For most Americans, breakfast looks like cereal, bagels, oatmeal, yogurt and fruit smoothies or the classic spread with eggs, bacon and pancakes. For Cindy Lam, a Chicago-born first-generation Cantonese-American entrepreneur, these options felt, in her words, “70-80 per cent” complete – a sentiment captured by the Cantonese phrase “chat chat baat baat” (literally “seven seven, eight eight”), meaning almost there, but not quite. The phrase resonated with her own sense of identity, too: caught...