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London’s Slickest Restaurant Group Brings Taiwanese Beef Noodle Soup to Shoreditch

Bao will open a “Noodle Shop” on the corner of Redchurch Street

A bowl of Taiwanese beef noodle soup on the red bar at Bao’s new Shoreditch restaurant
A bowl of Taiwanese beef noodle soup on the red bar at Bao’s new Shoreditch restaurant
Bao [Official Photo]

One of London’s sleekest, cult-followed restaurant brands will bring Taiwanese beef noodle soup in a stylised guise to its newest location in the trendy East End Shoreditch neighbourhood. Bao — the Taiwanese mini-chain owned by Erchen Chang and her husband, Shing Tat Chung, and his sister, Wai Ting Chung — is poised to open its sixth restaurant on the former site of Andina at 65 – 66 Shoreditch High Street on 23 June, bringing Bao Noodle Shop to the corner of the hyper-trendy Redchurch Street.

It will centre around niu rou mian, using noodles made at the restaurant and continuing the group’s import of a short, highly specialised roster of Taiwanese products by bringing over flour from the country. A Taipei-style broth will buoy short rib and beef cheek, while a more delicate soup from the southwest of the island will revolve around the tenets of a key Bao dish: rump cap with aged white soy sauce. New baos are coming, as might be expected, featuring an Iberico pork number with garlic mayonnaise and another based around sweetcorn congee. It will also serve bao bing, a towering dessert of shaved ice and fruit which finds its different guises and names across myriad countries.

Bao number six will be in esteemed company: next-door to bacon naan and chai queue-magnet Dishoom, it will live across the road from seafood grill Brat and British-Thai restaurant Smoking Goat, a stone’s throw from Michelin-starred Lyle’s, and down the road from a collection of east London’s hippest and most fashionable clothing, cosmetics, and homeware stores.

A restaurant interior with white tiling, red leather stools, and light, mid-century wooden tables
The Shoreditch interior, inspired by the noodle shops of Taiwan
Bao [Official Photo]

The group is known for its specific tailoring of each site to a particular source of inspiration — evidenced, most recently, by the newest restaurant drawing on the “western style cafes in Asia. The Boleros of Taiwan to the Kissatens of Japan,” according to its website. Everything the trio does is precise, deliberate, cool and their arrival in Shoreditch, having already put footholds in Hackney, Soho, Fitzrovia, Chinatown, Borough, and King’s Cross, feels inevitable and fitting.

A licensing application with Hackney council states that Bao wishes to vary the existing premises licence to authorise films, live and recorded music, and takeaway sales of alcohol during existing hours. The application suggests that the Shoreditch site could offer some of the same extracurricular activities as seen at the Borough Market restaurant, where there’s a cinema room in partnership with streaming platform Mubi, and a karaoke room for hire.

Bao’s Soho restaurant — its first bricks-and-mortar site — opened in April 2015, having amassed an ever-growing cult following at Netil Market in Hackney, out of which the group has been offering its new takeaway rice box brand Rice Error since last summer.

Its other restaurants include the development kitchen at Bao Fitzrovia, which opened in July 2016; the most recent site, which opened in King’s Cross at the end of last year; and the brand-adjacent flagship Taiwanese restaurant and teahouse Xu, which came to Wardour Street in May 2017. The group is backed by JKS Restaurants, which counts 17 individual restaurants in a portfolio that includes a number of Michelin-starred restaurants, such as Gymkhana and Trishna, Lyle’s, Sabor, and Kitchen Table, as well as grill and sports bar Brigadiers, and Berenjak, the Iranian kebab restaurant in Soho.

More soon.

Gymkhana

42 Albemarle Street, , England W1S 4JH 020 3011 5900 Visit Website

Sabor

35-37 Heddon Street, , England W1B 4BR 020 3319 8130 Visit Website

BRAT

4 Redchurch Street, , England E1 6JL Visit Website

London

, , England Visit Website

Bao

83 Rue De La Gauchetière Ouest, Ville-Marie, QC H2Z 1C2 (514) 875-1388

XU

30 Rupert Street, , England W1D 6DL 020 3319 8147 Visit Website

Trishna

15-17 Blandford Street, , England W1U 3DG 020 7935 5624 Visit Website

Kitchen Table

70 Charlotte Street, , England W1T 4QG Visit Website

Borough Market

8 Southwark Street, , England SE1 1TL 020 7407 1002 Visit Website

Brigadiers

1-5 Bloomberg Arcade, , England EC4N 8AR 020 3319 8140 Visit Website

Smoking Goat

64 Shoreditch High Street, London, E1 6JJ

Dishoom

12 Upper St Martin's Lane, , England WC2H 9FB 020 7420 9320 Visit Website

BAO Fitzrovia

31 Windmill Street, , England W1T 2JN Visit Website

Berenjak

27 Romilly Street, , England W1D 5AL 020 3319 8120 Visit Website