Wei Hong Bakery Takeaway. Fun with sweet, sweet buns. I accidentally just ate 6 or 7 in two days. Delicious taro moon cake. Drove past the entrance the first time. Super hole-in-the-wall location on Olive Blvd. $1.85 per bun, $4-5 for moon cake. Kind of like a Chinese donut. Savory buns also available. Very much adjacent to the seafood shop. Tip: Semi-strange hours, so check before you go. Look for the bigger, yellow seafood shop of the same name.
Wei Hong Bakery Experience Summary
For all of the good food in St. Louis, good bakeries are hard to come by. Boogie's Donuts went out of business, and Nathaniel Reed's is mind-blowing but a twenty-minute drive. The best pastries in a five-mile radius are at Schnucks. To be fair to Schnucks, they have great donuts and fritters.
So I was delighted to find Wei Hong Bakery in University City as a place to get a sweet snack on a Saturday.
As a Chinese bakery, most of the pastries at Wei Hong are buns. They have sweet top, custard, red bean, and coconut buns on the sweet side. They have BBQ buns on the savory side. They complement those with taro and lotus moon pies and an assortment of cookies.
My first time there I bought everything. I got a lotus cake, I got a taro mooncake, I got a sweet bun, I got a sesame ball, and I got a cream puff. My second time there, I got a red bean bun, a coconut bun, and a custard bun.
My wife told me to buy buns for everyone at the friend's house we were going to for dinner. Only a couple of them got eaten, so I may have had five buns the next day.
The buns are best described as a supped-up version of sweet Hawaiian rolls. Not nearly as fried as a donut, they offer a delightfully light and sweet pick-me-up.
I like them more than most as my wife and friends enjoyed them but didn't eat seven over two days like I did. My son enjoyed the sweet top tremendously once he trusted me enough to taste it.
The Wei Hong bakery is literally a hole in the wall of a hole in the wall. The bakery is physically connected to the more prominent Wei Hong Seafood restaurant in a yellow, unassuming building across from Aldi. I drove past it twice before finding it, even with GPS on.
The Food At Wei Hong Bakery
As a disclaimer, I'm way more of a bun fan than normal humans. Other people at the party did not like these nearly as much as I did.
I'm a huge, huge taro fan from my time in San Francisco, so I always order it when it's available. Being a legit Asian bakery, Wei Hong has a taro mooncake and a red bean bun. Needless to say, I was very excited.
The taro mooncake - $4 - did not disappoint. It had a really nice, flavorful taro filling inside of a very tasty exterior crunchy pastry. The filling was thick in both amount, almost an inch thick, and in texture, it took some effort to get your bite all the way through. The ratio of taro filling to pastry was a very impressive three-quarters taro to one-quarter pastry. The pastry was flaky and buttery and complemented the taro filling. 7.5/10.
On my second visit, I got the red bean bun - $1.85 - I forgot to get on my first visit. I had never had one before and was surprised that it was very similar in texture to mochi and sweetness. For some reason, I had expected it to be savory, but it was very much a dessert bun. 7/10.
Here's a quick run down on my experience with the other buns, all of which are $1.85:
Sweet top bun was my son's favorite. With the sweet crust on top, it's a sweet bun on steroids. My favorite bun as the dough stays light and fluffy without anything in the inside.
Custard bun was just an inverted sweet top with sweet custard in the middle. The best bites were the ones you got the custard.
Coconut bun was very light on the coconut and had swirls of sweet cream in the middle.
The creme in the creme puff was excellent. My son sucked it all out like an Oreo.
Lotus cake seems like an acquired taste for old people. Like if you sucked the flavor out of the taro mooncake.
I'll take a minute to talk about the crispy, fried sesame ball. It's basically an Asian zeppole covered with sesame seeds and with a sweet cream in the middle.
Get excited for the first bite. The fat comes oozing out of the fried dough, and you get hit with a rush of sweet custard. It's an instant mouthgasm making you wonder why it's taken to this point in your life to taste something so amazing. But a couple of seconds later, the sesame overpowers the fried dough, and by the end of the bite, you're left with a very, very strong toasted sesame flavor in your mouth.
Quite the roller coaster. 7/10.
They made the same balls without sesames on the outside, so that's on my list for a visit three. My buddy also told me he and his dad used to get the savory buns when he was a kid. So, I need to go back there at lunchtime to grab some of those.
Wei Hong Bakery Atmosphere And Miscellaneous
The atmosphere Wei Hong is that of a cozy Asian bakery. One fish tank, two people, and three cooked ducks.
Along with all the buns.
There wasn't a line the two times I visited, but the service wasn't blazing. Depending on how many buns you buy, you're looking at around 3 minutes per person in line. It can be a little hard to communicate, but pointing got the job done at the end of the day.
And, remember, don't go in expecting typical American pastries and donuts, no cinnamon buns or apple fritters.
Parking At Wei Hong Bakery
It's a hole in the wall, so the hardest part of parking is finding the place. Look for the big, yellow seafood store across from Aldi. Assuming you find it, there's basically unlimited parking. There are two or three giant adjacent parking lots.
Wei Hong Bakery Receipt
