Erchen
CHANG

The uses Erchen Chang has found for bao might surprise you. For a Simone Rocha Christmas dinner in 2019, she created a bronzed turkey, sculpted entirely out of bao and filled with deep-fried mince pies. For a horror film–themed dinner for Hato Press in the same year, she fashioned a halibut from bao and made a performance out of “filleting” it. “All the guests took a piece home to have the next day,” recalls Chang, creative director of Bao London, speaking from her home in the British capital. “That’s kind of twisting people’s minds a little bit, but not too much—there’s warmth. There’s a feeling of entering someone else’s world, and that excites me.” 

Few people—chefs or artists—could achieve the same level of creativity through dough. Bao is, after all, not known for being a precise medium. Like other bread doughs, it requires careful kneading, proofing and shaping, not to mention steaming, which is how bao is cooked. “Bao is one of the hardest mediums to work with,” says Chang. “When it’s steamed the form changes, so you need to predict where it’s going to go.” As much as skill and technique are required, so too is patience. As Chang puts it, you need the “experience of understanding the dough.”

Chang’s talent is the result of an unusual path into the restaurant industry. Before her current role as the creative director of Bao, a wildly successful group of restaurants in London that she started along with her husband, Shing Tat Chung, and his sister, Wai Ting Chung, in 2013, she had already experimented with wood, clay, bronze, cloth and ceramics as an artist. Chang and Chung met, in fact, at London’s Slade School of Fine Art where Chang was studying sculpture and media, focusing on performance and installation art.¹ Her final installation, “Rules to be a Lonely Man,” would later become Bao’s conceptual core. The piece was inspired by the classic image of the salaryman in Japanese popular culture—an overworked city dweller in an ill-fitting suit—and evolved into the restaurant’s logo of a lonely man with hunched shoulders wolfing down a bao. 

“The lonely man transformed into someone fatter, and slowly he had a bao in his hand, which then informed the beginning of the world building of Bao,” says Chang, whose creative background—she isn’t a trained chef—and Taiwanese heritage inform her perspective on both the food and restaurant aesthetics.

Picturing all the restaurants in which the lonely man might eat became key to how Chang envisioned new ventures around London: Bao Soho opened in 2015; Bao Fitzrovia in 2016; the teahouse Xu in 2017; Bao Borough, housing the group’s first karaoke room, in 2019; Cafe Bao in the midst of the pandemic in 2020; and Bao Noodle Shop in Shoreditch earlier this year. All this is a long way from where the trio began eight years ago, at a stall in a parking lot in East London, selling their signature steamed milk buns with braised pork. 

Today, Bao is an entire universe—or, as Chang prefers, “Baoverse.” The lonely man still informs the dining experiences and the restaurants’ “spaces and small details—from single diner seats to the whiskey shelf.” Chang counts movies and TV among her creative inspirations, including the Japanese cartoon Chibi Maruko Chan and the work of directors Seijun Suzuki and Aki Kaurismäki. “They have an attention to detail and an eye for aesthetics, and their world building is amazing,” she says.