Gongfu Cafe & Bao, a restaurant in Ottawa, Canada, offers a unique dining experience by serving Hong Kong-style snacks with a twist. The menu includes items like French toast with rhubarb puree, hand-pulled milk tea, and pineapple buns. The cafe’s design takes inspiration from the simple, open kitchens of Hong Kong’s traditional cha chaan teng cafes.
The owner and chef, Tarek Hassan, is not originally from Hong Kong or even of Chinese descent. Hassan, a 46-year-old Egyptian-Canadian, developed a deep appreciation for Cantonese food and culture after watching the 1989 film The Killer.
“In many ways, [the film] is a love letter to Hong Kong, exploring different settings and locations and the scenes of Hong Kong,” Hassan explains. “It really made me fall in love with the place.”
Hassan’s passion for Cantonese cuisine and cha chaan tengs has earned his cafe recognition on the Chinese Restaurant Awards’ Elite 30 Canada 2025 Top 50 Honorees list.
“I’m floored,” Hassan says. “It feels like both a weight and an honour, because I feel like a lot of people will feel like it should be Chinese-owned businesses on that list. [But] I feel [the recognition] has to do with the care and energy that went into the cafe.”
Originally from Alexandria, Egypt, Hassan’s family moved to London when he was 11. It was during this time that he saw The Killer and soon after, experienced Cantonese food for the first time at Lee Ho Fook, which was the first Chinese restaurant in London to earn a Michelin star in the 1970s.
“I was just blown away,” he recalls. “Imagine: someone who’d never had Chinese food in their early teens, and they’re starting to get passionate and excited about food, and then they experience those flavours and textures and wok hei [the flavour of a perfect stir-fried dish]. It was just overwhelmingly compelling.”
Five years later, Hassan’s family relocated to Toronto, Canada, and he pursued computer systems engineering in Ottawa. His mother gifted him a carbon steel wok as a parting present, requesting that he call her each time he used it. “It was kind of emblematic of my obsession with the cuisine,” he says.
While studying, Hassan volunteered to cook meals for students and worked in restaurants during summer vacations. Upon graduating, he realised that engineering was not his true calling and shifted his focus to the psychological aspects of people’s relationship with technology.
“The design philosophy and design thinking helped me come up with a brand, understand the user experience, and that all kind of factored into my engagement with the culinary world,” he explains.
Hassan decided to attend culinary school, driven by his desire to work in the kitchen. During his program, he apprenticed at a Thai-Caribbean restaurant, where he had the opportunity to hone his skills at the wok station.
“My chef, who also was my mentor, said that when I worked the wok, he saw me as an old street-food wok person in my previous life, that I was at home using a wok,” he says.
Alongside his restaurant work, Hassan also developed his baking skills.
In 2012, he gained attention for his innovative bao (steamed buns) creations at a fundraising event. These buns were filled with a terrine made from corned beef and beef heart, a combination that surprised many attendees. The texture of the baos also fascinated people.
“I feel like a lot of people, by default, are tentative around ‘ethnic foods’, but steamed buns have a really broad appeal. It’s fluffy bread without any crust … so there are a lot of people who are surprised by how accessible they find it,” he says.
When the City of Ottawa announced street food vending permit applications a few months later, Hassan saw it as a learning opportunity. He developed a business plan for a food cart selling steamed bao.
To his surprise, his application was approved. He quickly launched a crowdfunding campaign, raising CA$12,000 (US$8,700) to purchase a food cart equipped with bamboo steamers and launch his business in 2013.
Initially, Hassan had to educate customers about steamed buns and his culinary vision. His fillings ranged from homemade char siu barbecued pork with a maple syrup and Shaoxing wine glaze to more unconventional choices like Hawaiian pizza and vegetarian Panang curry.
The steamed baos became popular, and five years later, Hassan felt ready to open a physical restaurant. In 2017, he and his friend, architect Ian Ho Kin-yuen, travelled to Hong Kong to immerse themselves in the city’s culinary scene and atmosphere, drawing inspiration for Gongfu Cafe & Bao’s menu and design.
Hassan describes his first visit to Hong Kong as a full-circle moment. “It reminded me of how obsessed I was with the city [and how] that kind of sparked this whole interest in Chinese food and Chinese culture.”
The pair explored many establishments, including Hoi On Cafe, Saam Hui Yaat, and Lin Heung. They also sampled dim sum, bamboo noodles at Lau Sum Kee, Hong Kong-style milk tea at Lan Fong Yuen, and baos at May Chow’s Little Bao.
During his visit, Hassan observed the influence of British colonial history on Hong Kong’s cuisine.
“There’s this shared DNA for places whose cuisine has been touched by British colonialism, and then adopted into something that’s more aligned or more at home within that specific culture,” he notes.
He also noticed parallels with his own culture, such as the use of corned beef, known as bully beef by the British, in egg and corned beef sandwiches. “[It’s] the same name in Egypt, which is what I grew up eating as a breakfast food,” he says.
Hassan incorporates elements of familiarity into his cafe, aiming for details that resonate with each guest in different ways. Gongfu Cafe & Bao’s design avoids overt “Chinese” motifs, opting for a diner-like atmosphere with classic cha chaan teng elements like booth seating and green and white tiles.
“For most people, they will think, ‘Oh, that’s a weird, cool tile pattern,’ but someone who’s been to a cha chaan teng will immediately be like, ‘I get this,'” Hassan explains.
“But also, someone else might come in and have a feeling of comfort or familiarity with this tile, because their grandmother’s bathroom had this kind of tile,” he says. “And so this different spectrum of familiarity and comfort is something we were pursuing from the get-go with a brick and mortar. It’s the same with our cuisine too.
“That felt like our approach to acknowledging and having sort of this Easter egg for someone whose cuisine or culture it is, without being extractive.”