Henan's Peppery Breakfast Soup Reaches London at 87 Yuan a Bowl
Fangzhongshan, Henan's best-known hulatang chain, has opened its first overseas store in central London, selling the peppery breakfast soup with no concession to local tastes — following a 26-year-old pioneer whose King's Cross shop proved the demand exists.
Hulatang is not an obvious export. The defining breakfast of Henan province is a thick, peppery soup of beef broth, gluten strips and vermicelli, seasoned with black pepper rather than chili, ladled steaming at dawn alongside fried dough twists. It is heavy, it is breakfast-only, and its heat is the kind that builds rather than bites. Yet this autumn it has a beachhead in London.
On September 26, Fangzhongshan — the chain most Henan eaters would name first — opened its first overseas store in central London, selling its signature soup at about 87 yuan (roughly £9.50) a bowl. The store announced a policy of "no localization compromise", and its early clientele is mostly Chinese students. It took over a premises whose previous tenant was a Shaxian Snacks — another regional Chinese chain that made the same journey. The opening trended on Baidu's hot list within days.
It is also the second attempt, and the brand is following a pioneer. Liu Xiaochao, a 26-year-old from Zhengzhou, opened a hulatang breakfast shop near King's Cross in December 2025 after nearly two years of preparation, charging 130 yuan a bowl and serving about 300 customers a day, roughly a third of them not Chinese. In March this year he formally relaunched as the UK's first Xiaoyaozhen-style shop — Xiaoyaozhen being the Henan town whose pepper-rich recipe is hulatang's benchmark — and brought the price down to 88 yuan. His ingredients are air-freighted from China; the spice blend travels in his own luggage.
The customers Liu chronicled on Weibo explain the demand better than any market study. "As a Henan student studying abroad, there's nothing more comfortable than a bowl of spicy soup with steamed buns in the morning. After eating it, I really felt like I was home. The taste is very authentic," one message his shop shared reads.
The global canon of Chinese food has long been Sichuan heat and Cantonese dim sum; the newer wave — Shaxian, malatang chains, and now a Henan breakfast soup — is provincial and specific, aimed first at the diaspora and only then at the curious. The near-identical price points, 87 and 88 yuan, suggest the two shops have found the same market-clearing number.
Whether London beyond the homesick will take to a peppery dawn soup is the open question both stores are now betting on. Liu's window sign hedges beautifully: "The god of hulatang will bless every child drifting outside.