The White Whale

The Chinese Bakery is my White Whale. It’s elusive, and reminds me of my incredible lightness of being. I’ve spent the largest of my culinary fortunes travelling to eat at as many as I could, hoping someday one would come to my town. I’ve turned over the idea of starting my own. I’ve had an 8 year vocation of trying my best to bake the things they sell, let down and overwrought by the fact that every place everywhere seems to get the same baked goods from some ominous supplier. There is an universality to everything they sell; a capital mentality to the exponential increase of profit in exchange for convenient goods.

 The bakery behind my house once held Chinese owners from the Province of Neimenngu who, when asked, had egg tarts ready for me within the hour. That was a golden age. It was there where everything came from the artisanship of their hands. I liked to pretend that the German goods they baked were a mere cover for all the mian bao they would make me. Sadly, it was short lived. They didn’t stay long. It was an ill-fated space. Their son Mei promised me tutelage in the art of noodling. I brought him tea during the dragon boat festival to seal the deal. That’s how serious I was; but the day I came, they were gone, and the new owners had no idea where they had gone. I never saw them again.

A year later, another bakery opened in the deeps of Kitchener. Yup, there lay the fixed threads of the warp subject to but one single, ever returning, unchanging vibration. It had it all: bubble tea, lemon tea so chalky it’d close your throat, egg tarts, rolled cakes, red bean buns, all settled in a long, PCB lit corridor, lights leaking Won Kar Wai’s own florescent imagination. Everything toted in plastic, prepackaged and ready to be plucked. It was a hard sell, however, especially with the Chinese grocery store next door, which more or less sold the same pre-packaged stuff. And before I knew it, it was gone too. I was surprised. Still, I never expected to see anything like it again, especially if it couldn’t survive where it was. Nor did I expect to stick around long enough to see another incarnation, especially in the old-line uptown space of Waterloo. But hey, I don’t have a crystal ball; Uptown does have a Crystal Palace though- coincidentally owned by the same confident creators of Hot Wheels Tea House, the newest incarnation of the Chinese Bakery. But I’d be a fool to call it that- it’s so much more. Tea House seems an apt label for what it, I imagine, will grow into. For now, while it practices opening, it offers all the baked goods I’d come to expect, as well as Chinese breakfast familiars. Inexpensive breakfast familiars. And if you want the cheapest bubble tea you can find, don’t hesitate to pay the place a visit, at least until it gets its bearings, because you can get a good glass for a nominal 2 dollar fee. That’s right. That’s it. Nothing more. There’s no tax for the time being. It’s too good to be true. Macaroni and toast, chewy steamed buns with crisp cucumber, and sweet tender peking duck; barmy, bitter Hong Kong tea I love, and as much as you can drink thanks to free refills- more than enough to slow down time, or be faster than it. So far, it’s a great place, smack with Sino-Western hybridity, after enough tea, you’d think you were living by The Bund.



N2J 2W7

519-208-8989

Hours: For now, whenever it feels like it.

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