The bubblewrap waffle is a snack with all the trappings of 2018. It is Instagram-friendly, has a daft name and is rooted in deep and meaningful culinary history that it plays on in order to fill a need which didn’t exist before.
Before you ask – and I did – bubblewrap waffles are indeed named because of their resemblance to the packaging. Every so often Sunny Wu, founder of Bubblewrap in London’s Chinatown, will receive a phone order for a metre-long roll of packaging.
It opened in 2015, first as a stall and last year as a bricks and mortar shop. Shortly after opening, Wu lost her voice because she had to explain the history to every customer. Back then, she was selling two a day, sometimes none. Now, over a weekend, it’s hundreds; Wu has considered live-tweeting the queue.
To understand the egg waffle – to use its proper name – is to understand its provenance. The most commonly held theory suggests egg waffles, or gai daan jai, were street food items first sold in Hong Kong in the early 1950s. They were originally conceived as a way of using up broken eggs, with people adding them to flour, milk and sugar to create a batter. These waffles used to be made on a hexagonal waffle iron and cooked on charcoal. Where they came from before that is open to debate, but Wu believes they were inspired by European waffles – “it was a colony after all” she trills, with some irony – with the recipe travelling and morphing from west to east and back again. When Hong Kong entered its period of economic reform, eating habits branched out – eating waffles became less about survival and more about pleasure.
Here, pleasure certainly abounds; each warm waffle is rolled into a cone and filled with ice-cream, fruit, sauce and nuts. The taste is akin to a regular waffle, except lighter, with a slightly sweeter crust. The bubbles don’t pop so much as melt. In the past few weeks, Wu created a vegan version, made with linseed instead of egg, and all toppings vegan, too. Bubblewrap sells this vegan variety on Fridays, so as not to contaminate the waffle irons. I have yet to taste a vegan alternative of anything so close to the original. It is slightly softer in texture, but otherwise Wu is either a scientist or a witch.
In an age when Instagram is considered to be the first and final symbol of millennial navel-gazing, and “bad vegans” – those who adopt the diet for superficial reasons – are seriously frowned upon, it is refreshing to meet someone who doesn’t seem to care what people think if she embraces both.
Wu joined Instagram the year it launched, and has even hallmarked her own shot in which customers hold the bubblewrap up in front of Wardour Street’s Ching dynasty-designed gate, as if the batter alone has been marketed for peak Instagrammability. “Most people order strawberry and Oreo because the colours work,” she says. “Why not?” she shrugs. “It’s fun.”
