BAO opened its first permanent site in Soho in 2015, after a period of market trading that had built a reputation well in excess of what a street food stall should reasonably be able to generate. The combination of precise, technically accomplished Taiwanese cooking — the bao themselves, the lu rou fan, the cold dish menu that rewards attention — and a brand identity developed by Erchen Chang that was visually distinctive in a way London's food world had not previously encountered produced, from the beginning, the kind of cult following that most operators spend careers pursuing.
Ten years on, BAO operates five permanent London sites — Soho, Fitzrovia, Borough, Marylebone and King's Cross — alongside a growing portfolio of concessions in food halls and market spaces that represents an expansion approach the group has developed with increasing deliberateness. The concession model sits alongside rather than instead of the permanent restaurant format, and the two serve different functions in a broader strategy that the group's founders describe as being about reach and experimentation as much as revenue.
How the Concession Model Works
A BAO concession — currently operating at sites including Coal Drops Yard's food hall and a series of rotating market appearances — typically runs a shorter menu than the permanent restaurants, focused on the most portable and recognisable elements of the BAO offer: the bao themselves in two or three formats, a rice bowl, a drink. The kitchen footprint is smaller, the staffing requirement lower, and the capital commitment a fraction of a full restaurant fit-out.
The commercial return from a concession is lower in absolute terms than from a full restaurant, but the risk profile is fundamentally different. A concession in an established food hall has a guaranteed footfall that a new restaurant site does not, and the cost of exiting or changing a concession arrangement is a fraction of the cost of closing a restaurant. For a brand like BAO, where the queue culture that characterises the permanent sites is itself part of the experience rather than a problem to solve, the concession format allows the food to reach people who would not commit to the wait — or who don't live near a permanent site.
The Experimentation Function
Chang has spoken in several interviews about the concession and pop-up format as a test environment for new dishes and formats before they are committed to permanent menu positions. A new bao filling that performs well in a food hall concession across several hundred transactions has been effectively consumer-tested in a way that menu development in a closed test kitchen cannot replicate. The feedback is real, immediate and commercial rather than curated.
The BAO team's broader creative output — the brand's publications, the merchandise, the visual identity — feeds into the concession format as much as into the permanent restaurants. A BAO appearance at a market or food festival is not just a food offer; it is an expression of the brand's wider creative identity in a format that travels.
The Lesson for Other Independents
The BAO model has attracted attention from other independent restaurant groups looking for expansion paths that don't require the full capital commitment of new sites. The food hall boom of the past decade — Kerb, Eataly, Market Halls, Mercato Metropolitano and a growing number of regional equivalents — has created an infrastructure for exactly the kind of concession-based growth that BAO has pioneered at the independent end of the market.
The limitation is brand fit: not every restaurant concept translates to a concession format without losing something essential. The BAO format — portable, individual, recognisable — suits it naturally. A restaurant whose experience is inseparable from a specific room, a specific service style, a specific atmosphere, cannot be concession-ised without becoming something different. The model is transferable in principle but requires honest assessment of whether the food and the brand can travel.