London’s cult-favourite Taiwanese restaurant group Bao opens a pop-up convenience store in Taipei
Bao made Taiwanese food cool in London. Its latest project in Taipei isn’t another restaurant, but a convenience-store-inspired playground where fried chicken, design thinking and cultural research collide.
Bao London founders Shing Tat Chung (left) and Erchen Chang at their Taipei pop-up, a new concept called BFF. (Photo: BFF)
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For more than a decade, Bao has been one of London’s most influential restaurant success stories, making gua bao part of the mainstream food vocabulary of an audience previously unfamiliar with Taiwanese cuisine.
Now, they are back in Asia, selling Asian food to an Asian audience. Will it work?
Founded by Shing Tat Chung, Erchen Chang and Wai Ting Chung, Bao opened its first permanent restaurant in Soho in 2015 after building a cult following at Netil Market.
What began as a humble just-for-fun operation consisting of little more than a cool box and a gazebo in an East London car park has grown into a restaurant group with a devoted following, known for its playful, design-forward take on Taiwanese food and culture.
Today, the group operates seven locations across London, serving its signature Taiwanese steamed buns and small plates. Fans, apart from collecting the merch, have even been known to get tattoos of the Bao logo.
This month, the Bao founders, whose backgrounds are in art and design, have set up camp in Taiwan — not with another restaurant, but with a temporary concept that defies categorisation. Is it a tiny fast food joint? Is it a convenience store? A research lab, cultural experiment, philosophical endeavour, art project? Or, all of the above?
Called BFF, which stands for Bao Fast Foods, the little pop-up has opened in a quiet residential area in Taipei and is designed to resemble an Asian convenience store.
On the current menu are things like mala honey-glazed fried chicken served with salad and pickle slushie; beef noodles in soup with spit-roasted beef carved over them; and nitro tea drinks. Collaboration offerings include a chajiu distill developed with Taiwanese liquor brand SC Lab exploring how the flavours of Taiwan can be distilled into drinks, including a braised pork liqueur. Needless to say, there is also plenty of merch.
As for offering beef noodles and fried chicken in a place where these can be found on every street corner, that hasn’t stopped an excited crowd, mainly of hip, in-the-know folks, from thronging the place.
“I think people are very excited to come and see,” said Taiwan-born Chang, 35, who is married to Shing Tat. “The best thing has been generating conversation and having a space for dialogue.”
Why aren’t they serving the baos they’re known for? “We’ve always got different and bigger ambitions,” Shing Tat said with a smile. “We could open a Bao, but how many could we open? It’s maybe to our own detriment — we always like to do things differently, and new.”
While BFF ostensibly functions as a fast-food concept inspired by Taiwanese flavours and the accessibility, spontaneity and late-night appeal of convenience store dining, there is a lot more going on. The space also serves as a studio and research kitchen, with the end goal of putting their learnings towards a permanent space.
“We do serve food, but we’re also R&D-ing in there,” said Shing Tat, who was born and raised in the UK and fronts the business while his sister, Wai Ting, takes more of a behind-the-scenes role.
Through a series of open-to-public talks, podcasts and what they call “design jams”, they are building an online open-source platform for anyone interested in the process of how a restaurant concept is created. The process is very much an ongoing one.
“Maybe in a year’s time, we’ll have a blueprint of how we design things and why we do it, where most people keep them completely safeguarded,” Shing Tat said, adding that it’s a way of giving back to the community.
Their own mission, on the design, branding and business fronts, is to explore what people are willing to eat and buy through the lens of a convenience store, which functions as a creative conceit.
“For me, the Asian convenience store is a global language,” said Shing Tat. “What we found is that there’s so much energy that a convenience store brings, and there’s so much culture around it. I feel like (a concept like this) hasn’t really been done.”
Taipei is necessarily the place for this deep-dive into what convenience store culture is, he continued. “All the stuff we are inspired by is here – not just inspiration and culture and way of life and design, but also the product itself. To develop beef noodles, and to be able to taste and serve it, is a real kind of test.”
A pop-up also provides exactly the room needed for free experimentation – an approximation of the circumstances under which Bao was born.
“We’ve been building a brand for 10 to 12 years. When we first started, we had just graduated from university and everything was based on intuition, and, by necessity as well – we didn’t have the money to open a restaurant,” Shing Tat said.
“But, when you look back, it was such a big defining point in our journey that without it, I don’t think we’d be where we are today. If we jumped straight into a very slick restaurant now, we’d be talking to the masses straight away, whereas during the pop-up, we’re talking to a core community.”
And, he added, “we wanted to inspire our community, but we also wanted to create something for the future that wasn’t just adding more sh** to the world.”
With their proven success in branding and their reputation for popularising Taiwanese food in the West, the local community has willingly involved themselves.
“Suddenly, we had two to three people who owned beef noodle shops… everyone wants to give, and all these people are so open, to come to us and help and show us their recipes,” Shing Tat said. “We’re learning so much. There’s absolutely nowhere else that we could do it.”
“Taiwanese are really open-minded and want to share,” Chang said. “There’s so much room to push what is traditional, what is authentic. We don’t have a long history to back these foods, so it’s been a good space to open that dialogue up.”
Shing Tat said: “We were pleasantly surprised by how many people were like, ‘You guys brought Taiwan to the rest of the world. You guys inspired me. I started my business because of you guys’. Three days ago, someone said, ‘You guys opened outside of Taiwan and you inspired people to open in Taiwan.’ That’s what kind of drives us.”
BFF is at 1F, No 2, Alley 16, Lane 32, Guangfu South Rd, Songshan District, Fujian Village, Taipei City 105, Taiwan, from now until June 27. It is open to the public Thursday to Saturday, 5pm to 10pm.
Source: CNA/my
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