As the moon swells to full rotundity at this time of year, I think of cake. More specifically, mooncake. In the lunar calendar, late September typically marks both the end of the harvest and the rise of the supermoon, when the moon is closest to Earth. This is the perfect time to reflect on nature’s bounty and translate the harvest of summer crops, like lotus seeds and red beans, into a portable form. Thus arose the culturally and calorically rich mooncake, enjoyed throughout Asia—from China and Malaysia, to Taiwan and Vietnam—to celebrate the perigee of community, family, and the joy of harvest.
Many are familiar with the shelf-stable varietals of mooncakes—waxing with additives, flavor that never wanes; tin-packed in fours, sixes, or eights then piled in bulk at the 99 Ranch. When I was a kid, I could walk into mom’s pantry and find a way bygone mid-autumn mooncake three years later. These days, the mooncake is showing us a different face, as its modern makers incorporate clean, single-origin ingredients into fresh pastes, custards, jams, and other flavor-forward fillings. Across New York City, Chinatown mom-and-pops and Asian-American pop-ups alike are pushing out their unique takes on the durable nutcake of old. As the weather cooled from record highs this summer, I roved the streets for yuebing that embraced the romance of ephemerality with fresh interpretations of reflection, gratitude, and togetherness.
Cafe China: Elevated Classics
Cafe China’s mooncakes are a study in balance, where simple fillings allow the quality of the ingredients to shine. A strong focus on interiority also describes owner Yiming Wang’s approach, from decor to design to dining. Wang greets me in a white sweater and a cream checkerboard skirt on the restaurant’s ground floor, lively with customers yet intimate with the amber glow of tasseled lamps. We float upstairs to the celadon-clad serenity of the top floor. I take a seat across from the focal moon window (yue dong chuang), and she sits under the skylight. She begins with her parents. Based in Harbin, Wang’s parents were professors of Russian, Japanese, and Chinese literature. “They were very strict about what we ate growing up,” she recalls. Grocery stores in China often stocked foods full of sugar, salt, fillers, artificial flavors, and preservatives. “But there was one place they brought me to called Huamei Canting, a Russian restaurant. They baked their own bread and pastries, which left a very deep impression on me.” Decades later, Wang would revive the same philosophy with Cafe China. “We make everything from scratch. And our chefs work in an old-fashioned way, which we appreciate.” The attention to quality shows in their lotus paste mooncake, a fine example of the pastry’s classic roots. But for their emphasis on tried-and-true methods, Cafe China does not shy away from exploring new flavor combinations; their pineapple mooncake, a twist on the Taiwanese pineapple cake, featuring a tart filling tempered by a crumbly, salty egg yolk, is both subtly playful and delicious.
Kuih Cafe: Once in a Blue Mooncake
Most weekdays, Veronica Gan’s tiny Malaysian specialty shop is technically closed for business—but the half-lidded shop shutters bely a frenetic, deft pair of hands that could only ever mean business. With boots on the ground and fists in the dough, Gan’s grindstone work ethic and artistry flow as she whips up the city’s most knockout mooncakes. It was a snowskin mooncake that first stopped me in my tracks. Tinted with butterfly pea for a tie-dye midnight sky, her bingpi yuebing is debossed with a floating lantern, rabbit, and moon. The cutaway reveals a bright yellow yolk and grassy green pandan paste, like a 3D lunar landscape painting from the inside out. With short hair tucked behind her ears and black apron spackled in flour, Gan scrutinizes more of her edible sculptures, inspecting their lines and curvature with the gravity of a gemstone appraiser. Some don’t make the cut. One that does: a snow-white bingpi with a blooming floral design. Once again, Gan links inner with outer artfully, lacing silky mung bean paste with bursts of lychee fruit and dustings of rose petal fragments. She packs it into a square wood box. “Let me tell you,” she says, “my mooncakes are big.” Oh? “Yeah. 140 grams.” For every major holiday in the community—be it the Lunar New Year, where Gan makes nianbing, or the Dragon Boat Festival, where she wraps zongzi—she delivers without fail. “It’s only me and my husband,” she says. From the back of the kitchen, her husband beams. “I want to share a piece of myself with my customers, who are always supporting me,” she continues. “They’re good people. I just want to make something special for them.”
Ăn Xôi: Shoot for the Stars
A Saigon native, Thảo Bùi runs Vietnamese cuisine pop-up Ăn Xôi with her partner Duy Võ from a kitchen in Queens. Yet she agrees to meet me mid-mooncake delivery in Manhattan. I am brandished with a box of cakes crafted with the utmost precision. When we sit down for a quick coffee break, Bùi confesses with refreshing candor her childhood aversion to mooncakes. “I think I ate maybe two of them total growing up,” she says. “They were too sweet for me.” When the pandemic hit and she could no longer visit Vietnam, Bùi spent her days in the kitchen conjuring up the flavors of home—savory and sweet. “I looked into the history of our cuisine, read about the ingredients, learned the processes. Things clicked.” She started her pop-up then, but fell sick shortly after. Eight long months of immobility, pain, and misdiagnoses led Bùi to the operating table in January 2022, where doctors finally excavated the walnut-sized tumor that had jammed between her brain and spine. “I thought about my life a lot after that. Did I really want to go back to my old corporate job?” Her mother flew in from Vietnam to lend Bùi a hand with the pop-up in the weeks leading up to the Mid-Autumn Festival that year. “She asked me one day, ‘should we try making mooncakes?’” Bùi overcame her hesitance. “The times have changed, and our food has too. My mom told me mooncakes can come in all sorts of different flavors. We can do whatever we want.” And so Bùi made the mooncakes of her actual childhood dreams—bite-sized, colored with tropical fruit hues of durian, guava, honeydew, plums, and coconut. She plays with the medium in her “gold star” mooncake, where shredded coconut and green onion strands weave with sugar-soy pork floss.
Lady Wong Patisserie: The Next Phase
Husband-and-wife team Mogan Anthony and Seleste Tan met during their decade-long tenure as pastry chefs at Singapore’s Four Seasons Hotel. One sweet friends-to-lovers story later, they now run a shopfront in New York’s East Village and a stall in Midtown’s Singaporean food court, Urban Hawker. Their confections are just as charming as their meet-cute: Lady Wong’s angelic, dainty, and pastel bingpi are a solid contribution to the category of next-gen mooncakes. I am especially delighted as I try their chewy green bingpi with its toasted custard filling, redolent of nut butter, which hugs a bouncy pandan core. The Mid-Autumn Festival holds a special place in Tan’s heart. “Our family would be sitting outdoors enjoying the moonlight with a table full of peanuts, kuaci, and mooncake. Kids used bamboo sticks to hang lanterns and ran around the neighborhood.” Anthony chimes in, “And we still do that with our kids. The neighbors might be like, ‘What is this family doing?’ But we want to pass down as much as we can.” Tapping into their French-trained culinary backgrounds, Tan and Anthony showcase the breadth of Malaysian and Southeast Asian flavors in pristinely presented goods. Tucked behind a glass display, each cake and kuih sparkles. “We get a lot of younger customers from all Asian backgrounds,” Anthony says proudly. “They always tell us how much they appreciate our work, and what we’re doing for this generation, and the next.”
Yun Hai Shop and The Foundry Bakery: Roots Ascending
To ring in the festival this year, Taiwanese general store Yun Hai Shop in Brooklyn joins forces with Missouri bakery The Foundry Bakery to offer a fresh interpretation of the Taiwanese-style peng cake—known for its puffed, spherical shape that “pongs!” outward. The result: mooncakes that actually look like the moon. An in-house craft ethos backs every element of this mooncake, but it should come as no surprise that behind the concept lies St. Louis-based baker Ray Yeh’s scientific rigor. A former molecular geneticist, Yeh tackles baking challenges with methodical precision. Yun Hai co-owners Lisa Cheng Smith and Lillian Lin discovered Yeh online and knew they wanted to amplify his work to a New York audience. The peng style of mooncake was “created in the 1920s or ’30s by applying new Japanese baking techniques to the Chinese pastry tradition—a product of Taiwan’s history of Japanese occupation,” Lin says of the pastry’s history. For this launch, Yeh advanced the technique to produce a hypnotically swirled and laminated shell. I’m especially entranced by the lavender-hued taro mooncake. Taro root lends a mellow and cozy flavor and texture; Yeh’s version will surprise even the most avid taro fiend (me) with its pillowy, soft, and gentle mouthfeel. Meanwhile, the cross-section reveals an autumnal surprise: a sprightly roast chestnut at the core. “They’re just beans, seeds, and roots from underground,” Smith says of the ingredients. “But transformed into a cake, they’ve ascended.”
Special thanks to:
Crystal Chuen-Yee Chen
Jordan Mixon (Set Designer)
Cafe China:
Yiming Wang
Xian Zhang
Kuih Cafe:
Veronica Gan
Chen Lin
Ăn Xôi:
Thảo Bùi
Duy Võ
Lady Wong Patisserie:
Seleste Tan
Mogan Anthony
Yun Hai Shop:
Lillian Lin
Lisa Cheng Smith
The Foundry Bakery:
Ray Yeh
Leah Yeh
