Origins
Unlike soy sauce and oyster sauce, which were developed in southern mainland China then popularised in Hong Kong, XO sauce is completely homegrown in this city. Created in the 1980s specifically to match Cantonese cuisine, it is similar to the Fujianese sha cha sauce, containing garlic, onions, chilli, and a variety of dried seafood.
While only hearsay, it’s widely believed that Spring Moon, the fine-dining Cantonese restaurant in the prestigious Peninsula Hotel, created this sauce as a complimentary condiment placed on their tables. Customers fell in love with this homemade sauce and started asking if they could buy it, so Spring Moon began selling them by the bottle.
According to Gordon Leung, the executive chef at Spring Moon, the sauce’s unusually foreign name is derived from XO (extra-old) cognac, a liquor popular in Hong Kong and considered a chic luxury product. This reference is obviously used to emphasise the high quality of the sauce, as well as the mixture of pricey ingredients it contains.