Where Asia's favourite foods came from, one at a time.
Eat Drink Asia picks a single food, such as dumplings, century eggs or a Sara Lee pound cake, and traces how it came to matter across Asia and beyond. SCMP journalists visit Hong Kong chefs, consult scholars and set family food memories beside the history.
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Eat Drink Asia comes from the South China Morning Post, and it handles food the way a newsroom handles a story: find the thread, then go and ask people about it. Each episode is built around a single thing to eat or drink. The titles show the range, with episodes on century eggs, dumplings, wok hei, Korean instant coffee as a Korea-wave export and how KFC became a Christmas tradition in Japan. One even takes on Sara Lee pound cake, a supermarket cake the episode calls the Asian-American equivalent of Proust's madeleine. The reporting is hands-on. For the wok hei story, Culture Desk senior reporter Lisa Kam goes around Hong Kong and puts the question to a chef with four decades of wok cooking. That episode also stops to explain the dai pai dong, an open-air street restaurant where food is mostly cooked in a wok, and hears from Grace, author of The Breath of the Wok. She describes how her father's obsession with wok hei has outlived him, carried on by people in Lake Tahoe who never met him. History comes with expert support. The dumpling episode sets its subject beside the compass, gunpowder, papermaking and printing, then brings in Dr. Dai Zhaoyu of Hong Kong Baptist University's School of Traditional Chinese Medicine to explain the legend crediting an Eastern Han dynasty doctor with the dumpling as a cure for frostbite. By the end, the story has reached a xiaolongbao wrapped around mochi and molten chocolate. Other episodes are looser. The century egg story starts with two presenters teasing out a nervous first taste, then visits a cook who makes century egg and pork congee, a cheap, comforting dish likened to chicken soup when you are ill. The instant coffee episode sets up its subject with a scene from the Disney Plus series Moving, in which the right ratio of sugar, coffee powder and creamer satisfies a deputy director's sweet tooth. It then hears from a Seoul office manager who keeps instant mix alongside the capsule machine, and follows what happened to instant coffee once global coffee chains arrived in the early 2000s. Elsewhere, memory does much of the work. In the Sara Lee episode, the narrator remembers boxes of the cake turning up at barbecues and potluck parties in Hong Kong, and a New York pastry chef recalls eating it frozen for breakfast as a child. The KFC episode includes a father's Chinese-style roast chicken stuffed with glutinous rice, his workaround for Hong Kong's tiny ovens, alongside a fried chicken brined in pickle for a lighter, sweeter finish. The voices change from story to story: Charmaine Mock and Sam Evans introduce the wok hei episode, while the dumpling story is presented by Bernice Chan and written and produced by Gerard Watt. The century egg reporting also has a video version on the SCMP website. For a first listen, the wok hei episode has the whole approach in one place: a cooking technique, a reporter out in Hong Kong and a personal story with real feeling behind it.
Made for: Suits a listener who wants food history told through reporting, and who enjoys hearing chefs, scholars and ordinary eaters explain why a century egg or a cup of instant coffee matters to them.
What sets it apart: It brings newsroom reporting to a single food at a time, mixing kitchen visits and academic sources with pop culture and personal memory, with Hong Kong's kitchens and street food in the mix.
Eat Drink Asia is an award-winning podcast by the South China Morning Post that deep dives into the forgotten history of some of Asia's most popular dishes that have gone global. Discover the human story behind some of Asia's most loved foods, drinks and condiments with SCMP journalists, as they speak with chefs, restaurateurs and food experts from across the region.
Century egg congee gets a comfort-food defense, and your breakfast standards may need revising.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Japan's Christmas chicken custom meets fried chicken built on pickle brine and spiced duck fat.
Christmas lands on the table in a few familiar forms: Hong Kong roast chicken stuffed with glutinous rice, turkey with stuffing and roast potatoes, and Japan's habit of choosing chicken, with KFC as the easy point of comparison.
A century egg shifts from family-banquet nerves to comfort food as congee shows how familiarity can change taste.
Eat Drink Asia approaches the century egg first as a test of belonging, then as food. A family banquet makes the first bite feel loaded, from the egg's dark gloss to the quiet pressure of elder approval.
A hot wok turns chemistry into aroma, char, and a Cantonese cooking memory that travels beyond Hong Kong.
Wok hei comes through as both kitchen science and lived memory. Chef Zhang Chaoking of Mingkut grounds the idea in the fierce heat that drives off moisture, caramelizes fat, and leaves a charred crust, then connects it to the Maillard reaction behind toasted bread, roasted…
A Chinese medicine legend opens into a thoughtful world history of dumplings.
Dumplings are treated here as a global food story with a clear Chinese point of departure. The episode follows jiaozi back to a legend about Zhang, an Eastern Han Dynasty doctor whose medical text still shapes practice, then uses Dr.
A food-history dispute opens into Hainanese migration and the shared past behind Singapore and Malaysia's claims.
Eat Drink Asia turns the Hainanese chicken rice debate into a compact food-history story, following the dish through Hainanese migration and the rival claims made around Singapore and Malaysia.
Follow the food and you find the politics.
Food history with the footnotes read aloud.
["KFC's Japanese Christmas tradition starts with a 1974 slogan, 'Kurisumasu ni wa Kentucky,' after Takeshi Okawada allegedly heard a customer say turkey was unavailable in Japan.", "Sam Evans says media reports put Christmas KFC dinners at about 3.6 million Japanese families, with holiday buckets accounting for roughly a third of the chain's annual Japan sales.", "Susan Jung and Daniel Calvert join from Los Angeles and Tokyo to compare KFC, Famichiki, and convenience-store fried chicken, then explain pickle brines, chili powder, and duck fat.", "The episode ends with Sam and Charmaine tasting KFC Hong Kong's original chicken, a spicy cup-noodle flavor version, and a hazelnut-chocolate Portuguese tart."]
Eat Drink Asia hosts Sam Evans and Charmaine Muck join regular guest Lisa Kam to explain why dishes like quail egg siu mai, pork liver siu mai, lat cheong goon and dai bao are "endangered" in Hong Kong.
Sam Evans and Charmi Mock open with a family-banquet century egg that looked like 'shiny coal' and ended with applause after the first bite.
Eat Drink Asia examines wok hei, the Cantonese 'breath of the wok,' through Lisa Kam's reporting across Hong Kong kitchens and dai pai dongs.
Eat Drink Asia follows Bernice Chan from Beijing’s Du Yi Chu to Shanghai, Hong Kong, Nepal, Japan, and Europe to trace dumplings across a 2021 global trade estimated at about 24 billion U.S.
["Eat Drink Asia frames Hainanese chicken rice as a Singapore-versus-Malaysia origin debate, then traces the dish back to Wen Chang in Hainan province and the Hainanese migration of the 1880s to 1940s.", "Hosts Alkira Reinfranck and Bernice Chan bring in Brian Wong, Norman Musa, and Anthony Tang to compare Singapore's 1940s chicken-rice shops, Malaysia's 1930s Nam Heong Chicken Rice in Kuala Lumpur, and a Hong Kong kitchen cooking 180 to 200 chickens a day.", "The episode also uses UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage status, Michelin-recognized hawker stalls, and the history of British Malaya to explain why both Singapore and Malaysia claim the same dish.", "Brian Wong's Wen Chang visit shows the original version as small chicken with yellow capsicum, calamansi, garlic, and ginger, not the black sauce-and-chilli plate that Shih and Hari argue over in Singapore and Malaysia."]
Eat Drink Asia follows tempura from 16th-century Portugal to Japanese cuisine, where fried vegetables and seafood took on new forms.
Eat Drink Asia traces tofu's American history from Benjamin Franklin's 1770 letter about Chinese soybean cheese to documented production by Woh Sing and Company in 1878.
This episode explores the cultural significance and history of Hong Kong egg tarts through interviews with locals and food experts.
The episode visits a KFC concept store in Hong Kong to explore the history and global variations of fried chicken, focusing on Asian adaptations.
This episode explores the story behind a $100 Wagyu beef burger and a speakeasy in New York City, with insights into Hong Kong's evolving food scene.
A feature interview with celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay about his new restaurant in Hong Kong.
This episode covers Korean street food in Koreatown, a popular Israeli restaurant in Hong Kong, and a cart noodle food challenge, plus the World's 50 Best Restaurants announcement.