In his left hand, Daniel Wong tips a white ramekin of crème brûlée; in his right, he wields a blowtorch with a pointed blue flame. He passes the torch across the sugared surface of the dessert, slowly rotating the ceramic bowl. The sugar turns caramel-brown and bubbles, and for a few seconds is fluid enough to dance in time with the ramekin’s spin. The result is a cool crème brûlée with a perfectly even, glassy top.
Wong is the chief cook, torch-wielder and proverbial bottle-washer at Crackle Crème, the latest addition to Chinatown’s so-hip-it-hurts Union Street. The name on the glass front is a bit ambiguous: is it Crackle Crème or Crack le Crème? Wong goes with the latter but says, “You can pronounce it however you want. Both ways are right.”
Open since June, Crackle Crème is an ode to crème brûlée. In inattentive hands, this deceptively simple baked custard can go so wrong: gritty, lumpy or worse, like scrambled eggs (baked in a too-hot oven); puddly in the middle (not enough time to rest and set); or past brûléed and completely burnt on top (no excuses).
Wong makes none of these mistakes. North American flavours like vanilla bean and Earl Grey are rich and sweet without being cloying, while Asian-inspired flavours like durian or pandan-coconut are lighter in texture and less sweet. Smartly, he’s also included higher-proof options. The Bailey’s crème brûlée is divine: perfectly smooth, decadently (but not overly) rich and unabashedly boozy.
Crackle Crème is Wong’s first business. He and his family moved to Vancouver from Hong Kong in the early ’90s, and his parents ran a Chinese bakery in East Vancouver for many years. But Wong never liked being in his parents’ bakery, opting instead to become an automotive refinisher — painting cars.
At the age of 29, Wong enrolled in the culinary program at Vancouver Community College. Unlike most culinary students, he had no designs on being a chef and to this day prefers dining out to cooking — he simply wanted to acquire some life skills. Out of the program, he knew how much work it was to run a bakery, and knew that working in kitchens would be equally grueling. So he settled on a slightly unusual concept: a tiny shop that would specialize in exceptional crème brûlée.
It’s not often that automotive refinishing and crème brûlée share a sentence, but it all makes sense to Wong. Working with cars, he learned to be organized and work clean, and that training is evident in his small kitchen. And where he used to work with paint and steel, his canvas is now cream and eggs.
“I love being creative,” he says. “It’s part of what I loved about painting cars, is you can mix so many different colours. So in a way, doing crème brûlées is kind of like mixing things for me.”
Wong sees an eclectic mix of people come into his shop, and he’s beginning to figure out what people like. He sees a lot of reluctant men who “get dragged in by their wives or girlfriends” but the mention of bourbon-hazelnut or Guinness-bacon crème brûlée tends to cheer them up. Women, he observes, are drawn to Earl Grey. And he’s also attracting attention for his vegan crème brûlée, made with soy milk and cashew cream.
Beyond crème brûlées, you can get Liege waffles with homemade ice cream, soda floats and espresso drinks. The space is tiny, so seating is limited, but ask nicely and Wong will lend you a picnic blanket so you can decamp to the small park across the street.
Crackle Crème is located at 245 Union St.
