An East Village pastry shop where red tortoise cake is the star

Marian Bull is a writer, potter and editor living in Brooklyn. She writes a weekly cooking newsletter called Mess Hall. In our new series called Dishing, Marian will get the story behind a tasty dish at a local restaurant.

Walk into Lady Wong, a narrow Southeast Asian pastry shop in the East Village, and you’ll find cases full of gleaming sweets.

A lemon-coconut mousse cake reveals a middle layer of passion fruit-calamansi curd; pandan matcha ganache screams green from atop a round, saucer-sized tart; and a dozen varieties of steamed cakes, or kuihs, glisten with the promise of glutinous rice flour — which offers a dense, bouncy chew. The worst choice you can make here is to leave with only one thing.

If you visit on a summer day, you’ll also likely find a tray of oval sweets stamped with geometric patterns. These are angku kuih, or red tortoise cake, a celebration item that has undergone many iterations since owners Mogan Anthony and Seleste Tan opened their brick and mortar shop in March 2022.

“I enjoyed these as a little kid — my father used to buy them for me,” said Anthony on a recent August day, perched on a stool outside inside the tiny store. As he spoke, customers swept in and out, picking up special order cakes or an afternoon pick-me-up. “I grew up in a Chinese village in Malaysia, and I married a Chinese woman from Malaysia, and we both ended up in the restaurant business. So when we make these things, we have all these feelings for the products that are instilled in the back of our head.”

Ever since the couple hatched the idea of Lady Wong, they knew they wanted angku kuih on their menu. In Malaysia and China, it’s a good-luck food that’s often served at birthday parties for the elderly or for a baby’s one-month birthday. Since tortoises live so long, they’re a sign of longevity.

As with many of their other kuihs, like the technicolor rainbow cake that’s as…