“We actually opened a bakery out of necessity,” Nicole Ma, the co-owner of Hoko cafe on Brick Lane, tells Broadsheet. “Our bread supplier was closing down, so we were forced to make our own bread.”
Since early 2025, Ma and Ryan Leung, the husband-wife owners of Hoko Hong Kong Cafe and Covent Garden’s Hoko Wonton Noodles, have been looking for a site, training staff and perfecting their dough, ingredients and fermentation process. The result is Bakery Hoko, their new Cantonese bakery that opened a few weeks ago on Bethnal Green Road, just a two-minute walk from their cafe, which is modelled on Hong Kong’s cha chaan tengs, eateries that are similar to greasy spoons and serve Western and Cantonese dishes.
The bakery sits at the quieter end of the road, surrounded by small independent shops and trees. Its double shopfront divides the space between an open production kitchen and a customer-facing bakery, where everything is baked in small batches throughout the day.
Hong Kong-style French toast, a mainstay at Hoko’s cafe, is now made with milk bread that’s baked in-house and available to buy as a whole loaf. Alongside made-to-order brick toast, the menu includes Cantonese bakery favourites such as Ovaltine cream buns, beechwood-smoked sausage buns, bolo pineapple buns (a sweet bun with a crackly sweet topping) with thick slabs of salted butter, Hong Kong egg tarts, snow-crust char siu buns, Horlicks swiss rolls and seaweed egg salad buns. Weekend specials include a garlic mascarpone cream cone.
“Our goal was never to reinvent what Hong Kong bread is,” Ma says. “Traditionally, many cha chaan tengs in Hong Kong would have a bakery nearby or connected to them, so it feels like a natural way for us to complete that story and recreate more of that experience in London.”
For the past five years, Hoko has been carving out a space for Hong Kong food and culture in east and central London. Similarly, Bakery Hoko draws inspiration from the old-school bakeries found in neighbourhoods and public housing estates across Hong Kong, but filters them through a distinctly contemporary-London lens.
Designed by Justin Melican of Block 1: Design, who also worked on Hoko’s cafe, the space features a dark Ketley brick counter, translucent glass-brick wall, butter-yellow Formica tables, stainless steel chairs and mosaic tiles wrapping the structural columns. The mixture of materials and patterned surfaces echo the stairwells, corridors and housing estates familiar to generations of Hongkongers.
There are personal touches, too: photographs of Hong Kong housing estates taken by Ma and Leung, plastic bread trays, orange bakery tongs and vintage blue melamine plates sourced by Ma’s mum. Cantopop plays overhead. “We wanted these details to feel familiar to people who grew up around them,” Ma says, “while still allowing the space to feel contemporary and distinctly Hoko”.
There’s also room to sit in with a drink, with options ranging from Hoko’s signature Hong Kong milk tea and yuen yeung to oolong cold brew, red bean ice with milk, Horlicks-foam Ovaltine and iced sugar cane jasmine tea, alongside a selection of hot Chinese teas.
For Ma, the bakery brings Hoko into a more universal category. “Bread and bakeries exist across almost every culture, and Hong Kong baking itself reflects that history of adaptation and cultural mixing,” she says. “That flexibility is something we find very interesting about Hong Kong cuisine generally.”
Bakery Hoko
152–154 Bethnal Green Road, E2 6DG
Hours:
Mon to Fri 8am–5pm
Sat & Sun 9am–6pm
