First Look: Eggette Brings Extra-Crisp Hong Kong Egg Waffles To Chinatown

The Dai family has been serving cha chaan teng classics since 2019, when they opened The Peak Hong Kong Cafe in Bondi Junction. The eggettes, aka egg or bubble waffles, were popular from the start, but they really popped off after the diner relocated to Glebe in 2021. Now the family has opened Eggette, a dedicated shop for the snack in Chinatown.

Known in Cantonese as gai daan jai, eggettes are a familiar Hong Kong street snack: honeycomb-shaped waffles made from a lightly sweetened batter, cooked in a mould until the little spheres become crisp on the outside while the inside stays soft. The dish’s origins are hazy, though one popular story traces them to thrifty Hong Kong shopkeepers who turned the cracked eggs they couldn’t sell into batter rather than letting them go to waste.

The Peak’s recipe came from co-owner Quentin Dai’s mum, who drew on her memories of the eggettes she grew up eating. Before opening their new venture, the family travelled back to Hong Kong to visit five shops – including old-school spots tucked into housing estates and villages – and ate around five eggettes a day. The trip inspired them to push the crispiness of their version further.

“We try to offer the most-crisp version of it,” says Quentin, whose father Jason Dai runs The Peak while he and his brother Lachlan Dai manage Eggette. There’s little to the shop beyond a counter and three eggette moulds. The batter is freshly mixed for each order, using free-range eggs and Australian ingredients. The waffles are cooked to order for five minutes, which includes a proprietary cooling step that locks in extra crunch.

The result is an eggette that’s airy and light, with a split second of crispness giving way to softness underneath. Choc-chip and red bean are the bestsellers, their fillings folded into individual bubbles so every bite lands the same way. Classic Hong Kong flavours like Ovaltine, Milo and Horlicks, along with newer ones like cheese and matcha, are mixed directly into the batter. “We’re trying to bring the original, old-school taste using all fresh ingredients and no shortcuts,” Quentin says.

Drinks get the same treatment. There are staples from The Peak like Hong Kong yuenyeung, a combination of coffee and Hong Kong milk tea made with a blend of seven Sri Lankan teas.

Eggette sits on the ground floor of the Citymark Building in Chinatown, which was once home to the Marigold restaurant upstairs. With later trading hours planned, Quentin wants it to become the kind of late-night institution he encountered in Hong Kong, where hard-to-find shops still draw queues out the door at 11pm.

Eggette
Shop G8A 683–689 George Street, Haymarket

Hours:
Mon to Sun 11.30am–830pm

@eggette