Marian Bull is a writer, potter and editor living in Brooklyn. She writes a weekly cooking newsletter called Mess Hall. In our new series called Dishing, Marian will get the story behind a tasty dish at a local restaurant.
Walk into Lady Wong, a narrow Southeast Asian pastry shop in the East Village, and you’ll find cases full of gleaming sweets.
A lemon-coconut mousse cake reveals a middle layer of passion fruit-calamansi curd; pandan matcha ganache screams green from atop a round, saucer-sized tart; and a dozen varieties of steamed cakes, or kuihs, glisten with the promise of glutinous rice flour — which offers a dense, bouncy chew. The worst choice you can make here is to leave with only one thing.
If you visit on a summer day, you’ll also likely find a tray of oval sweets stamped with geometric patterns. These are angku kuih, or red tortoise cake, a celebration item that has undergone many iterations since owners Mogan Anthony and Seleste Tan opened their brick and mortar shop in March 2022.
Lady Wong's angku kuih, or red tortoise cakes.
Reece Taylor Williams/Gothamist
“I enjoyed these as a little kid — my father used to buy them for me,” said Anthony on a recent August day, perched on a stool outside inside the tiny store. As he spoke, customers swept in and out, picking up special order cakes or an afternoon pick-me-up. “I grew up in a Chinese village in Malaysia, and I married a Chinese woman from Malaysia, and we both ended up in the restaurant business. So when we make these things, we have all these feelings for the products that are instilled in the back of our head.”
Ever since the couple hatched the idea of Lady Wong, they knew they wanted angku kuih on their menu. In Malaysia and China, it’s a good-luck food that's often served at birthday parties for the elderly or for a baby’s one-month birthday. Since tortoises live so long, they’re a sign of longevity.
As with many of their other kuihs, like the technicolor rainbow cake that’s as photogenic as it is delicious, it’s a treat that both Anthony and Tan have warm memories of. They knew it was crucial to get the flavor and texture right — a project that would end up taking longer than expected.
Mogan Anthony, who owns and runs Lady Wong with his wife, Seleste Tan.
Reece Taylor Williams/Gothamist
To develop their angku kuih recipe, Anthony and Tan researched techniques by combing YouTube, the internet and the expertise of family and friends.
“Back in Malaysia, it’s a street food—we take it for granted,” Anthony said. “But when we made it here, we struggled. One time it would come out good, the next time it wouldn’t. I would ask my mother or my mother-in-law for advice, and then we’d say, 'Oh, it’s because it’s a 20 degree winter day.' You have to change it [for the environment.]”
Finally, they landed on a recipe that worked beautifully in their test kitchen.
To make the filling, they soak and steam mung beans, then cook them with coconut milk, pandan, sugar, and just enough shallot to impart a delicately savory sweetness. That mixture gets fried in a wok with oil until the fat emulsifies it into a paste — like thick mashed potatoes.
The outer layer is made from a dough of glutinous rice flour, which when mixed with water becomes thick enough to mold like clay. And while many recipes call for food coloring, Anthony and Tan use natural beet extract. The two components – the filling and the outer layer – become a united cake thanks to hand-carved wooden molds sourced from Malaysia, which make them look like intricate tortoise shells.
When the couple found the space in the East Village, they knew they’d have to produce everything out of the city — space is far cheaper when divorced from Manhattan ZIP codes. That March, they began producing their tortoise cakes in their commissary kitchen in North Salem, New York — not far from where they live in Connecticut — and driving them into the East Village.
However, they soon learned that the cakes dried out in cold weather — when made outside of Malaysia’s hot, humid climate, the rice flour dough lost its lusciousness. They decided that the only way to do it right would be to make it a summer specialty.
So now they make the cake when the weather allows, usually from May to October. It’s also available at their other locations in the Urban Hawker and Urban Space Vanderbilt food halls in Midtown.
These recipes and flavors just work in progress. It'll never be finalized.
All that effort and calculating has paid off. The angku kuih at Lady Wong is dense and chewy, and its soft, rich filling soft luxuriates on the border of sweet and savory. But Anthony and Tan are constant tinkerers, and the recipe continues to evolve.
“These recipes and flavors just work in progress,” Anthony said. “It'll never be finalized.”
They’ve also parlayed that experimental attitude into other pastries. While Lady Wong prides itself on faithful renditions of traditional kuihs, with as many ingredients as possible sourced from Malaysian farms, they also use French pastry as a Trojan horse for Southeast Asian flavors. Tan, after all, was a pastry chef at WD-50, Wylie Dufresne’s avant-garde tasting menu spot that shuttered in 2014. They fill the dome of a petit gateau with black sesame mousse and passion fruit caramel; crepe cakes are loaded with matcha and pandan.
Soon, Lady Wong will launch a collection of petit gateaux inspired by the tortoise cake, another set of recipes that they have been tinkering with for months. This, too, was something they knew they wanted at the outset, and now they finally have the capacity to make it happen.
The soon-to-come petit gateaux.
Reece Taylor Williams/Gothamist
To create the correct shape for the petit gateaux, Anthony reached out to a custom toy maker he found on Etsy who 3-D printed dozens of custom molds, which will offer that same tortoise-like design. The molds will be used to make delicate mousse cakes: coconut sponge, topped with mung bean or lychee paste, all beneath a dome of coconut or taro mousse.
Anthony hopes the cakes will be on shelves soon, but when he brings out a plate of prototypes, he eyes them like a painter wondering where to apply the last few strokes of paint. Each flavor is dusted with a different color: red, gold, or purple. For him, they’re an important expression of what Lady Wong does.
“People always say, there’s so many pastry shops in this city, how do you compete with them?” he says. “But we don’t want to compete with them. We want to stay in our lane. If people want these flavors, they’re going to come to us. In New York City, there’s always opportunity for flavors like this.”
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