How Macau’s Portuguese egg tart was created by a British pharmacist-turned-baker

Andrew Stow didn’t set out to create the edible icon of Macau. The British pharmacist-turned-baker was just trying to make the city’s Portuguese community feel a little more at home.

“It was because Andrew went to Belém [in Portugal] and saw pasteis de nata, and really liked what the culture was, to stop and have an espresso and an egg tart together,” says his sister Eileen Stow. “The shot of caffeine and the shot of sugar to get you through the day was the thing and he thought, ‘why isn’t that in Macau’?”

Andrew returned to Macau, his home since 1979, and started experimenting with his own version of the Portuguese egg pastry. Not long after, he opened Lord Stow’s Bakery in Coloane Village – with the initial intention to deliver breads and pastries to supermarkets – and included egg tarts among the more typical fare of sandwiches and birthday cakes.

Little did he know how much the local Chinese community would embrace what they referred to as the “Portuguese egg tart”, given its differences from the more commonly known egg tart served as dim sum. “He had no idea,” Eileen says. “They liked them so much that they would take them to their friends in Hong Kong. And then when their friends from Hong Kong came to visit, they said, ‘oh, we must find that bakery and take some home for our friends’. So it was the Hong Kong visitors who helped fuel the fire of fame.”

More than 25 years after selling its first egg tart, and eight years since Andrew’s sudden death from an asthma attack, Lord Stow’s Bakery now produces about 13,000 a day of what has become one of the most recognised symbols of Macau.

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“Macau is that fusion of everything,” says Eileen, who has been managing the business since Andrew’s passing. “So the little egg tart sits well with that.”

Despite its reputation as Portuguese, this particular “little egg tart” is truly a fusion of cultures and imaginations. Its legend begins with Andrew, who grew up in Essex, England, with two sisters.

“He was the adventurer, not me and not my sister,” Eileen recalls. “As a teenager he was cycling to Germany and learning German before he went. He was going to kibbutzim in Israel. He loved to travel and see other cultures.”

After helping his mother, who worked at a chemist, Andrew studied pharmaceuticals and joined Boots as an industrial pharmacist. He moved to Anglo French Laboratories in Macau in 1979 and, when the company moved a few years later, he decided to stay in Macau.