Book review: Bao by the founders of Bao

It starts with three protagonists: Erchen Chang, and siblings Shing Tat Chung and Wai Ting Chung, who meet at the Slade School of Fine Art in 2008. The summer after graduating, the trio take a trip to Taiwan – where Erchen is from – to immerse themselves in the street food markets of Taipei. Sitting in the back of a Volkswagen Polo on the way back from the airport, they realise that Bao will be “the name for the next chapter of our lives”.

Throughout this “cookbook-cum-manifesto”, each founder contributes to the story behind Bao, the Taiwanese restaurant group that started as a pop-up project in East London in 2013 that has since plotted four restaurants across the city.

There is a striking honesty to the book, with Shing writing “it was never our intention to open a restaurant. Rather, it was a route to bring together our creative backgrounds through the commonality of food”. It makes their expansion over the past decade from Soho to Borough, King’s Cross and Shoreditch all the more remarkable. Each site has its own identity: while King’s Cross is a Taiwanese café serving sweet-foam drinks, Borough is a grill house offering lemon cordial highballs and ox-tongue skewers.

The book consists of more than 100 recipes, starting with a step-by-step guide to bao-making the tangzhong way, which results in softer, fluffier bread. The recipes are then divided into Bao Soho, Bao Fitz (which closed last year), Bao Borough, Bao Shoreditch and Bao Drinks. Erchen explains how each dish came to be, including the pop-up staple, the classic pork bao, the dan dan tofu noodles and the nostalgia-inducing grapeade topped with aloe foam.

Bao boldly reveals that “our purpose in opening restaurants was not just to fill empty stomachs, but to inspire lonely mouths with perfect moments”. This recipe-meet-memoir inspires lonely minds, too, with all the imperfect moments that led to the classic pork bao – what Erchen describes as “our pursuit of perfection”.

Bao by Erchen Chang, Shing Tat Chung and Wai Ting Chung (Phaidon, £29.95)

>> Recipe from Bao: Classic pork bao