“Our Heart Is in Macau”: Selective Scaling, Memory Work and Place-Bound Culinary Heritage at Lord Stow’s Bakery

Culinary heritage is often safeguarded and promoted through commercial reproduction, yet a food icon’s value may depend on limiting replication beyond its place of origin. This article examines Lord Stow’s Bakery, widely credited with creating the Macau egg tart, as place-bound culinary heritage. Drawing on heritage-making, authenticity, socioemotional wealth and organisational memory, it conceptualises selective scaling as expanding a heritage-bearing business in some directions while deliberately limiting its replication in others. The study combines interviews with the founder’s sister and co-owner, a multilingual media archive spanning more than three decades, 127 online posts and comments, and field observation, analysed abductively. In the co-owner’s account, the family regards further franchising and flavour diversification as threats to quality, founder legacy and ties to Macau, even as local outlets, production capacity and a few long-standing overseas partnerships continued. Recipes, hand-centred production, stable packaging, the minimally altered Coloane shop and a curated new outlet form a living memory infrastructure, while family, media and visitor practices turn queuing, photographing, eating and sharing into heritage-making. Selective scaling thus helps sustain the bakery’s place-bound value, although safeguarding Macau’s wider egg tart tradition depends on a broader community of practice.