stay golden
Veteran Houston pastry chef bakes up new biscuit-based ghost kitchen
One of Houston’s most experienced pastry chefs has added a new offering to his repertoire. Chris Leung recently launched Golden Biscuit Company, a breakfast-focused ghost kitchen concept.
Open weekdays from 8 am until 2 pm, Golden Biscuit Company serves traditional biscuits, including a classic biscuit with butter and jam; a bacon, green onion, and cheese biscuit topped with bacon caramel; and biscuit sandwiches such as egg and cheese; sausage, egg, and cheese; bacon, egg, and cheese; and a Monte Cristo with ham, turkey, Swiss; and jam.
While those offerings would probably be enough to find an audience, Leung’s true innovation is the “stuffed biscuit,” a kolache-style pastry that uses biscuit dough to contain fillings such as mushrooms and gravy; egg white, feta, and spinach; and sausage, egg, and cheese. Leung tells CultureMap that he sees several benefits to using biscuit dough instead of a traditional kolache dough.
“To me, it’s a completely different product because of the dough. Kolaches, depending on where you get them, the dough could be nice and fluffy but other places just wrap the dough around the sausage,” he says. “The biscuit dough is much more buttery and flaky. I think it lends itself as a great dough for scrambled eggs and cheese and things like that.”
Those who know Leung as the CultureMap Tastemaker Award-winning chef and co-founder of Cloud 10 Creamery might wonder what an ice cream maker knows about biscuits. Veteran Houston restaurant obsessives may recall that, prior to starting Cloud 10, Leung worked alongside Randy Rucker at Bootsie’s, the innovative Southern restaurant that briefly flourished in Tomball in the late aughts. Similarly, Leung developed the bacon and cheese biscuit with bacon caramel for Museum Park Cafe, the acclaimed but short-lived Museum District restaurant that operated in 2014 and 2015.
Ten years later, Leung sees an opportunity to utilize the same commercial kitchen that powers Cloud 10 as a venue for serving office workers, teachers, and anyone else who’s looking for a convenient, freshly-made breakfast. Available for delivery via DoorDash (and coming soon to other platforms), diners can order individual biscuits, handheld biscuits, or biscuit sandwiches, but Golden also makes ordering for groups easy with 6-packs of biscuits and 12-packs of stuffed biscuits.
Customers may also schedule larger catering orders through a form on the restaurant’s website. Like kolaches, 15 seconds in the microwave is enough to reheat the biscuits back to an optimal temperature.
So far, Golden has mostly been a word-of-mouth endeavor, but Leung is ready to increase the volume. “It’s going as well as we thought it would,” he says. “We’re getting the logistics down so we can get the product out.”
Of course, the chef remains deeply involved in Cloud 10. The ice cream shop has locations in Midtown, the Heights, and Katy. It sells pints at Houston-area locations of Whole Foods Market and at Central Market locations throughout Texas.