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Victoria Burrows

British chefs are in the midst of a love affair with Cantonese prawn toast as the dish appears on tables across the country, spanning fine-dining hotspots, chef’s counters and street food markets.
In London, at Thai-Americana Chet’s in The Hoxton Shepherd’s Bush hotel, the dish is transformed into a crisp bun filled with house-made prawn paste, while at Sri Lankan street food specialist Adoh, it becomes a plate of neat, rectangular, chilli-spiced sandwiches.
At Cafe Kowloon in London Fields, opened by restaurateurs Frank Yeung and Abhinav Malde and acclaimed Filipino chef Budgie Montoya, the prawn toast is made with thick-cut sourdough from the lauded E5 Bakehouse next door and served with the crispy prawn heads plus a chilli oil and spring onion mayonnaise.
At the two-Michelin-star, 13-seater Humble Chicken in Soho, Japanese-German chef-owner Angelo Sato serves a deluxe version of the classic Cantonese snack as part of his exquisite 16-course tasting menu that combines his Asian and European heritage.

Sato’s take replaces the prawn with a generous langoustine tail, briefly grilled over binchotan (Japanese white charcoal) until plump and bouncy, and kissed by smoke. The tail reclines on a fresh shiso leaf and a layer of ssamjang (Korean fermented soy paste) made with fresh tomato and the brains of the langoustine, which in turn sits on a rectangle of deep-fried tempura toast generously sprinkled with sesame seeds.
The dish is named after a nearby Chinatown diner, Old Town 97, that stays open until 3am and is also the site of the team’s “late-night, post-service shenanigans”.
The rendition at Andy Beynon’s one-Michelin-star restaurant Behind, in Hackney, takes a different shape. An entire Sicilian red prawn from Mazara del Vallo is spread across a plate, its head meat removed, part of which is emulsified with Sicilian olive oil to make an accompanying sauce. The lightly warmed tail is draped on the plate, bare except for the tail fan.

Diners may not recognise the Cantonese dish within until the last bite. The remaining head meat is boiled, dehydrated, made into a mousse with fish trimmings and light spices, and stuffed back into the head casing, which itself is rolled in sesame seeds and deep-fried. Crunching into the head gives a sudden and unmistakable hit of recognition: prawn toast.
A consommé made from white wine and prawns is served alongside, with a ring of tiny flowers and miniature dried by-catch shrimp rimming the glass.
A beloved dish across Britain
Prawn toast is widely believed to be a 20th century Hong Kong creation, though some suggest it dates back even further to 19th century Guangdong. While its origin is debated, it is a beloved dish across Britain that, for many chefs and diners, sparks fond memories of childhood Chinese meals.
“For me, prawn toast means ‘Saturday night’. It’s nostalgia,” says Declan King, head chef at The Clarence gastropub in Glasgow, Scotland. “Every Saturday as a kid, my family would get a Chinese takeaway. Prawn toast is something I’ve brought into kitchens throughout my career, in some form or another.”
Cantonese prawn toast is generally made from a paste of chopped raw prawns (or shrimp), egg white, cornflour, ginger and sesame oil, spread on white toast and deep-fried until golden.
The classic British version is also sprinkled with a coating of sesame seeds. King’s rendition uses cream rather than egg whites, as he prefers the texture – “controversial, I know” – and includes chilli, lemongrass, a splash of rice vinegar and fish sauce, adding notes of Southeast Asia.

On the other side of Scotland, chef Roberta Hall-McCarron has a beauty of a prawn toast at Ardfern, her all-day cafe, bar and wine shop in Edinburgh’s Leith district.
A giant barbecued scarlet prawn – peeled and deveined but with the head and tail left on – rests on a thick slice of sourdough bread, deep-fried with a topping of prawn mousse lifted with spring onion, soy and a splash of dashi. The dish is finished off with a scattering of in-house peanut and chicken skin chilli crunch and fresh-cut spring onion.
“Food that is delicious and familiar to diners, but with a little bit more, always goes down well,” Hall-McCarron says.

Further variations
Back in London, chefs Jack Croft and William Murray, who run three restaurants – Fallow, Fowl and Roe – have a similar take.
“Prawn toast is a comforting classic and a good example of something simple that works because it’s well balanced,” Croft says. “It’s really about texture and savouriness rather than anything complicated.
“We weren’t looking to reinvent it, but to take a well-loved dish and apply our own approach and technique while keeping it immediately recognisable.”
They swap prawns for a more sustainable alternative: locally sourced cuttlefish, which have a “nice creamy texture”.
They blend the cuttlefish with their in-house green curry mix, fish sauce, egg whites and dashi. The mousse, sesame seeds and triangular slices of bread are fried until golden on both sides, and covered with sweet chilli jam. These are then topped with puffed crispy pork skin and spring onions.

Beynon’s fish-focused Behind is also built on principles of sustainability; his dissected prawn toast is zero-waste and respects the ingredient, as it gets “the maximum flavour of what prawn can be”.
In the hands of chef, journalist and cookbook writer Ravinder Bhogal, who has run Jikoni in London’s Marylebone since 2016 and has just opened Cafe Jikoni at the new V&A East Museum, prawn toast becomes something far more political: her prawn toast Scotch egg is a kind of “soft activism”, she says.
“It’s an emblem for us of two cultures colliding in a beautiful way – and making something better than the sum of the parts,” she says.
Collision is in prawn toast’s DNA: it is a mix of Chinese prawn paste and Western-style white toast. But at Jikoni, which specialises in what Bhogal taglines as “mixed heritage” cooking, the dish becomes even more multicultural as it is transformed into a Scotch egg – a classic British snack that may have origins in Indian nargisi kofta – but with Southeast Asian influences.

She finely chops prawns, mixes them with ginger, soy, sesame oil, chilli, salt and pepper, and wraps the paste around a softly boiled egg. She covers the sphere in panko breadcrumbs and blitzed spicy Thai prawn rice crackers. When fried, the flecks of prawn crackers puff up and get very crisp. She serves the Scotch eggs with banana ketchup and cucumber slices.
Takes by Chinese chefs
All these renditions of prawn toast may be thrillingly inventive and delicious, but what do Chinese chefs in the UK make of them? Are these versions by non-Chinese chefs disrespecting Cantonese culinary tradition?
Amy Poon, who opened her first restaurant, Poon’s, at London’s Somerset House last year after wildly successful pop-ups, feels that the “cultural appropriation thing” can “get too much”.
“I know people sometimes feel very strongly that food is political, but I want food to be something that unifies rather than divides. I don’t like the ‘I own this, you don’t own that’,” she says.
“We needn’t talk in such shouty terms; the pendulum swings so quickly from being respectful to incredibly righteous, and I don’t think that’s very effective. Let’s have a conversation and figure out who you are.”

The prawn toast found on Chinese restaurant menus across Britain may have already departed from the Cantonese original through the addition of sesame seeds – added as it is “something the British diner can recognise”, as Poon puts it – but it is still a Chinese dish.
“You wouldn’t find it in the annals of Chinese cooking; [the Qing-dynasty poet] Yuan Mei isn’t writing about prawn toast, but it doesn’t take a lot to acknowledge where something came from,” says Poon, noting that many British chefs are very much doing so.
“I think you should learn to play by the rules before you’re allowed to break them – as then you’re coming from a place of knowledge rather than ignorance, and it reinforces your own argument more. I always find it disappointing when people don’t want to learn.”

Hong Kong-born restaurateur Geoffrey Leong opened Leong’s Legend, which specialises in Taiwanese food, in London’s Chinatown in 2008, when most other restaurants there stuck to Western-tweaked Cantonese classics.
He opened Dumplings’ Legend nearby in 2010, where he has 400 dishes on the menu, including classic prawn toast and a version using a slice of baguette.
“I love baguette, and we leave the prawn tail sticking out the end so you get to see what you’re eating,” he says.
Dishes like this that tweak – or rewrite – tradition have been on the menu at Dumplings’ Legend since the beginning, and new dishes developed for special events are added to the kitchen’s growing library. Leong is on a mission to expand diners’ perceptions of what Chinese food can be.
“I was fearful that people always come to Chinese restaurants only to eat their favourite xiaolongbao or their familiar this or that dish, rather than be open-minded and try other dishes,” he says.
“We owe gratitude to the early pioneers introducing Chinese cuisine to the world, but there’s so much more to Chinese food, and I’d like diners here to realise that.”
A prawn toast from the history books
Amy Poon’s version of prawn toast at the elegantly styled Poon’s at London’s Somerset House is something special – although it took a “telling off” from her parents, Cecilia and William “Bill” Poon, who opened the original Poon’s restaurants in the 1970s, to spark its creation.
“I don’t really like prawn toast myself – you can find it in every gastropub, almost, between here and Aberdeen … probably made en masse by a catering company who sell it frozen,” Amy Poon says.
“My mother took me aside and said, ‘You know, darling, there are some dishes that pay the rent, pay your staff. Maybe you should reconsider, stop being stubborn.’ So I went to my father and said, ‘Could we make it extraordinary?’

Bill Poon, a seventh-generation master chef from Shunde, in China’s Guangdong province, alerted his daughter to an old-fashioned way of making prawn toast that is rarely found today as it is so labour-intensive.
The recipe uses a slice of pork back fat (lardo) in place of bread. As butchery is very rarely done today in-house, it is not easy to obtain a slab of back fat rather than offcuts. Once acquired, chefs must slice the back fat very thinly, cut the slices into small discs, then wash them and marinate them in wine overnight. Then they pat them with cornflour and potato flour and pour batter on top. The lardo is then topped with hand-chopped prawns and deep-fried with sesame seeds and breadcrumbs.
Amy Poon ultimately named the dish The Hill That Amy Didn’t Die On – a lighthearted nod to her submitting to her parents’ wisdom.


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Food and Drinks

How UK chefs are reinventing Cantonese prawn toast in thrillingly delicious ways

The prawn toast scotch egg at Jikoni is a coming together of Cantonese, British and Southeast Asian influences. Photo: Laura Jalbert

The classic prawn toast at Cafe Kowloon in London comes covered in sesame seeds. Chefs around the UK are now experimenting with the dish. Photo: Cafe Kowloon

At Humble Chicken, prawn toast is made with a langoustine tail laid over shiso, ssamjang and deep-fried tempura toast. Photo: Humble Chicken

Behind’s homage to Cantonese prawn toast uses a whole Sicilian red prawn. Photo: Dot Dash Media

The prawn toast at Thai-American restaurant Chet’s, in The Hoxton Shepherd’s Bush hotel, is made with a prawn-paste-stuffed bun. Photo: Victoria Burrows

At Ardfern in Edinburgh, a topping of prawn mousse rests on a thick slice of sourdough that is deep-fried before being topped with peanut and chicken skin chilli crunch. Photo: Victoria Burrows

At Roe, cuttlefish substitutes for prawns in the prawn toast. Photo: Roe

The prawn toast Scotch egg at Jikoni is a coming together of Cantonese, British and Southeast Asian influences. Photo: Laura Jalbert

Amy Poon says she wants food to be something that unifies rather than divides. Photo: Courtesy of Ani Sarpe

The prawn toast at Poon’s uses a slice of pork back fat (lardo) in place of bread. Photo: Victoria Burrows

Amy Poon (left) and her father, Bill Poon (right). Photo: courtesy of Amy Poon

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Lisa He and Sophie in front of China Star. He says that the next two months will be crucial for the survival of their family restaurant. Photo: courtesy of Lisa He

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Lifestyle

Food & Drink

A beloved Chinese restaurant dish across Britain, Cantonese prawn toast is being transformed in ways that must be tasted to be believed


A beloved Chinese restaurant dish across Britain, Cantonese prawn toast is being transformed in ways that must be tasted to be believed.


Chinese cuisine

Chinese culture

Asian diaspora

Asian Cuisine

How UK chefs are reinventing Cantonese prawn toast in thrillingly delicious ways

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}A beloved Chinese restaurant dish across Britain, Cantonese prawn toast is being transformed in ways that must be tasted to be believed

A beloved Chinese restaurant dish across Britain, Cantonese prawn toast is being transformed in ways that must be tasted to be believed