Changes, Chinatown, and the Ham and Egg Bun

Sandwiches are an ephemeral thing. No matter the outliers like the last McDonald’s hamburger sold in Iceland; by design, sandwiches make our lives just a little bit nicer for a short period of time and then live on only in Instagram photos and poorly-written blog posts like mine. Nowhere is that more clear than on this site, where our very format means each month we are exploring a different set of sandwiches than the month before, and the month before that, and so on. There’s some repetition, sure–there are only so many ways you can combine bread and fillings before the patterns become very clear–but as Heraclitus might have observed, if he’d been inclined to bend his Logos toward something as prosaic as a piece of meat wrapped in bread, one cannot eat the same sandwich twice.

I apologize for my melancholy and my current interest in impermanence, but change has been on my mind. This week, I drove my eldest son Damian off to his freshman year at UIUC, a really good state University only a 2 hour drive away, with an excellent program in his chosen field of study. His life is changing in a major way, and it’s a scary, exciting time for him.

Our lives are changing too. For Mindy and myself, Damian has been a central part of our lives for nearly 2 decades. While he’s still very much a part, for much of the time he’ll be less present, and it’s an adjustment for us. For his younger brothers though, he has always been there, and I can’t imagine what it feels like for them to not have him around. I couldn’t be more happy and proud to see him go, but there’s a sadness too. Change is tough on everybody.

It’s a change for the Tribunal as well. Damian has always been one of my best, most enthusiastic and insightful helpers when exploring a new sandwich. He’s not far away, but he won’t be as readily available to test out my latest attempts at a South American sausage or a poorly-shaped attempt at a Philly-style torpedo roll. I do expect him to give me the skinny on the best sandwiches in Champaign-Urbana, and I imagine some of them will make their way into these pages in the near future. But the times when I could just shout “Hey who wants to try a sandwich?” and have Damian be the first one through the kitchen door are gone.

I wanted to go on one last adventure for the Tribunal with him though, before his larger life adventure ahead, so last weekend, I took him with me to explore the Ham and Egg bun at the bakeries of Chicago’s Chinatown.

The ham and egg bun is a Chinese pastry, a specialty of Hong Kong, that consists of a soft, slightly sweet baked Chinese bun stuffed with one perfectly rectangular slice each of canned ham and some sort of egg brick. Leaving aside the question of whether that sounds good–I’m seriously side-eyeing the egg brick thing–does it sound like a sandwich?

Google maps showed me at least 4 Chinese bakeries within a short walk of the heart of Chinatown. I only knew for sure that one of them carried the ham and egg buns we were after, but I was relatively sure we’d find good things to eat regardless. I lucked into a good parking spot right next to the Chinatown Square Mall, site of the first of our stops for the day.

Chinatown Square is a bit of a manufactured version of Chinatown, all pagodas and lattices in red, green, and gold, with a large open area in the center featuring statues representing each of the 12 years of the Chinese zodiac.

There are good things to be found in Chinatown Square though, including a restaurant commonly called one of the best Chinese restaurants in America, Lao Sze Chuan. Unfortunately, “Chicken Crack” was not what we were after that day. Instead, we headed to Saint Anna’s Bakery & Cafe to look for our ham and egg buns.

And we found them, first try.

We ordered a ham & egg bun and a box of pork belly cookies too weird to describe, and due to a strongly-worded sign advising customers not to eat carry-out orders inside the store, we retired to a nearby bench in the mall to check out the bun.

It’s… a bun. Nicely browned with some kind of egg wash, obviously baked on a sheet in bulk with many other buns. No evidence of ham or egg here though. We tore it open to get a look inside.

Tearing is not a good strategy for evenly distributing ham between the two halves, nor for showcasing the bizarrely regular shape of the egg sheet, but you get the picture. Bready and sweet, with a little protein in the center–that’s the story of the ham and egg bun.

Onward to our next stop, Feida Bakery.

Feida’s ham and egg bun, like Saint Anna’s, was completely enclosed. This time we had the foresight to ask them to cut it in half for us.

Even breadier than the last, this was not a particularly appetizing snack for us. I felt I had to say what I’d been thinking. “This is not a sandwich.”

“What do you mean?” asked Damian.

“Well, it’s a pastry. Or a pie, maybe. It’s not assembled out of bread and fillings, like a sandwich is.”

Damian likes to play devil’s advocate, or maybe he just likes arguing with Dad. “Well, it’s assembled and then baked. It’s a baked sandwich.”

“But when it’s assembled, the fillings aren’t being inserted into bread. They’re being inserted into dough. It’s not the same,” I insisted. Damian shrugged.

We walked down the block to Chiu Quon, our next stop. Some kind of fireworks demonstration on the corner was shaking the buildings every couple of minutes.

Chiu Quon had been the one place I knew sold ham and egg buns before we got started, and they did not disappoint. In fact, they were the most sandwich-like we’d seen so far, the roll open on either end to expose the ham and egg. They were still obviously baked that way, rather than assembled after baking into a sandwich.

They were also the best we’d had so far. The ratio of egg to ham to slightly-sweet soft bread was just right; the insides were moist without being soggy, and though every individual piece of the whole was in essence identical to what we’d had before, they achieved that balance I’m looking for, that whole-greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts thing that tells you the person who made this actually cared about what they were doing.

It still wasn’t a sandwich.

Everything we had at Chiu Quon was good though, from the moon cakes to the custard tart to the strangely mild and glutinous yet compelling winter melon cakes. This place has been around for a while, and it seems they must be doing well, as they appear to be in the process of opening up newer digs across the street.

We had one stop left, the optimistically named Tasty Place.

However, though they had a section in their display case labeled Ham & Egg Bun, it was empty, and they informed us they were sold out for the day. The End.

I’m just kidding. There was another Tasty Place across the street (how common is this in Chinatown? Beside this place and Chiu Quon, there’s also the infamous pair of restaurants called Three Happiness within rock-throwing distance of each other).

This Tasty Place also had an empty spot behind the “Ham and Egg Bun” sign in their display case, but when I asked if they still had any, they affirmed that they did, and one little old lady ran into the back room while the other took my money. While we waited, we shared a preserved egg bun, a layer of pastry wrapped around a hundred year egg. Strange yet ultimately forgettable. Eventually we received our Ham & Egg buns.

Well what do you know? This one is actually a sandwich! They’ve taken a bun, actually sliced it open, and added the requisite slices of ham and egg-stuff. It’s not great, far breadier than any of the previous examples, but the ham and egg are actually warm, and the juices from the freshly added ingredients were just then soaking into the soft sweet bread rather than having long since turned it to mush. This one was recognizably a sandwich, yet the pastry from Chiu Quon was still the best bun of the trip.

I’m not sure why this pastry is on our List. Here at the Tribunal, we don’t take ourselves too seriously (“not particularly critical or informative” is one of the more apt descriptions I’ve read)

@SeHNNG Honourable mention goes to The Sandwich Tribunal, not particularly critical or informative but good fun https://t.co/hlQoZMX0mq

— Inaki (@aliveinthewired) April 28, 2016

but we have set ourselves as judges of sandwichness, and I feel I have to say: the ham and egg bun as I experienced it that day is not a sandwich, Tasty Place’s version notwithstanding. There have to be standards, right?

Well, at the end of the day, we ate some pretty tasty snacks and enjoyed some father-and-son time together in a place as cool as Chinatown, so who cares?

Sandwiches are important to us here at the Tribunal, but they are not life. They are not even a very useful metaphor for life. They are, at best, a momentary bit of handheld happiness in one’s life. Sandwiches can be a rough-and-ready bit of fuel for you to get on with your work, or they can be a glittery bit of garnish on your perfect day, but there are other things that are more important.

I’m glad I got to have this day with my son, despite the lack of proper sandwiches. I look forward to the opportunities I’ll have to spend time with him in the future, rarer though they’ll be. I imagine they will be occasions on which life brightens up my sandwiches, rather than the other way around. In the meantime, I will cherish the time, and the sandwiches, that I can share with his brothers.