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| A sausage roll and a meat pie. (China Daily Feng Yongbin) |
"We both came from Australia," Wong says, "and our love for the same football team brought us together."
The two friends would occasionally get together, talk about their homeland, and discuss the one thing they struggled to find in China - a good meat pie.
"One time I actually brought in a few packets of Four'n Twenty," Wong recalls, referring to an Australian pie brand. "I smuggled them onto the plane."
They were experimenting with recipes to sate their own hunger when they noticed an online forum for expats had a discussion running about the dearth of pies in the Chinese capital.
"Andrew said, 'Let's just write a reply in there and see what happens'," Wong says.
Before they knew it, they had half-accidentally started a pie delivery business, providing pies to foreigners craving a taste of home.
"Andrew likes taking risks while I am a bit more conservative," Wong recently told Agenda magazine in Beijing, "which makes us a good combination for doing business together."
It took about a year to open a shop front, and it means they are now reaching a wider customer base, with more Beijingers dropping by to discover a taste of Australia, and often getting a bit of cultural exchange in the mix.
"It's still predominantly foreigners, 80 percent foreign, but we get a reasonable number of Chinese and a lot of them do come back, which is good." Wong says.
And he believes China might just be able to develop a taste for the humble pie.
"We were thinking we could do a few shops across China, obviously that's a long way from happening but that's a nice dream to have and you've got to start somewhere," he says.
Who knows? With time, a pie shop might just be a staple of every Chinese city and country town.
The restaurant is located in the north alley of 58 Gongti Beilu, Beijing.
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