two years of culinary school here to add American technique to his repertoire.
Openness to foreign cultures boosts creativity in any business, researchers say. But for Taiwanese bakeries, it’s a hallmark. Hole-in-the-wall Kamalan, for instance, makes 30 to 40 kinds of bread a day. Some are distinctively Asian, like the plump mooncakes, shiny on the outside and hiding a golden cooked egg yolk within. Others look more European, like the lavish, puffytopped cupcakes in paper collars, faintly flavored with vanilla or green pandan and cloudlike, almost souffléé-ish, within.
And some, like the plain blocks labeled “pineapple cake” blend both worlds, sublimely. Within each of these crisp shortcake cubes is an explosion of tart pineapple jam, which Lian boils for nine hours to perfect. These humble-looking flavor magnets, I found out, are part of the long menu of treats exchanged during the two-week Lunar New Year, which starts Feb. 12.
Baked goods, in fact, are a fairly late addition to this holiday, the pinnacle of the year for many Asians, explained my colleague Yan Anthea Zhang, who was born and raised in China. “Lunar New Year is the most important holiday for Chinese. It marks the start of spring, so it’s a holiday about hope and prosperity,” she said. “People take a long time off — two weeks, after which there’s another holiday, the Lantern Festival — to relax, spend time with family and friends, and eat. And I have to say that baking is a new thing in China. Traditionally, people there steamed or fried foods made of wheat powder or rice powder.”
Irresistible as they are, in other words, the baked treats at Houston’s Asian bakeries are sweet adaptations to duress. Oven-baked wheat bread, for example, first appeared in Asia with 17th century Portuguese traders in Japan. Over later centuries, as Japan imposed its influence throughout Asia, local communities reinterpreted its bread recipes for themselves. Today, East Asian cultures happily swap, scout and copy baking techniques by the hour, not the year.
“Taiwanese bakers have hit a sweet spot,” Taiwanese-American lifestyle blogger Leslie Yeh said, “taking the best of Japanese-style breads and combining them with whatever flavors are trending.” Their huge variety, she told me, is very Taiwanese: it reads as abundance.
Not that Asian bakeries are just about bread. Right next door to Kamalan, the Taiwanese Jungle Bakery Cafe is an austere shrine to nothing but fabulous desserts. Inside a chilly glass case, cakes erupt with fondant flowers, 3D seascapes and the face of a blissed-out Hello Kitty. In a separate case sit jewel-like pastries: a shiny pink bauble filled with coconut cake, a coffee mousse cushion perched on a brownie, and an all-white column of creamy vanilla cake wrapped in white chocolate mousse.
Still another type of Asian bakery anchors the strip mall across the street. At the Vietnamese-French Parisian Bakery Café, the chalkboard and wood fixtures have the cozy feel of a bistro, even if not one person now nibbles baguettes at its tables. The cases are crowded with enormous chocolate and almond croissants, along with some truly unforgettable cream puffs: fat, turban-shaped and filled with pastry cream so silken it’s like taking a cool drink. Even this monument to French culture, though, has an Asian soul. Side by side on the chalkboard with the French breads are iced coffee swirled with condensed milk, spring rolls full of brawny shrimp and hand-tied banana leaf parcels of sticky rice.
Like fellow Asian bakeries, in other words, Parisian Bakery
Café is a living catalog of personal and national histories. Long before the 17th century arrival of French missionaries, Vietnamese were already influenced by tastes and techniques from neighboring countries, especially China. Later, during more than 70 years of French colonialism, they encountered ingredients such as butter and wine. But instead of adopting the outsiders’ customs wholesale, Vietnamese cooks folded them into their own, along the way inventing a cuisine appealing enough to sustain bakeries and restaurants, generations later, in far-off Houston.
But 2020 devastated these businesses. In the months before COVID prompted citywide shutdowns, Asian small business owners were already brutalized by rumors, violence and threats, and diatribes about “the China virus.”
Only after months of struggle, some businesses are doing better, Lian said. He showed me a baking sheet filled with plastic signs he’d pulled from his emptied-out shelves. “Now, by late afternoon,” he said, “we’re almost sold out.”
While most of these bakery customers are Asian, many are not. Lian estimates that about 70 percent of his clients have Taiwanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean or Japanese roots, and the other 30 percent are nonAsian.
For many customers with Asian roots, bakeries like Lian’s have been havens of comfort for years. “These mom-and-pop shops are exposing people to different foods, but they are also so important to the community,” Leslie Yeh, the Taiwanese-American food writer, told me. “A lot of children of immigrants went through childhood feeling, ‘There’s a food that I eat at home, and a food I eat in public.’ There was a sense of foreignness that you had to cover up.”
Coming from the suburbs and visiting Asian bakeries made her feel at home, she said. Now she loves seeing non-Asians lining up at the same places. “Bread is a very easy way into a cuisine,” she said. “You don’t have to overexplain it.”
I think she’s right. For a nonAsian like me, who moved to Houston decades ago, nibbling through a bag of pineapple bread and cupcakes from Kamalan in my living room is now a way to reclaim the city I fell in love with. For adventurous kids longing to horse around with their peers and sick of living onscreen, the same bag of snacks can launch a raucous, tasting party on Zoom — as my teenagers recently had with friends scattered throughout the city.
Something about newly baked bread seems to lift people’s spirits, Lian told me. “My wife and I love this job,” he said. “And we’re always hearing it from customers in the bakery: ‘You have very, very good bread.’ They just seem happy to be here.” I feel that way too. So I keep going back, and I keep bringing treats home to share. As a Houstonian, I need the city’s Asian bakeries — their daily treasures, their history and their creativity in hard times — to flourish.