The bing sutt, or cha chaan teng, is a Hong Kong institution with no precise equivalent elsewhere. It emerged in the 1950s as a working-class alternative to the expensive Western-style restaurants that the colonial elite frequented — serving Westernised dishes adapted to local tastes and local budgets: milk tea pulled through a silk stocking filter to achieve a particular smoothness, French toast deep-fried and served with peanut butter, macaroni in broth, instant noodles, red bean ice. The name cha chaan teng translates roughly as 'tea restaurant', but the category is really about a mood: fast, affordable, unpretentious, deeply local. By the 1980s and 1990s, as Hong Kong modernised rapidly and rents climbed, the traditional bing sutt began disappearing. Capital Cafe opened in part to preserve the form, while adding a layer of nostalgia specific to the Cantopop era.

The café's ownership is part of its story. Capital Cafe was co-founded by Edmond Leung — a Hong Kong singer with credits stretching back to the era the café commemorates. The interior design leans into the reference deliberately: ceiling fans and floor tiles and wooden chairs in the style of 1970s Hong Kong, old concert posters, and a blackboard on the wall where visiting pop stars sign their names. Because the owners are from the entertainment industry, the café attracted celebrity customers from its opening, and was widely covered in newspapers and entertainment magazines. The menu carries the joke into its dishes. The 'Principal's Toast' — toasted bread covered with cheese and black truffle — is named for Alan Tam, whose nickname in Cantonese showbusiness circles is 'the Principal'. The dish was reportedly created for him specifically.

Hong Kong's scrambled egg culture is more serious than it may sound. The Australia Dairy Company in Jordan — a famously brusque, legendarily efficient cha chaan teng — is widely considered the standard against which all Hong Kong scrambled eggs are measured. Capital Cafe's kitchen explicitly engages with this comparison. Several of Capital Cafe's experienced chefs had worked at the Australian Dairy Company, and the Hokkaido milk used in Capital Cafe's version — a high-fat Japanese milk at 3.6% butterfat — is a deliberate upgrade from the standard recipe. Whether the Capital Cafe version bests the Jordan original is a debate that Hongkongers conduct with the seriousness usually reserved for civic matters. The eggs are silky, buttery, and loosely set; the debate, pleasingly, has no resolution.

Capital Cafe expanded after its 2010 Wan Chai opening: a second branch in Shau Kei Wan in August 2011, a third in Mong Kok in March 2012, and the first non-local branch in Macau in January 2014, where it trades as Chrisly Cafe. A partnership to open branches in Guangzhou in 2011 ended the following year after disagreements with mainland partners over food quality standards and worker accommodations. The café's owner, Swadiq Khan, withdrew his shares rather than compromise. In October 2014, the Wan Chai branch participated in a Levi's Hong Kong campaign — the entire store was covered in denim, the staff dressed in Levi's, and a new dish called the Levi's Toast was introduced, with tomato and cheese representing the brand's red-and-white logo. It is the kind of collaboration that would have seemed implausible in an original bing sutt. Capital Cafe has always known it is a revival, not a remnant.