How to start a restaurant and then build an entire brand world around it: we take lessons from BAO

Looking back at the journey of BAO can be a wellspring of inspiration, brimming with nuggets of knowledge about not just starting and running a business, but also designing one. The restaurant, which first opened as a stall in Netil Market in 2013, has gone on to not just sell a delectable selection of baos over the years, but also become a crowd favourite, quickly launching a confetti of outlets across London. Started by husband and wife artist duo Shing Tat Chung and Erchen Chang, along with Shing’s sister Wai Ting Chung, BAO owes a chunk of its success to its humorous, delightful and now iconic identity of a double-chined, hunched-back ‘Lonely Man’ inhaling a BAO bun, that led to an extensive exercise of worldbuilding. As the restaurant launches its freshest outlet – BAO City – we sit down for a chat with Co-founder & Creative Director Erchen Chang, who takes us through the evolution of the restaurant’s design language, which began with a singular logo that was translated into an entire world of storytelling, touching everything BAO does and makes. The idea for BAO was sparked when the trio took a trip after Shing and Erchen graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art – where they met – and devoured some of the “softest baos” in the mountainside of northeast Taiwan. They wanted to bring their version of those toothsome baos to London, but their stall needed an identity. To build one, Erchen looked back at one of her art pieces from college, an illustration from a performative installation titled ‘Rules to be a Lonely Man.’ The character, which was inspired in equal parts by “salarymen in Asia in oversized suits, and melodramatic macho men in Japanese B movies,” was central to both the installation, where five lonely men in suits gathered by a riverbed to cry, and the illustration, featuring one man sitting under the branch of a cheese plant with his hand under his chin. The illustration was eventually refined and sharpened to create the BAO logo. “Many ask ‘Why is he sad?’ He’s not, he’s quietly enjoying a perfect moment with his BAO. We’re here to inspire everyone’s inner lonely man. At BAO, everything from the food we serve to the interiors of the restaurants is our way of translating Taiwanese culture into stories and experiences for our guests,” says Erchen. “The logo has been tweaked over time, but ever so slightly. Similar to Starbucks, where they kept zooming in, for some reason the same thing is happening with the Lonely Man.”