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Pastry chef Gerard Dubois has opened a cafe called Sour Dough, where all the bread and pastries are made from sourdough.
LifestyleFood & Drink

Sourdough is the star of new cafe opened by pastry chef Gerard Dubois in Hong Kong – it’s in everything from bread to muffins

  • Sourdough used to be a hard sell in Hong Kong. Now it’s so popular that pastry chef Gerard Dubois has opened a cafe in Wan Chai where it is the star ingredient
  • At Sour Dough, all the bread and pastries – including croissants, pain au chocolat, Danish pastries, scones and muffins – are made from sourdough
Food and Drinks
Bernice Chan
Bernice Chanin Vancouver
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Sourdough bread is all the rage in Hong Kong, with more people than ever baking it or buying it, but pastry chef Gerard Dubois can remember a time when no one did.

“I love sourdough, but I never pushed it because the Chinese didn’t understand what I was talking about 30 years ago. Everybody said it was crispy and hard,” he recalls. At the time, he was a pastry chef at the Hilton Hotel in Central, on Hong Kong Island.

The Swiss baker has been baking sourdough bread since 1991 for his bakery La Rose Noire, which distributes baked goods to hotels, restaurants and supermarkets in Hong Kong as well as to 47 countries around the world.

Ten years ago he opened a chain, Passion by Gerard Dubois, which also offers sourdough bread. He has now opened a cafe called Sour Dough in Wan Chai, where all the bread and pastries – including croissants, pain au chocolat, Danish pastries, scones and muffins – are made from sourdough.
The inside of Sour Dough in Wan Chai.
“We are one of the first to do sourdough croissants,” he explains ahead of its opening on March 24. “We use 30 per cent sourdough in the dough so the croissant is more crispy, less salty and less sweet, and the pain au chocolat and Danishes too. There’s still butter but it’s more healthy.”

Sandwiches use sourdough bread that is either white, red or dark; there are vegan and vegetarian fillings, as well as pastrami and sauerkraut, and Cubano sandwiches. Salads are all vegan, as is the soup of the day.

A Cubano sandwich from Sour Dough.

“Twenty – even 10 – years ago when we talked about vegan [food], people said, ‘Vegan? No way’. When I started talking about organic [food] many years ago, people said, ‘No way’. But now vegan is in, and people are talking about it. The same with sourdough,” Dubois says.

Desserts are served in glass pots and cakes are presented in petal-shaped slices. Two desserts are for dine-in only, though. One is a made-to-order sourdough mille-feuille. The flaky pastry is layered with vanilla cream and finished with either raspberry and rhubarb compote or mango and apricot compote.

The other, a must-try, is the Mont Blanc, named after the mountain in the French Alps and made of chewy meringue, vanilla, whipped cream and a generous topping of chestnut paste.

Mille-feuille from Sour Dough.

“We bake everything on site, so when you enter the shop you can smell [the baked goods], see the pastries, sandwiches and salads, and then at the back you can see people baking bread,” he says.

With so many bakeries opened in Hong Kong, Dubois notes that there aren’t enough bakers, which is why he’s limiting Sour Dough to one location for now.

Sour Dough, G/F, Keen Hung Commercial Building, 80 Queen’s Road East, Wan Chai. No telephone number

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