Dining Out 036: BAO

Lunch in Borough. Plus, A Very Dining Out Christmas.

Hey everyone. Before we get to this week’s review, I wanted to share some fun news! If you follow me, Lucy or Dining Out on Instagram you might have seen that we’ve made the very first Dining Out zine, which is called A Very Dining Out Christmas. Here it is:

As you will see in this week’s review below, I’m feeling very festive this year so I thought it would be fun to make something to round out 2024 at the most indulgent time of year. Within its pages is some new writing by me (including quite a demented thing about Iceland, not the country the shop), some genuinely brilliant illustrations by Lucy, plus Christmas recipes from south London bruisers Dinner For One Hundred and Toad Bakery, festive wine recommendations from Hannah Burke, a world-beating London mince pie guide by Tom Howells, AND a sneaky look at the Dining Out Awards, wherein I was joined by Angela Hui, Daisy Jones, Imogen West-Knights and Lucas Oakeley to crown some favourite restos and dishes of 2024.

If you were a paid subscriber of the newsletter as of about 6PM yesterday (Wednesday 4th), you get a free copy – to claim it please email diningoutkisskiss@gmail.com with your preferred postal address, and Santa (Royal Mail) will make you a delivery very soon.

If you are not a paid subscriber but you would like a zine you can buy one here. The quantities are limited but all of the profits from sales will go to Medical Aid for Palestinians so please dig deep. Thank you, Merry Christmas, love you lots. Anyway, here’s Wonderwall:

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I don’t think there’s much that could be better than being brought to your table at a restaurant on a really rainy Sunday afternoon, and discovering that the table is actually the window seat.

Even if there are plastic roadblocks splayed on the ground outside, and you’re looking out not at a moody street that could be from a Scandi noir, but on people trying to eat complicated Bread Ahead pastries while also sheltering from the weather with coats on their heads, there’s still something romantic about sitting in the window when it’s raining. You feel sort of hermetically sealed off from the chaos outside, and warmer and cosier than you might otherwise for it. So, when my pal Hannah and I arrived at the Borough branch of BAO last weekend, to these very circumstances, our set-up was feeling pretty good before we’d even ordered any food.

BAO is, I guess, a central London chain, with branches in places like Kings Cross and Battersea Power Station. Their restaurants, which showcase Taiwanese food, each have different identities – some are grill houses, some are noodle bars, some are just takeout counters – but there’s a throughline of very sleek design* and of course, addictively squishy and cleverly filled bao buns, which are the main event.

I like BAO because eating there is easy and straightforward, but not boring. At BAO Borough, the menu is short – there are sharing plates, and there are bao buns. The flavours are accessible and the surroundings are interesting, but despite the casual vibe, the food is always surprising and fun. Where veggies might expect tofu and not much else, there’s a bao on the menu filled with deep fried cheese (a lesson in giving people what they actually want). And a prawn bao shaped like a Greggs’ finger doughnut actually isn’t a million miles from one, the usually-squishy dough dense with oil, sort of like how prawn toast might taste if you put it among the fancies on an afternoon tea. Essentially, these dishes and others on the menu are a reminder that though BAO Borough opened over five years ago, its food has retained a balance between intrigue, familiarity and consistent execution that clearly keeps people interested, and returning for the menu items they love.

My order reflected this. I am an OG fan of the prawn bao (in fact, now that I’ve tasted it again so recently, I’d probably go out on a limb and say it’s one of my favourite things to eat for under a tenner, because the way the oil from the fryer settles into the dough, making it heavy, really is intensely memorable) but everything else Hannah and I chose was new to me. We went for a grilled cucumber and chilli oil situation, as well as some lightly fried tofu with a Taiwanese pickle to share. To accompany my personal prawn bao, I also picked a beef shin bao, with pickles and an “egg emulsion” – this was pretty much just mayo, but I rate the menu author for building the drama.

For both of us, the prawn bao unsurprisingly came top – just the right side of “supremely oily”; generously filled with firm prawns – and any complaints elsewhere were minor. The beef shin was so tender as to be stringy and meltingly soft, and when considered all together, the pickles, the “emulsion” and the soft bao dough were more than a little reminiscent of the flavours of a Big Mac (huge compliment). The cucumber salad was as crisp and bracing as I hoped, having just ducked in from the rain, and the tofu was treated with a light touch, its skin browned and resistant, with chewy insides and a real killer of a sweet pickle on the plate for good measure.

In all, the food was satisfying and quietly impressive, the way BAO always is – and while I could very easily have upped and left after finishing the mains, for the entire meal, I had found myself nagged at by something. Out of the corner of my eye, for pretty much the whole time I spent eating, I could see a specials board making an offer I could not refuse: a Christmas-themed dessert.

For context: I have decided to be aggressively into Christmas this year. 2024 has been a bit of an up-and-down year for me in a lot of ways, the latter bit of which has, I will admit, been more towards the droopy end of that particular scale. I am, then, in no position to turn down an intravenous shot of good cheer, even if it’s just for the month of December. I have become a Christmas yes man. I will openly cry in the street listening to Darlene Love (completed that one already); I will partake in any Secret Santa to which I am invited, no matter how annoying the group chat is. I will wear the hat from the Christmas cracker hat until I fall asleep in front of the Christmas special of The Wheel on the 25th. And if I am eating lunch at BAO Borough with my dear friend Hannah, and I find out about a special dessert called a “mince pie bao”, I will be eating it expeditiously**.

There are no two ways about it, this thing fucking rocked. It came to the table unassumingly, sort of in the shape of a miniature Victoria sponge, but solid all the way around, and placed on a bed of custard. Like the prawn bao, the dough had been deep fried, resisting a little when we tried to break into it, to access the mincemeat. When we did get inside, the fruit was jammy and rich and just sharp enough to stand up to all the stodge – and as for the rest, well, I’m not sure there’s a person in the world who can’t appreciate the specific alchemy of hot, sugared dough and cold custard.

It was a great dish to share because it felt novel and generous – we didn’t know exactly what we should expect from a mince pie bao, and what we got was better than we hoped. For me, it also felt like an auspicious start to the festive season, as did our visit to BAO more generally. When I got home after lunch, I listened to Michael Bublé, put up my crap little Christmas tree, and decorated my windowsills with pound shop tinsel. The charm of the food had just put me in a light mood, I think. That’s a good way for a meal to leave you.

* Photos of their new flagship in the City feel sort of Wong-Kar-Wai-if-he-read-Kinfolk.

** I’ve had a think and I’m pretty sure I’d draw the line at ice skating, but if you were asking me to do that you were probably not my friend in the first place.

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Dining Out is written by Lauren O’Neill and illustrated by Lucy Letherland. Weekly reviews are free to read every Thursday, and you can follow us on Instagram here, but if you’d like to see more, you can subscribe for £5 a month or £50 a year, to get extra content every second Sunday.

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