This year, a video has been making the rounds on TikTok: a steaming pot of white rice porridge, a soft-boiled egg lowered in with chopsticks, and possibly a scattering of scallions, all captured in the gray light of a studio apartment kitchen. Typically, the caption reads something like “day three of being Chinese” or “my body asked for this”. Congee has somehow become a Gen Z breakfast trend, defying most expectations about what it should look like.
On its face, that seems odd. Congee is not brand-new. According to the majority of culinary historians, it is thousands of years old and was created out of necessity. Rice was stretched thin with water to feed more people, and it was gradually developed into something truly comforting. It has never required Gen Z’s consent to exist. And yet here it is, ordered by twenty-somethings who, three years ago, were probably more likely to be holding an oat milk latte, on brunch menus in cities without a specific Cantonese dining tradition.
The question of why is worthwhile. A portion of the solution appears to exist somewhere outside of food, in the same cultural undercurrent that gave rise to “Chinamaxxing”, the half-sincere, half-ironic trend of young Americans embracing Chinese wellness practices, such as slower mornings, hot water instead of iced drinks, and traditional Chinese medicine routines. Congee is a good fit for that pattern. It’s warm. It’s easy. The point seems to be that it requires very little of the person consuming it.
| Category | Detail |
|---|---|
| Dish | Congee (rice porridge), a staple across Chinese, Cantonese, and broader East and Southeast Asian cuisines |
| Origin | Documented in Chinese culinary history for roughly 5,000 years as a digestive and restorative food |
| Trend driver | Gen Z social media culture, particularly TikTok recipe videos and wellness content |
| Cultural context | Tied to the broader “Chinamaxxing” wellness trend and renewed interest in traditional Chinese medicine practices |
| Market signal | Congee increasingly appearing on American brunch menus, particularly in cities with large Asian populations |
| Health framing | Often discussed in relation to gut health, digestion, and “food as medicine” wellness narratives |
| Reference source | The Guardian – Chinamaxxing trend coverage |
There’s a feeling that Gen Z entered adulthood already worn out from performance, whether it be online, at work, or even in how breakfast appears to the camera. Most of that is rejected by Congee. It’s not a flower-shaped smoothie bowl. It is beige, frequently unattractive, and occasionally consumed directly from the pot. As the trend develops, it’s difficult to ignore the fact that the rice isn’t the main draw. It has to do with what the rice does not require.
The New Jersey-based creator Sherry Zhu, whose hot-water videos contributed to the popularity of this wider wellness movement, has discussed how sticking to warm foods and beverages improves her digestion. The framing has stuck, but it’s genuinely unclear if that holds up clinically for every viewer trying it at home many gastroenterologists would call that more anecdotal than evidence. Congee, a bowl of rice cooked slowly until it crumbles, is sold less as a meal and more as a tiny act of self-care.
The framing of maintenance is more important than it may appear. The body was viewed as a machine to be optimized in earlier wellness cultures, especially the Silicon Valley strain, with mornings planned for maximum productivity and supplements stacked like code. Nothing is optimized by Congee. It simply rests on the stove. In a culture that has spent the past ten years condensing everything into five-minute hacks, there is something almost stubbornly anti-productive about a dish that requires forty minutes of mostly ignoring it.
At least the data indicates that restaurants have taken notice. In cities with large Asian populations, congee has been appearing on brunch menus along with what one food trend report called a wider fusion of Southeast Asian breakfast flavors into the American morning routine. It’s a more subdued change than, say, the matcha boom, and it’s spreading more via recipe videos and home cooking than through marketing from chain restaurants. That in and of itself says something about how this specific trend is evolving, kitchen by kitchen and bottom-up rather than being driven by a single brand.
Beneath all of this is a generational irony as well. Many of the people who reach for congee today were raised in homes where it was already prepared without ceremony and most definitely without a ring light for a grandparent’s breakfast, lunch, or dinner. The strange feeling of seeing a dish that has been quietly present in their own families for decades suddenly appear online wrapped in discovery-narrative language.
As if it had been waiting for TikTok to find it, has been noted by some Asian American writers, and not in an unkind way. The tension between appreciation and something more akin to extraction hasn’t entirely subsided, and it’s still unclear if the larger trend will take it into consideration or simply keep going in the direction of whatever comes next.
The fact that Gen Z isn’t really pursuing congee for its flavor alone is what does appear to be consistent. They’re following the speed it demands. You can’t rush a pot that needs to simmer, which may be the more radical ingredient in a culture that has built entire industries around rushing. After the novelty wears off in a year, it’s unclear if congee will still feel relevant. One spoonful at a time, however, it has currently evolved into a tiny, heartfelt act of resistance.
i) https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/mar/04/chinamaxxing-influencers-chinese-traditional-medicine
ii) https://www.chinadailyhk.com/hk/article/628311
iii) https://www.asiamediacentre.org.nz/beyond-geopolitics-the-rise-of-the-internets-chinese-era
iv) https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202602/02/WS6980c900a310d6866eb3709b.html
v) https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/25/asia/chinamaxxing-americans-soft-power-intl-hnk-dst