On a roll: at home with the Bao restaurant founders Erchen Chang and Shing Tat Chung

For someone so synonymous with the more refined and cosmopolitan end of London’s dining scene, Erchen Chang is a surprisingly big fan of a fry-up. The co-founder of Bao, which now has seven restaurants across the capital, grew up in Taiwan, but came to the UK when she was 14 and went to a boarding school in Kingston, southwest London. The student body was international, but the food in the canteen was decidedly English. “My friends were from Japan, Mexico, everywhere,” she recalls. “They were all girly girls. They all hated the English breakfast. I was like: ‘Give me the sausage! Give me the bacon. I love scrambled eggs. I love those soupy beans.’” Chang is sitting in her bright living room at home in east London, with her husband, Shing Tat Chung, another of Bao’s co-founders (the third is Chung’s sister, Wai Ting Chung). To this day, a full English remains a tradition most weekends in this household. “I love it when you have the orange juice, a pot of tea, a big plate, toast on the toast rack, butter in the butter tray,” she says. “You’ve got to do it properly.”

It won’t surprise you to learn that Chang describes herself as a foodie. Her  culinary education started early. As a kid in Taipei, with two older siblings already at school and parents who worked full time, she was looked after by her grandmother. Some of her earliest memories are of being carted around the city – to the hair salon, for instance, where she’d listen to her grandmother “chit-chat with all the local gossips”. But her grandmother was also the main cook in the family’s home. “I’d go to the market with her in the morning on the back of her bike,” Chang recalls. In the kitchen, her grandmother was “in her zone”, she says. “I would watch and smell and just absorb a lot about Taiwanese food.”

Chung had an even more food-focused upbringing. His grandfather came to the UK from Hong Kong in the 1960s after a three-month journey by boat, “a classic Hong Kong immigrant story,” he says. “He went straight into pot-washing and then he worked his way up to head chef in London.” Chung grew up in Nottingham, above the takeaways and restaurants that his parents ran. He remembers enjoying delicious staff meals throughout his childhood, and helping out in the kitchen drying plates when he was around six or seven years old. “Subconsciously, restaurants are probably in my DNA,” he says.

The couple met while studying at the Slade School of Fine Art, and quickly bonded over a shared passion for food. Chung would cook elaborate meals for them both, which he served on the tiny desk in his flatshare bedroom. “I remember one time I cooked this huge Japanese feast, and my friend came in and said, ‘What the fuck? Why do you never cook like this for me?’”

“It was so OTT,” Chang says. “We would go through all the dishes and rate them. We were really into MasterChef.”

After they graduated, Chang took Chung and his sister on a trip to Taiwan, and it was there that the idea for Bao emerged. “We tried the classic gua bao,” Chung says, referring to the clam-shaped bao that in Taiwan is typically filled with braised pork. “It was such a unique flavour: the soft bun, the salty braised pork, the sourness of the ferment, the sweetness of the peanut powder.” Nowadays, he says, that kind of flavour combination is well-known, but “back then it was amazing”.

In 2013 the trio started a food stall selling bao at Netil market in Hackney, east London. Chung remembers a family trip to Hong Kong soon after that and his dad being unable to mask his disappointment as he told a relative that his son was “selling bao on the street. It sounded like this massive failure. He wasn’t glorifying it as contemporary street food. It was like I was selling steamed buns for 50p.” But the pop-up was actually “successful from day one,” he says, and in 2015 the Bao trio partnered with JKS Restaurants (the group behind Gymkhana, Berenjak, Speedboat Bar and other stalwarts of the London dining scene) to open their first brick-and-mortar restaurants.

The couple’s creative combination can be seen in their home. They bought this double-fronted, detached house in 2019, but it had previously been a house of multiple occupancy, with the ground floor divided up into five rooms, and it needed an extensive renovation. Chung drew up the plans, and the carpenter Dom Garwood, a friend, built the interiors, which are panelled in warm Douglas fir. “It’s like a little cabin,” Chang says.

The ground floor is now a single, open-plan space combining a kitchen, dining area and living room. There’s an original Alvar Aalto dining table, at which the couple eat dinner most days with their four-year-old son; in the evening, this is where Chang likes to sketch new ideas for Bao. In the living room are further enviable pieces of furniture, including Le Corbusier armchairs, a clam chair by Arctander, and Noguchi lamps. On the wall is a huge painting by Chung himself. It is called Three Bellies.

The upstairs is less dramatic, apart from their son’s bedroom, which sits on a raised platform, almost hidden behind sliding doors, and which Chang dreamed up while she was still pregnant. “I really let my inner child come out,” she says. “When we have friends over, our son will sometimes ask, ‘Do you want to come to my bedroom? It’s cosy in there.’ What a pick-up line.”

After years of intense work and stress, it seems Chang and Chung have found a settled rhythm, both as parents and as a business. But change may be on the horizon. In July last year the Lo & Behold Group, a Singapore-based hospitality group, took over JKS’s share as Bao’s new partner. It’s the start of a new chapter, but Chang and Chung are coy about what exactly it means, whether that’s international outposts of Bao or further openings in the UK to add to their seven in the capital. What’s clear is that the couple are ready for a new adventure. “As you grow bigger, you turn into an operator, which is more science than magic,” Chung says. “So how can you keep the magic as you grow? That’s the next stage.”