There’s a moment, in almost everyone’s life, when you stop and wonder what brought you to where you are. It doesn’t have to mean anything grand. Not everyone needs their work to be a reflection of their roots or their story. But sometimes the question arrives on its own, what have I carried with me, and where has it taken me?
Shing, Wai Ting and Erchen found their answer. And they called it BAO.
“To our parents, who we disobeyed, first by doing fine art degrees instead of business studies, and then by opening a restaurant instead of getting office jobs. But who still supported us, brought us a gazebo and an icebox to kick-start BAO, and ran around Taiwan buying us custom steamers and queueing for goose fat.”
This is the first thing you read in their book. And it already tells you everything about who they are and where they come from.
It always starts somewhere
Erchen grew up in Muzha, Taipei, where food was everywhere from the start. Every day her grandmother cooked epic family banquets and Erchen was always there with her, on the back of her bike, flying through the streets picking up supplies, ending up in the local wet market.
Shing and Wai Ting’s story is different, but just as rooted. Born in the UK to Cantonese parents from Hong Kong, theirs was a classic immigration story built around restaurants. They grew up above them, pot-washed from the age of nine, spent their weekends working. Food was the family language even if their parents didn’t exactly want that life for their children.
So they studied art instead. But after years of fine arts education, they found themselves drawn back to food. Only this time they came back with something extra: a background in art and design, and the ambition to use food not just to feed people, but to inspire them.
That’s where the three of them met. At art school in London, in 2008.
The summer after graduating, they traveled to Taiwan together – through the markets and street food stalls that Erchen had grown up around. When they came back to London, they created BAO. At the time, opening restaurants wasn’t even part of the plan.
Three things on the menu
They tried to get a spot at a market – no responses, no opportunities. The first one came after six months, and it was just a place on a waiting list for another six months. So they did a pop-up instead. Three items on the menu. Long queues. It was a hit.
They sent photos to their parents. Shing’s father couldn’t understand – his restaurant had a hundred dishes, and these three had just three. And yet there was that queue. All those people waiting for exactly three things.
The project kept growing. The queues got longer, the word spread, and at some point the choice became obvious – they left their individual projects and went full-time. Street food traders, all in.
Then came the BAO bar at Netil Market: a small shack they designed and built themselves, inspired by the hidden bars in the alleys of Shinjuku. Inside, you felt transported somewhere else entirely.
That feeling became the goal of everything they would build after.
In 2015 they opened their first restaurant – a tiny basement in Soho. Queues from day one. Erchen’s grandmother had traveled halfway around the world to see it – she got up after ten minutes because she couldn’t bear to sit comfortably knowing all those people were waiting outside.
A world for the Lonely Man
In Japanese there is a word, kuchisabishii, that describes the desire to eat not because you’re hungry, but because your mouth is lonely. It’s a concept the West struggles to embrace – not so much around food, but around solitude itself. We’re used to thinking of being alone as something to fill, to avoid, to justify.
BAO starts from the opposite idea. Their symbol is a man eating a bao, alone, with an expression of pure peace. He’s not sad. He has simply found his perfect moment. The logo was born from an artwork by Erchen, originally five men, each searching for their own perfect moment of solitude, and became the foundation of everything BAO came to be.
Every BAO restaurant is designed with the single diner in mind-though not exclusively. Counter seats, kitchen views, windows onto the street. There’s a dedicated menu called “Long Day”, a full ritual, complete with instructions on how to experience it.
During COVID, this philosophy left the restaurants and entered people’s homes. Special takeaway dishes, each paired with a specific film to watch on the couch. Packaged in straight-edged bamboo boxes, cobalt blue paper bags. Even in an emergency, nothing left to chance.
But the ambition to extend the experience beyond the physical space didn’t stop there. BAOverse, their Webby Award-winning loyalty app, turns every visit into part of a larger journey. You earn BAOcoins every time you dine, unlock perks as you explore different restaurants, and progress through tiers – from Tourist to Visa to Resident, all the way up to the Lonely Club, an invite-only level whose details remain confidential. It’s the same world-building logic applied to a different medium. Every touchpoint, inside and outside the restaurant, is designed to deepen your connection to the Lonely Man universe.
Obsession as a language
What sets BAO apart is not just the vision. It’s the precision with which that vision is executed, every single day, without compromise.
The BAO centimeter: between the filling and the edge of the bao there must always be exactly one centimeter. Always. It’s a simple thing. The difficulty is doing it perfectly, every day, without exception.
Every ceramic on the table is handmade by local artists, different pieces for different restaurants, some created specifically for a single dish. Like the Ozu plate, raised off the table, inspired by a dinner scene in a Yasujiro Ozu film.
The Noodle Shop took six years. London flours weren’t right. They eventually found the perfect one in Taiwan and started importing it directly. In the early days, one of their mothers kept a thousand kilos of flour in her living room and shipped it to them piece by piece. Before that, their parents were running around Taiwan buying custom steamers and queueing for goose fat.
This is the intergenerational continuity that BAO carries with it. Not as nostalgia, but as living material.
Inspired by Taiwan. Belonging nowhere else.
BAO doesn’t try to replicate Taiwan in London. What they do is take the essence of a culture and translate it through the lens of three people who carry that culture inside them, but who live elsewhere, think differently, and studied art and design.
Sometimes something gets lost in translation, they say. But it’s precisely those impurities that make BAO what it is.
Each restaurant is a chapter of that translation. Soho and the flavors of the night markets. Fitz, intimate, obsessed with the tea Erchen’s grandfather used to drink. Borough, the informal grill house with karaoke downstairs. King’s Cross, a Taiwanese café suspended between past and present. The Noodle Shop, six years of research in a bowl you don’t share with anyone.
Each one tells a chapter of their story. Each one carries something they lived, saw, ate, felt.
We went to BAO City and tried to taste as much as we could between the three of us. If you want to see our experience, the video is right here.
The book
For years the recipes were kept secret. Studied, perfected, protected. Part of the project was exactly that – building something that couldn’t easily be replicated.
Now they’re all here, in the BAO cookbook. Every chapter tells the story of a restaurant, its inspiration, its roots. And then the recipes.
It’s the documentation of how three people turned everything they were into something that exists in the world.
Sometimes it’s not about having a brilliant idea or the right talent. It’s about putting everything you are into a project – your roots, your experiences, your obsessions, the parents who ran around Taiwan buying custom steamers – and having the courage to do it with a maniacal care for every single detail.
Not everyone works this way. But for those who do, or those who feel it might be their way too, this story is there to remind you that it’s possible.
