Milk tea, pineapple buns and macaroni with sliced ham are the signature dishes at cha chaan teng. But other delicacies have long vanished from their tables.
One of them is "black cake", an ultra-thick pancake that can feed several people, says Lau Wing-po, the boss at Ngan Lung Catering.
"Usually a family would order one of these cakes with two cups of tea," he recalls. "We had to pan-fry it for half an hour."
Despite their popularity, the cakes took so long to cook that it became uneconomic for restaurants to offer them.
Other items have disappeared due to people's changing tastes.
Among them are two sweet soups - "phoenix milky soup" and "lotus seed tea". The former was a popular treat in the 1950s, made by adding a raw egg to sweetened custard sauce. The other shared some similarities, and was finished by cracking an egg into boiled lotus seed soup.