All Crust, No Custard: Bao Shi Fu's Super-Long Egg Tart Draws a Backlash
A half-meter egg tart became China's pastry of the season, drawing queues and millions of Zhihu reads — until customers noticed how little custard is inside. The chain says it will 'optimize' the product.
The egg tart is a pillar of Hong Kong-style bakeries, a disc of flaky pastry the size of a palm. This autumn, the chain Bao Shi Fu decided China needed a bigger one: a rectangular "super-long egg tart" half a meter from end to end, sold in a box whose label spells it out — chao chang chang chang chang chang dan ta, the character for "long" repeated five times. It became the pastry of the season. On Zhihu, a question about why it went viral drew a heat score above four million; orders surged, some stores queued, and one expert quoted there advised that nobody should finish a whole tart alone.
Then came the reviews. Customers in recent days have swarmed the hashtag with a common complaint: the tart is all crust and barely any custard — quan shi pi, mei dan ye, "all skin, no egg," as the trending topic puts it. The proportion is the point. What people love about an egg tart is the soft, barely set center; the pastry is the supporting act. "This is a traffic product that exists to be photographed," one customer wrote. "You buy an egg tart for the silky filling, and the crust is only ever the supporting role. Now the crust is almost the whole thing, and the value collapses." Another poster's objection was simpler: "It's all sugar. Don't give this to children."
By September 28 the company's customer service was fielding journalists. The super-long tart is not sold at every branch, a representative told Jiu Pai News; production standards are identical nationwide, with a trainer dispatched to stores when the product launched. The criticism about thin filling has been "reported up to the stores and to the people in charge," and the company will "keep optimizing the product based on the customer experience."
The tart also landed in a familiar slot: China's annual cycle of novelty foods engineered for the camera, each displacing the last. "Last year it was milk-skin candied hawthorn, this year the super-long egg tart — what's next year's?" one Weibo user asked over a photo of both. Another put the weariness more bluntly: why, they wondered, does something like the super-long tart go viral every few months — and when will the country's "super-long vacation" finally trend?