Granola for breakfast but make it Chinese? An American digs deep into her heritage
Cindy Lam’s Umami Granola brand blends Cantonese flavours with an American breakfast staple, offering unique savoury and sweet options
For most Americans, breakfast looks like cereal, bagels, oatmeal, yogurt and fruit smoothies or the classic spread with eggs, bacon and pancakes.
For Cindy Lam, a Chicago-born first-generation Cantonese-American entrepreneur, these options felt, in her words, “70-80 per cent” complete – a sentiment captured by the Cantonese phrase “chat chat baat baat” (literally “seven seven, eight eight”), meaning almost there, but not quite.
The phrase resonated with her own sense of identity, too: caught between the traditions of her immigrant family and the mainstream American culture around her, forever navigating a space where neither side felt hers entirely.
“I was caught between two worlds,” Lam says from her home base in Brooklyn, New York. “The breakfast options here never had the depth of flavour I grew up eating. It was always missing something.”