Last week, Lolita Granola’s founder Natalie Hsu joined us at Soho House for a chef demo with our youths that featured wonderfully baked granola cookies. For Natalie, the concept of granola really began to grab her attention during the height of the pandemic, when we were all looking for ways to live healthier lives.

“So during COVID, I became kind of a health freak, and I started making acai bowls at home,” she says with a chuckle. “We would blend almond butter, fruit, and then obviously granola is needed in an acai bowl, because I’m a texture person, so I need that crunch. Our neighbours at the time made really good granola so they gave us their recipe and we’d make some tweaks to our own liking. As time went on, everyone who came to visit us tried my granola and just really loved it. They’d be eating it non-stop. But one thing led to another and we moved houses and all this granola-making was put on pause.

“Five years later, things started to settle down and we started making it again. It was actually a New Year’s resolution for me last year to work on a long-term project, and that’s when I decided to actually create Lolita Granola. I love doing all the design work and the branding as well, so it was good fun. I’ve always kept this as a passion project, so there wasn’t any external pressure or anyone telling us we had to do it, so it was just a very pleasurable thing to work on.”

But for those unfamiliar with Natalie’s background, granola is actually far from what she does for a living. She’s also an established, award-winning actress who has taken the region by storm over the past six years.

“I had never thought of doing acting,” she says, telling me that her passion at the time was actually dancing. “Well drama was probably one of my favourite classes, and I did choose it as one of my IB subjects, but it never occurred to me that it would be a viable career path. I think I was always quite rational and realistic, and becoming an actress isn’t really something you can just decide you want to be that easily. So even then, my focus was fully on dance.”

But it seemed fate had made the decision for her. The first ever film she starred in was a musical, and it was her dance videos online that captured the director’s attention, leading him to offer her a role despite her lack of acting experience.

“In that moment I also realized how lucky I am and how rare that opportunity was and how it doesn't come by easily. It was also a big move – I had to film in mainland China for a year, and it was during COVID, so it wasn’t like I could travel back to Hong Kong easily. But in the end, we agreed that it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that might not ever happen again, so I decided to go for it, and I just ended up really liking the experience.”

Upon her return to Hong Kong, she had gotten to meet an “amazing agent,” and one by one the pieces fell in place. Since 2020, she’s been in upwards for 12 films, across Hong Kong, Malaysia, Taiwan and China. In 2025, she received the New York Asian FIlm Festival International Rising Star award, and was nominated for Best Actress at the Hong Kong Film Awards and Hong Kong Film Critics Society for her lead role in Last Song For You. Just a year later, she was again nominated for her performance in My First of May.

“To be honest, acting came pretty naturally,” she admits. “It’s something that to me, the less I think about it, the better at it I am. So in a way, not having a lot of experience of professional training actually helped me; I just went with what I felt was right, and my instincts. But these awards were never something I thought about or put much emphasis on, because I didn’t even know you could win awards when I first started.

“Acting is also such a subjective thing, and it’s really hard to say whether you’re improving yourself or not. How can you measure something so subjective? But with these awards, it gives me some kind of feedback, especially because they come from people in the industry whose opinions I really value, so I’m really grateful. On the other hand, I try not to take anything like this too heavily. I try to remind myself that the most important thing is to feel fulfilled in what I do, choose the scripts and characters that align with who I am, and put something better out there into the universe.”