Pineapple buns at the Lido Restaurant

Saturday morning. Early. Kind of gray out. It’s the middle of August but it looks like it might rain. It’s one of those mornings when you feel like have pastries and coffee in bed while reading the paper.

My buddy David Lang, who is from Hong Kong, keeps telling me I need to go to the Lido Restaurant and order a pineapple bun. A pineapple bun with butter—boh loh yaau as they say in Hong Kong. I’m thinking today is the day.

So I just throw on some clothes and head up the street to the Lido which is in a crappy-looking stripmall midway between the Aberdeen Mall and Parker Place Mall. It’s barely 8am but the place is packed. No big deal. My plan is to order a couple of pineapple buns to go and eat them back at my hotel with a nice hot latte.

There’s a bakery cart right by the door holding dozens of fresh-out-of-the-oven pineapple buns. I tell the boss man at the cash register that I’d like two to go. While I’m waiting for someone to bag them up, I hear my name: “David! David!”

It’s David Lang. Sitting in a booth behind the cash register. He’s already got a pineapple bun in front of him.

David invites me to join him for breakfast, so what the hell. I tell the boss man that I’ll be having the pineapple buns here. Oh, and could I also have some coffee. “Hong Kong-style?” he asks.

David Lang doesn’t wait for me to answer. In Cantonese he tells the boss man to give me Hong Kong-style coffee and to give me two pineapple buns, both with butter. “You got to have butter,” he tells me.

About pineapple buns: There’s no pineapple in them. They are called pineapple buns because their crispy tops resemble the texture of a pineapple. They are to Hong Kong what beignets are to New Orleans. And every bit as addicting.

About Honk Kong-style coffee: It’s like Nescafe made with sweetened and condensed milk and tastes as awful as it sounds. But after awhile, you get used to that condensed milk taste (I remember nomadically traveling around Spain and Portugal many years ago in a VW camper and not being able to get fresh milk reliably so I’d end up making coffee with Nescafe and condensed milk and damn if I didn’t get so addicted to it that I was drinking it that way when I got home a year later).

Now you probably think, like I did, that if you order a pineapple bun with butter that you get a little pat wrapped in foil on the side, or maybe they spread a little margarine over it like you would a piece of toast. But you’d be wrong. They slice the still-warm pineapple bun in half and put a slab of butter in the middle that is about three inches by five inches and maybe half an inch thick. I mean, it’s like half a cube of butter. Real butter. Sweet butter.

And damn is it good.

So my two pineapple buns come and then my Hong Kong-style coffee and David has the same, and I’m thinking, We are set for the day. We have got enough here to hold us over until dinner. But I am wrong.

For David Lang, this is just the start. This is the appetizer. He’s already ordered a big bowl of macaroni and pork in broth. And congee, which is a nasty looking rice gruel. And a ham omelet. And a Hong Kong donut, which looks kind of like a churro. You know, to go with his two pineapple buns with butter. In short, enough calories to fuel a large family for three or four days. Unless you’re really hungry. Which, evidently, David is.