$80 of pastries and 8 hours of lounging

or how I spent my hangover last Saturday

Hi friends,

My last Saturday got off to a …rough start… but after delivering some Valentines cookies first thing in the morning, I finally went to a place that’s been on my “to eat” list for so many months. After toting my haul home I cuddled with my cat on the couch and watched TV until about 2am. Some fortuitous crossing of winds resulted in my consuming some of the best pastries and best media that I have in a long, long time. All in one Saturday on which I was comically hungover.

Step 1: Win Son Bakery

All week I had planned to go to Win Son Bakery on Saturday to try their a.m. menu (they switch from a pastry-forward breakfast menu to one with more savory meal-sized options in the afternoon). Saturday was the last day of a 2 week break from a diet that I had been on since before the bakery opened. I was immensely pumped.

Win Son (no Bakery) is a Taiwanese-American sit-down restaurant that serves trendy fusion-y plates at a trendy price point for its trendy Brooklyn patrons. Overall it's tasty and the flavors hit the spot for me, a Taiwanese-American trendy Brooklyn patron. But the prices and the wait mean I’ve only been there a couple times.

In comes Win Son Bakery. It is, well, a bakery, but also a counter service restaurant that sits kitty corner from its sister restaurant. It’s got a much more casual atmosphere and the bang-for-your-buck feels noticeably higher as well. The wait is still atrocious, but hey, it’s trendy Brooklyn after all

I ended up dropping $80 there which is admittedly absurd. I ordered what felt like close to one of everything because the thought of going back to my strict diet the following day sent me into a hedonistic spiral. Here’s a SMASH or PASS rundown of everything I bought:

• Xiao Guai Guai, SMASH

  A xiao guai guai is essentially a cortado which is my favorite coffee drink. “Xiao guai guai” means “good little boy” which I find charming as all hell. When ordered “for here”, it is served in a Taiwan Beer glass which is not a pint-sized beer glass - it’s about the size of well, a cortado. I love these glasses so much that I re-homed a couple from Win Son into my apartment to drink whiskey out of 🤫

• Millet Mochi Donut, (tentative) PASS

  The odds were kinda stacked against this one since I didn’t eat my first bite of the donut until hours after I bought it. At that point, it was quite greasy. I’ve not had a mochi donut before but it seems like it’s more about texture than flavor. I love mochi with all my heart, but compared to other things I ate that day, it was pretty lackluster.

  

• Black Sugar Egg Tart, PASS

  This tart was the most personally disappointing for me. You see, egg tarts are some of my favorite things to eat of all time. The kind popular in Taiwan are essentially Portugese pasteis de nata. This Black Sugar Egg Tart is not that. This tart does not have the charred top of the Taiwanese/Portuguese tarts. It is pale like the Hong Kong style. It is sad. The shell is also not right. In actuality it tasted fine, and the black sugar does come through BUT if it’s a Taiwanese bakery, do it Taiwanese style, ok?

• Custard Toast, SMASH

  This was probably the one item I was most excited for, and it delivered. A nice and hefty inch-thick slice of delicious, soft, pillowy square Taiwanese bread is toasted on the bottom for fortification then topped with custard and seemingly broiled. The custard was a bit grainy but I think purposely so because it reminded me of the custard filled buns I grew up eating.

  

• Laminated Pollo Bao, SMASH

  The next time your friend comes to you and says “look I got cronuts!”, slap them out of her hand and bring her to eat this life-changing croissant hybrid instead. This bun whose name makes no sense to me is a croissant on the bottom and a pineapple bun on the top. Eat it. Be happy.

  

• BEC with Scallion Pancake, PASS

  Each of the breakfast sandwiches comes on a milk bun by default with the option to upgrade to a scallion pancake for $4. I fucking love scallion pancakes. Like really really, I will always order them if they’re on a menu. So of course I got my Bacon, Egg and Cheese with the pancake upgrade. This should have been a slam dunk but somehow, this sandwich amounts to less than the sum of its parts. My gut tells me it’s the choice of cheese: raclette. Both scallion pancakes and raclette are pretty oily and were fighting for my taste-buds’ attention instead of working together. I ended up deconstructing the sandwich to eat my precious scallion pancake on its own. Next time, I’ll try the BEC on a milk bun, OR just order two of…

• Milk Bun Zhu Jiao, SMASH

  Zhu Jiao means “pig foot” but the Win Son Bakery menu uses the more palatable description of “braised pork knuckle”. Either way, if you’re with someone squeamish, just call it a Taiwanese sausage patty. This shit was fire. The milk bun is so soft and a tactile pleasure to eat. The pork was delicious and fatty. The sausage breading added a nice crunch. Douse it in the chili vinaigrette and pat yourself on the back.

• Turnip cake, NOT SURE

  Turnip cakes are a dim sum staple usually served lightly seared. They’re made with rice flour and their texture is chewy, soft, and a bit gelatinous. The turnip cake at Win Son Bakery is sliced thinner, deep fried, and served in paper sleeve which suggests it be eaten as a finger food. At first I found it over-crisp and kind of dry. As I kept coming back to take more bites, I realized that comparing it to the traditional dim sum dish was a mistake. Its size, shape, and portability makes it closer in function to a McDonald’s hashbrown, which I am totally game for. I’ll have to order this again before I make a final judgment.

  

• Candy box, PASS and can I have my money back?

  I fell victim to Valentines marketing and purchased this special box of candies that was sitting at the register. Again, the looming return of my diet had me in a YOLO mood and I dropped $30 on this box. I am not proud. I kind of thought, if it’s that expensive, it’s gotta be good, right? Wrong. There’s a reason that it’s Win Son Bakery and not Win Son Confectionary. Candies are not their specialty and pretty much each and every one of the treats in this box was totally forgettable. None of them even had a particularly Taiwanese twist. I did forget to take a picture of the sign explaining what each one was so it’s possible they were supposed to be Asian-y, but they certainly didn’t carry any of that on their own. It’s one thing to be not good or not Taiwanese but to be both is really disappointing.

Anyhoo,

…overall, I was very pleased with my trip to Win Son Bakery. There were some definite hits and it was also just nice to check it off of my list. Here’s the rest of the awesome stuff I consumed last Saturday:

• This reddit post and a follow-up New Yorker article about what it’s like to cook and eat in China while under coronavirus lockdown, from the hosts of Chinese Cooking Demystified on YouTube, is the best thing I’ve read in a while

• I developed a huge crush on food YouTuber Internet Shaquille who gives a nice combo of cooking demo and humor. Some fave vids so far include his very specific thoughts about BLTs and the many uses for Amaro

• This video of YouTuber Adam Ragusea experiencing immense joy watching once-renowned and currently-washed-up celebrity chef Marco Pierre White suffer through filming a set of promotional videos for Knorr stock cubes

  I also finally watched Parasite. Afterwards I found amazing videos of folks recreating the house both in miniature dollhouse form and on the Sims.

Mmkay, that’s it for this week.

xx Shawna