Hong Kong style street treats
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
419 6th Ave S International District
206 / 682-1267 website
-newly expanded with extra seats
Interview with owner, Tom Dang
Tom Dang is the manager and part-owner of Sub Sand, a lunch spot that’s been open for about 3 years.
“I’d been working at a lot of different locations, different types of restaurants, different types of cooking. I’d been working for Chinese restaurants, and Vietnamese restaurants, and even American restaurants, for the last, like maybe, I would say, twenty years.”
“When we are first open up this the idea is from, you know, like, well, me and the guy that eat sandwiches a lot and I been trying some of the local sandwiches and then I thought maybe if i can open up a shop that sells sandwiches around here then probably I could get a better job...”
“It wasn’t a sandwiches shop over here when we first opened up. So that is pretty much the idea that it came from. So we just want to be like one of a kind here in the I.D.
“And then I love them so I just keep creating, what to put on sandwiches, to make it better, you know. We have like special goes on every day, the special sandwiches that daily, most of them are not on the regular menu. So that is the “special special” you know, so...yeah.
Like Tom himself, Sub Sand’s offerings are a mix of different cultures: “It is more like Vietnamese-Chinese style cooking. Because I’m Vietnamese but I’m Chinese; I’m Vietnamese-Chinese. It is the stuff that when I was like, that I ate, and growing up with so I want to bring them back, these days, because this kind of style of cooking not so many people do around here in Seattle.”
Sub Sand’s extensive dessert menu reflects his wife’s background--and her strong sweet tooth.
“Most of the desserts that we have here is Hong Kong style. The reason why is like, my in-laws, they’re all from Hong Kong, yeah, and my wife is from there too. What it was is we went to Hong Kong to like visit them, you know, kind of like on and off for the last 15 years. And we went and we always try like street food and snacks and stuff, you know, and then my wife she just was like in love with them. And then every time we went to Hong Kong we took like a short-term, like a little tiny course that they teach you how to make you know sweets, and, you know, like desserts, and that. And a lot of them, some of them we learn from books as well, too.
“We got like tofu custard, we got egg custard, we got the red bean custard. We got ginger milk custard. Today we got the red bean sweet soup.”
“And also we got one dessert called like Chinese herbal custard. It taste a little tiny bitter but has herb in there and that is one of the pretty famous dessert from Hong Kong...it help for you if you have like a sore throat, you know, like for winter time. You know and also if you have like bad heat in your body system it kind of help to flush it out a little bit. So that’s why it taste bitter. You know how herbal is? Herbal is always tastes a little bitter.
“We’ve got a pretty large range of desserts, but we don’t have them every day--we rotating them these days. We used to have them all but because my cooler is getting smaller and smaller every day, you know. So now we’re rotating. We keep maybe two to three different desserts for a certain amount of days, like for three-to-four days, and then we turn around and we make something else.”
 |
| egg puff |
At a griddle station near the window, Tom creates Sub Sand’s most popular treat, the “egg puff”: “We’ve got the egg puff, which is like everyday, and it is the most selling dessert. People will love to order and then eat on the way out...”
The egg puff looks kind of like a designer waffle, with rows of round domes instead of square dents.
“The egg puff’s been around for I would say, like maybe, in Asia, they’ve been around like for a long, long time. for maybe 30 years. Back then people make them with charcoal.
“When I was a teenager, so we went to Hong Kong and they sell them all over, like every corner of the block, you’re standing right there and they’re making them. Also we tried and we were in love with them too.
“And we started to think of a way, say hey, we should bring this back to Seattle and sell them, because like every time we want an egg puff we have to drive all the way to Vancouver to get them (because they’re more popular over there back then).
“And then we were trying to bring them back to Seattle and then one time we went to Hong Kong and then I told my wife, you know: Hey, if you like egg puff, why don’t you take a little tiny course and you’ll have people show you how to make them? And then we went to a course for like four days over there and then we started buying like machine and make them.
“But at first it was like pretty sloppy and we didn’t make it turn out crispy and it wasn’t that good. Her dad does this person, his friend, who owns probably like five stands that sell nothing but egg puff over there in Hong Kong. So then we finally call him up and and say, ‘Hey Dad, we need some help from the guy!’ And then he wrote down like a new recipe, how he does his egg puff, and then we started bringing back to Seattle. And we’d try and try and try for, you know, like a year, and finally we nailed it down. And that’s the history of it.
“Now we make them with like green tea flavors, we got them in chocolate flavors, also shredded coconut, and little tiny peanuts in there, and we put like strawberry flavors in there now.
“My wife she was like really in love with them, she eats them and then she tries to work with them, you know, and we found out a way which is like we can make them really crispy from the outside and kind of spongy from inside so you have like different texture when you bite them, that’s how it is. That’s what the egg puff is now.”
