Davina Chang’s Paris cafe Bing Sutt was a tribute to Hong Kong – so what’s next for the cookbook author?

Hongkonger Davina Chang has called a cosy corner of Paris’ 3rd Arrondissement hers for the past three and a half years, along with the many customers from near and far who have stopped by her cafe, Bing Sutt. They come in search of a slice of life – and a warm pineapple bun – from her home city.
Chang’s cafe is inspired by the old-school bing sutt, or “ice rooms”, which have offered generations of Hongkongers respite from the brutal summer heat with Western-influenced snacks and drinks. It’s also created a new kind of safe space for Paris’ cosmopolitan, well-travelled community – one that reflects her own multicultural upbringing and the growing demand for diverse, meaningful food and beverage spaces.

It’s also opened up the floor for heartwarming conversations and unexpected changes, says Chang, who hosted a fundraiser for families affected by the Tai Po fires at Bing Sutt last December, and has received many a thank-you note from homesick Hongkongers throughout her time running the cafe, which just closed its doors last week. Having first set up shop in December 2022, the restaurant owner, content creator and now cookbook author is, after many cups of yuen yeung and char siu bowls served, ready to turn the page and pursue another dream.

Long before starting a restaurant of her own, Chang was just a fan of frequenting them. She launched her food page, @thecolordiet, on Instagram while living in New York, just as the city was experiencing a colourful food trend prompted by viral rainbow bagels and doughnuts. “The fact that I was too lazy to cook is why I always ended up in restaurants,” she said as we caught up ahead of Bing Sutt’s closure earlier this month.
Though it took some time for her account to gain traction, the network she gradually built eventually paid off. “Everything was very organic,” she said of the cafe’s opening and growth. “I didn’t really work with press or media, they came to me. I had my Instagram so I had a lot of influencer friends, and they would support and naturally post about it without me telling them to.”

It’s been a “non-stop lifestyle” ever since, said Chang, who has juggled content creation with her full-time barista duties at the cafe. She’s also co-authored a cookbook, A Taste of Hong Kong: 70 Essential Recipes from Asia’s World City, with food stylist and writer Ada Deschanel, who popped into Bing Sutt for a pastry one day – and kept coming back. Never did Chang imagine she would be overwhelmed with opportunities like this. “When I had to start fresh in Paris, I was like, ‘God, I’m never going to get anywhere,’” she laughed. “My husband still talks like, ‘Remember the first time you got an invitation for a poke bowl and how excited you were?’”

Having acclimated to different cities several times throughout her career – perhaps unsurprisingly so, given that she grew up in one of the most international places in the world – Chang is a true Hong Kong kid and third culture individual at heart. She first moved to New York as a university student, then Singapore as a young professional before landing in Paris for business school. Also like many Hongkongers, Chang previously lived a fast-paced life with little time to cook at home, and even less time to reflect on what she truly wanted to do.

“I don’t think I knew that many careers existed,” she said of defaulting to working in finance after university. “In Singapore and in finance, I had no time to eat, so my follower count just plummeted.” She then quit and travelled the world for a few months, when she met her now-husband and soon decided to join him in Europe. Having learned French in high school, Chang thought to apply to HEC Paris Business School and rebuild her life – and Instagram account – in the city thereafter.

“I was envisioning working in a restaurant group like Black Sheep, even a hotel group,” she says. “But since I graduated from my master’s degree right at the beginning of Covid, that was clearly the industry most affected. I wasn’t speaking working-level French back then, on the student visa. Everything wasn’t working out for me in terms of landing a job in the food industry.”
With plenty of time on her hands during the pandemic, Chang turned to a dream she had long nurtured but was never able to bring to fruition. “Paris was really the first place I saw myself [staying] in the foreseeable future,” she said. “I just started to sign up for barista classes, look into different store spaces, brainstorm. Once lockdown was over, because of my Instagram account, I already had a bunch of contacts of coffee shop owners, so I asked if they’d let me do some shifts with them to see if I liked this customer-facing role.”

Chang credits her time in finance for giving her some foundational understanding of what it takes to run a business, as well as a good few years’ of earnings to work with. After months of moonlighting as a barista, she began putting her dreams in motion, navigating the red tape of setting up a business in France as a foreigner and finding the right architects and interior designers to work with. “Admin is as bad as they say it is,” she quipped.

Focusing more on the daily front-of-house operations at Bing Sutt, Chang worked closely with a pastry chef partner from Guangdong province who grew up in the US to develop the cafe’s signature dishes. It wasn’t until Chang worked on her cookbook that she took a more active role baking, cooking and writing up her own recipes for dishes she grew up with. “It was actually easier than I thought, even better in some cases because you have better butter [and flour], less humidity,” she said of recreating egg tarts and the like in France.
Burnout, health problems and changing priorities meant Chang couldn’t continue operating Bing Sutt much longer, with the prospect of hiring replacement staff being too expensive to consider. But taking on new projects has shown her that there remain so many other avenues through which to pursue her passion for food and create community around it. Looking back fondly on showing off Hong Kong culture through the food and design of her space, Chang says Bing Sutt’s closure isn’t the end of the road. She’s looking forward to more content creation projects, more time brainstorming her next steps, and teasing a potential new Taiwanese product of hers in the drinks sector.
“It’s the best of both worlds,” Chang said of building a largely English-speaking audience through her ventures despite being based in France. “I learned to use my own characteristics, personality and background to my advantage to stand out instead of trying to compete with locals.”