By around 8:15 a.m. on a recent Thursday, the dedicated staff at Chiu Quon Bakery in Chinatown were already pulling out trays of pillowy buns from the ovens, pouring hot cups of coffee, steaming pots of dim sum on multiple double burners, and one baker had already made about 50 mooncakes.
The oldest Chinese bakery in Chicago makes hundreds of mooncakes a day during the Mid-Autumn Festival season, which culminates in a full moon around the autumnal equinox, which falls on Sept. 17 this year.
The moon-shaped pastries are not just desserts but symbols of the harvest season carrying with them the cultural heritage honored across Asia, said Joyce Chiu, owner of Chiu Quon Bakery.
“Moon festival is a time for families to get together, have a nice meal together and sit around sharing mooncakes,” Chiu said. “And all the little details, the packaging, and the design are always super intentional.”
Chiu said the bakery typically makes one or two batches a week, but during the days leading up to the Mid-Autumn Festival, the bakers bump it up to 420 mooncakes each day. Typically, mooncakes are cut into halves or quarters and shared, but the “baby mooncakes” Chiu Quon Bakery sells are smaller and more square-ish.
The pastry case in the morning had baby mooncakes ready to go in flavors of lotus ($2.95 each) and red bean paste ($2.50 each). The tray with winter melon baby mooncakes was empty, but baker Yan Long was in the kitchen making several more batches.
He wasn’t weighing the dough mounds before stamping each one into the mold, yet somehow, they all turned out the same shape and size. Speaking Chinese, Long said he’s been making mooncakes for 24 years.
The dough itself gets prepped a couple of days in advance to ensure proper fermentation before it’s divided into smaller batches and rolled into balls, which are flattened into a disc and filled with sweet red bean paste, lotus seed paste or even salted egg yolks.
Long was working fast to make the lotus seed variety too — grabbing each mound of dough, dipping it in flour, and pressing it into a carved mold to imprint the quintessential mooncake design on top. Before being placed into the ovens, Long sprays them lightly with water to prevent the mooncakes from cracking. A large baking tray with over 70 mooncakes was ready to be baked off before 9 a.m.
While Chiu Quon stocks baby mooncakes year-round, Chiu said there’s a specialness about making them for the Mid-Autumn Festival partly because of the kind of romantic, mostly fantastical back story behind the mooncakes, which commemorate a tale about the moon goddess and her lover who’s left on Earth.
As the lore goes, an ancient Chinese emperor called a heroic archer to strike down 10 suns circling the Earth during a disastrous year of drought and gave him a magic potion of immortality as a token of gratitude afterward. The archer and his wife kept the potion hidden in a safe until someone came to steal it one day. The wife, trying to prevent this lousy person from drinking it, took the potion herself. Before they knew it, she started to float upward to the moon and never came back down, leaving her to pine for her husband as the goddess of the moon. Chiu said the wife made the mooncakes as a love letter to her husband, at least in the version of the story she knew as a child.
“It’s all legend, and there are a lot of traditions and things that stem from variations of this story,” Chiu laughed. (Some say that Chinese people look at the moon every Mid-Autumn Festival, think of the wife in her lonely exile, and eat mooncakes in her honor.)
Chiu emphasized that mooncakes, beyond their folklore, are a significant marker of the season — a small token of traditional Chinese culture that carries many meanings to those who share them. Many Asian Americans compare the Mid-Autumn Festival to Thanksgiving, with similar themes of harvest, family time, and a collective spirit of gratitude and giving.
For Anna Desai, mooncakes are also an ode to her grandfather, a baker in Vietnam, and her father, who has been making mooncakes since she was little. Even when she moved to Chicago for college from St. Louis, her father continued to send her boxes of mooncakes, keeping their family tradition alive across two states.
Desai said she noticed a gap in the market despite the importance of the Mid-Autumn Festival and the size of Chicago’s Asian American population. Only a few bakeries, including Chiu Quon, make their own mooncakes, she noted. This scarcity inspired Desai to find a new way to share the traditional, sometimes outdated pastry. In 2021, she took the initiative to organize “Over the Moon Chicago,” a platform that brings together various local Asian American bakers to create a modern twist on mooncakes, available to pre-order around the Mid-Autumn Festival.
“We have a lot of local talent in Chicago and it’s a really creative way to share mooncakes and bridge different generations together,” Desai said. “Back in 2021, I just reached out to 12 bakers to see if they would be interested in doing their own version of a mooncake and that was that.”
This year, “Over the Moon Chicago” sold out within 45 minutes. The collection of bakeries included Sweet Bean Chicago, Maa Maa Dei, Umami from Scratch, Oso Tea Bar and more. The box, which was designed by New York City-based artist Cindy Tan, had a compartment for each of the uniquely shaped colorful pastries with flavors like strawberry pineapple, sweet corn miso with salted egg yolk, ube and pandan, chocolate passionfruit and a cat-shaped green mooncake with lotus, matcha and mango.
On Thursday, Chiu Quon Bakery — a key participant in the initiative since its inception — had a cart full of large lotus bean-filled mooncakes ready to be boxed up for Desai’s orders.
Up on the wall behind the counter at Chiu Quon Bakery are several framed articles and photos of the cafe throughout the decades. There’s also a 1998 Chicago Tribune article titled “Moonstruck” about mooncakes that featured Chiu Quon Bakery.
Chiu said though they’ve been around for years, there is more and more outside interest in the bakery her parents opened 38 years ago.
As co-owner with her brother, Chiu said she’s watched the reputation of Chinatown change from being an enclave of only Chinese or Asian customers to a destination spot full of people from all over Chicagoland swinging by to try new flavors or to experience different types of foods. Chiu said new customers are also walking in and asking questions about Chinese pastries such as mooncakes.
“We open our doors a lot more, and it’s nice because there’s a shift of people who are trying to learn about the culture,” Chiu said. “We’ve been very fortunate that our customers are coming in and asking, ‘what’s a traditional pastry we can try,’ or ‘what’s the most popular thing?’ So that we can kind of share the different types of food we have with other people.”
The cash-only caveat doesn’t deter customers either. In fact with the relatively low prices, a $10 bill buys a few pastries and a coffee, said Dan Shannon, who comes into Chiu Quon Bakery almost every day.
“I usually get the pork buns but I’m trying to lose weight,” he laughed while grabbing a cup of coffee. “Everything here is amazing — I’m always trying new stuff. And the people are wonderful.”
Like the BBQ buns and the coconut tarts, peanut mochi balls, egg custard tarts and red bean buns, the offerings in the pastry case are truly indulgent. The baby mooncakes themselves can rack up several hundred calories. And bigger, standard-sized mooncakes can be 1,000 calories a piece. But each calorie is packed with authenticity, Chiu noted.
As the community does each year, the regulars will surely swing by before the Mid-Autumn Festival to buy mooncakes. Some might grab a dozen to box up as a gift for their loved ones, while others will take a few to share with coworkers. Chiu said they’ll also have customers who saw the mooncakes on Instagram having never had one before. With social media connecting people across cultures, Chiu said she’s glad traditional Chinese treats are getting even more exposure.
“Whether or not they’ve ever tried it is one thing, but just being able to see it, see the stories behind it, see how things are made. I think that’s very captivating for some audiences, even if they might have never stepped foot in (our bakery),” Chiu said.
Chiu Quon Bakery, 2253 S. Wentworth Ave., 312-225-6608, cqbakery.com
This story has been updated to indicate that Cindy Tan is a New York City-based artist.
