by Eddie Huang
What I wanted to open was Baohaus, a restaurant that specialized in Taiwanese gua bao. I hardly ate bread, because I liked rice, but I knew that in America, rice would never usurp bread as the starch of choice. Growing up, I never really liked char siu bao, but it was always the number-one item among gwai lo. The big white buns—baos—filled with barbecued pork—char sui—were familiar and translated well to Americans. I figured baos would be the perfect bridge. They were an obscure, traditional, ambulatory Taiwanese dish with characteristics that Americans would understand. The bread gave people enough of a pole to hang on to and allowed me to put whatever I wanted between those lily-white baos. Plus, it was kinda cool making baos since Grandpa originally made his living selling mantou, which uses the same dough as a bao, just shaped differently.
I really liked the Baohaus concept, but began to feel that it wouldn’t take off in Bed-Stuy. Everyone I talked to in the neighborhood felt like it was something I’d really be fighting an uphill battle to introduce. I had assumed all along that I couldn’t afford spaces in Manhattan, but with my search in Brooklyn running dry, I went to the Lower East Side.
I always liked the LES—when I moved from Orlando to New York, my first apartment was on Orchard Street on the LES, above the Arivel furs store across from Reed Space in 2005. I walked around all day looking at spaces, but all my appointments were dead ends. Brokers would list spaces on one block, but they were never where they said they were, nor were they the square footage they said. Everything was too big. Around 6 P.M., I finished all my appointments and walked down toward Alife to check out sneakers. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a sign in Chinese on Rivington Street hanging over this subterranean space next to the graffiti mural by Schiller’s that people always took photos of. I peeked into the space and it was perfect. Roughly four hundred square feet, full of random lowboys and freezers, and this dope exposed brick. I called the number, left a message, took a photo, and waited to hear back.
The next day, the landlord called back. The address was 137 Rivington Street, the rent was $2,900, and they were looking for good credit, three months’ security, and 4 percent rent increases. My credit sucked because I had had to rack up debt to get through law school and I was still paying loans. Once I got my credit score to the Realtor, he wanted six months of security. It was bullshit. No one needed six months of security on top of a good-guy guarantee but this landlord was a fucking asshole. Landlords in New York are generally the scum of the earth. They’re beneficiaries of the worst kind of nepotism, eating off the good business decisions of their parents. They have no compassion because they’ve never had to work for shit or know how it feels to need a fucking break. There’s no incentive for them to rent to someone who gets the neighborhood and wants to bring something of substance. Every one of them would love to be the landlord for Spitzer’s or Starbucks. They want neighborhoods like the LES to gentrify, sell out, and attract dollars from big chains. After weeks of negotiating and trying to get a loan from Chase, I gave in and put up roughly five months’ rent in security that totaled over $17,000 which left me with $13,000 for everything else.
* It is my opinion that the show followed a narrative that eventually affected the outcome of the show. It is not a fact.
† White people think it’s unfair I give them a hard time for cooking OUR food or even having the audacity to say it’s OUR food, but it’s bullshit. You know what’s really unfair? Not getting a job at the Orlando Sentinel ’cause of my FACE. Not getting the same opportunity for the same job for the same pay for the same work because of this FACE. That said, there are people like Andy Ricker cooking Thai or Michael White cooking Italian who do the cuisine proud. They love, live, and breathe the shit. They aren’t fucking around with the food, they respect what it is, and they don’t talk about “elevating,” “changing,” or “reinterpreting.” They understand it’s good as is. More on that later.
‡ And despite the fact that Tony Bourdain and I both think Guy Fieri looks like a rodeo clown, I have to say, he played a part in encouraging me to do this. I can’t cosign Tex-Mex sushi or wearing your sunglasses backward, but one time … he got it right. So, as I say this with a trashcan under my head in case vomit involuntarily spews out of my eyes, “Thank you, Guy Fieri.”
§ Ten points if you know where that’s from …
17.
WORLD STAR
I wanted Baohaus to be a place the neighborhood embraced. Not a bullshit coffee shop that says it’s for the neighborhood but kicks people out or doesn’t let them use Wi-Fi if they don’t buy anything. I remember those years in high school where we got in trouble smoking in parking lots outside the 7-Eleven because we had nowhere to go. Most of the time, we got busted ’cause the register dude called the cops. As a kid, I remember always wanting to hang out at comic book or sports card shops. Then it became record shops and basketball courts and as I got older spots like Union. But there was never a restaurant that I would just wake up and go kick it at as a kid. Besides McDonald’s, Wendy’s, or Chick-fil-A, restaurants were for old people. I wanted Baohaus to be a youth culture restaurant that the neighborhood could post up at. Not moms and dads and nine-to-fivers, but the kids across the street, the freelancers, the unemployed, and the people that hung in the neighborhood because they’d scammed their way into rent-controlled apartments. At the core of Baohaus would be this truth: no one would kick you out, call the cops, or serve you shitty 7-Eleven pressed Cubans.
Most restaurateurs you talk to, the food comes first. It really didn’t with me. Food was never the issue. My food was, is, and always will be ill. New York was full of restaurants with good food, but few with a mind. You read the dining section in the Times and it’s the stepchild of the style section. People forget how powerful the culture of a restaurant is. Food is what’s on the plate, but dining extends beyond it. When you go to Taiwan or China, you don’t go to soulless super-restaurants with high ceilings and filet mignon. You go to the Dan-Dan Noodle Stand that your dad grew up at. I wanted the atmosphere at Baohaus to be everything that the Dan-Dan Noodle Stand was to my dad as a teenage Taiwanese street kid, but the food was for my mom. We argue, we fight, but at the end of the day, her moves are the only ones I’ve ever stolen in the kitchen. I always cook for my own palate but every single thing is derivative of the flavors and techniques she instilled in me. People talk about “family restaurants,” but Baohaus really is. The funny part is, my family wanted nothing to do with it.
A week before opening, I went home to see my family and everyone had long faces. No one could believe I was throwing away my degree to sell Chinese-Taiwanese fast-food. It made no sense to them. I couldn’t understand.
“Dad, you ALWAYS talked about that Dan-Dan Noodle Shop! You own a restaurant! Why is it such a big deal when I want to own one?”
“Because you’re not ready! You don’t know what you’re doing. And, and … you spend all this money on this degree to stand behind fryer? You crazy! What have happened!”
That weekend, we didn’t even really talk. We just walked by each other waiting for it to be over. Evan didn’t believe in the idea, either, but he was a really special kid. Anytime someone in the family got outcast, Evan would befriend them. He was the only one in the family who got along with everyone. I didn’t always get along with Emery, my mom didn’t get along with my dad, and vice versa, but Evan got along with everyone. I remember in high school when my dad dropped Evan off for the first day of his senior year, Administrator Lott stopped him.
“Mr. Huang!”
“Hey, what’s up, Mr. Lott? I am surprised to see you first day. My kids can’t be in trouble before it starts, right?”
“Ha, ha, ha, no, no one is in trouble, Mr. Huang. I just wanted to tell you something.”
“What is it?”
“Well … Eddie? Eddie was bad. Emery was mean, but Evan? Evan is an angel!”
We never stopped laughing at Evan for being called an angel, but it was true. He is the nicest person anyone
will ever meet. Like the rest of us, he got arrested for bringing a knife to school and hit a kid in the head with a hockey stick when the kid called Evan a chink. He’s still a Huang. But he’s the best we got.
I was keeping to myself and gave up convincing my parents, but Evan went out of his way to talk to me about the concept, asked me questions about Baohaus, and really got in my head. I remember him telling me: “I think Mom and Dad are right, but you’re pretty set on doing this so I’ll do it with you.”
That’s the type of loyalty, family, and love that you really only see in films. It’s not supposed to be real. Literal translation of what Evan told me: “I think you are going to fail and it’s a bad move, but I’ll ride with you and go down together if that’s what has to happen.”
My parents were pissed when Evan told them he was going to come help me. It was bad enough that I was going all-in; they didn’t want me dragging Evan along, too.
“Eddie! You can’t do this. You convince everyone, but don’t ruin your brother’s life! He has to go to school.”
“Mom, no one is ruining anyone’s life. He goes to UCF. That degree is worth less than a coupon for free McRibs.”
“What the fuck is McRib? Don’t change subject!”
“Yeah! You are sneaky, convincing Evan. You know what you should do? You should go work for David Chang!”
That’s what really set me off. David Chang is the chef who unwittingly popularized a bastardized version of Taiwanese gua bao. He tells the story of how he created the Momofuku pork bun in his book Momofuku.
It came about because he’d eat at Oriental Garden in Chinatown. It’s a great Cantonese restaurant that Chinese people go to for weddings and birthdays because it’s expensive, but some chefs go to on the regular because, well, they can. Chang would go there and get the “Peking duck.” This story is ludicrous on a number of levels. You have this “chef” ordering Peking duck at a Cantonese restaurant that serves the duck in gua bao. Peking duck is served in pancakes, not baos, for a number of reasons. You eat the skin in the pancake so that you get the texture of the skin, the body of the hoisin, the sharpness of scallions, and the thin starch from pancakes. Then you eat the actual meat solo to taste the flavor and make soup with the bones. Any official Peking duck restaurant does it that way. I’m all for innovation, cereal milk, and the evolution of a dish, but it needs to be intended. Serving “Peking” duck in baos is just plain lazy.
Chang asked the chef where to get the baos because he had an idea. He wanted to serve roasted pork belly in the baos. It’s a great idea that blew up and gained Chang notoriety as the man in New York. To this day, publications like New York magazine still credit Chang for introducing New York to the gua bao. I was mad, but I respected the hustle. The only way to get even was to set up shop myself. I thank David. Just like he came up on gua bao, I jumped off his success and brought the title home. A Taiwanese kid makes the best gua bao in New York just like it should be.* “It’s my island!”—crazy dude in Braveheart.
The bao became a vehicle for me to speak about everything from Brianna Love to Long Duk Dong. One of the most important things I did when opening Baohaus was that I told people I wasn’t a chef. Food isn’t the first thing I’ve done and it won’t be the last. Baohaus wasn’t a restaurant, it was an idea. An idea that couldn’t be understood with the language and vocabulary of traditional restaurants. Although I did not set out to tell my entire life story through the restaurant, I did. What saved me was that I had the confidence this time around to know what stories I didn’t want to tell. And those stories were anyone else’s but mine. I realized the problem with Hoodman wasn’t that I tried to do me, it was that I tried to do everyone else, too. Once we had a hit with my Obama and “I Shoot Hipsters” tees, I listened to too many other people. We looked into “developing a line” and growing the way other brands did when we should have just stuck to our guns. With Baohaus, we stayed true to ourselves and that’s how Rivington was won.
We opened with only five items: Chairman Bao, Haus Bao, Uncle Jesse, Boiled Peanuts, and Bao Fries with Sesame Sauce. That was it. I didn’t want a vegetarian item, but when we did a tasting of the menu at my South Oxford row-house apartment, I realized Jesse couldn’t eat anything so I made him a fried tofu bao with sweet chili and sesame paste. Everyone knows Uncle Jesse from Full House, but the inspiration was actually Jesse Hofrichter. The boiled peanuts were a Southern thing that my friend Tyler dropped on me a couple of weeks before opening. My grandpa loved boiled peanuts and fried chicken so it was the perfect item to bring us full circle.
That’s how everything went at Baohaus. Nothing was inspired by famous chefs, farms, or trends in food. It was the manifestation of my friends, family, and memories. I knew we’d kill it, because there’s nothing more powerful. We weren’t cerebral cooks inspired by Harold McGee. When we opened, there wasn’t even a budget for staff. All the money was spent on equipment and the first week of food. There was three hundred dollars left and if we didn’t break even the first week, we were done. Since I was a Yeshiva grad and it was an LES restaurant, it was only fitting that we opened on Christmas Eve 2009: Chinese food in a Jewish neighborhood on Christmas Eve. Our “staff” was composed of Steven Lau, Simon Tung, George Zhao, Ning Juang, Evan Huang, Stephane Adam, and myself. No one besides Evan and myself had ever worked in a restaurant, but that was the squad we opened with.
It’s a funny feeling. The lights go on, the door opens, and for a few hours, no one comes in. All day, there was this one girl, Lia Bulong, who kept asking when we’d open. Since we were still setting everything up, we had no idea so we kept telling her “in an hour or so.” She lived down the street on Clinton so she kept checking in.
“Guys! Lemme know when you open, I want to be the first customer!”
“OK, OK, like one more hour and this pork will be done.”
“Uggghhh, that’s what you’ve been saying for three hours!”
Of course, when we finally open, Lia is nowhere to be found. You may ask, “Why the fuck didn’t you just take her phone number and call?” That’s a good question: we didn’t have money for a phone. The first customer walked in about fifteen minutes after we opened and everyone jumped her with menus like a bunch of orphans in China trying to braid your hair. As everyone played twenty-one questions, I excitedly made the first bao. I can’t remember what it was, I can’t remember if we charged her, but I’ll never forget the moment. I don’t think anyone has ever enjoyed watching someone eat a five-inch sandwich as much as the seven of us smiling at this one Russian chick coming over from Alife. As she left, in busted Lia.
“What the fuck, dudes? Was she the first customer?”
“Ha, ha, ha, yeah, our bad!”
“Ughhh, you guys are the worst!”
Lia was hilarious and has been a customer and friend ever since. That’s how it started at Baohaus. Once Lia came in, this girl Sue came in who’d actually gone to high school with me. A few hours later, Warren’s dad called me on my cellphone because he saw on Facebook that we opened the shop and he just happened to be in the city for Christmas with Warren’s brothers. What are the fucking odds? You open shop Christmas Eve in the LES and your childhood best friend’s family is in the neighborhood with no notice? We made $260 the first day and we thought it was the greatest thing ever. Today, we make that in an hour.
After drinking, smoking, and cleaning up the shop, it was 3 A.M., so we didn’t open for Christmas. By that time, food writers in the neighborhood were posting things. We didn’t know it but Lia actually worked for Serious Eats and Eater, two big foodie websites. Rebecca Marx of The Village Voice also came incognito and they had an article up about our opening that same day, but the next day, of course, we weren’t open. So we just tweeted that we were tired and didn’t want to go to work, which was the truth. Christmas is for the NBA in our house. On the twenty-sixth, we opened up a couple of hours late and a good number of people came in to try our baos. Without us saying anything, everyone was
comparing it to Momofuku, which we wanted to happen. The difference was that we braised our pork. Although Chang is Korean-American, his technique is French. Even bo ssam, a Korean pork belly dish, uses steamed pork belly. Asians don’t use the oven for anything but holding Jordans.
I WAS SICK of immigrants not getting the credit they deserved. I was sick of the Jean-Georges of the world making a killing on our ingredients and flavors because we were too stupid to package it the right way. I was sick of seeing other Asian kids like myself walking to school with their heads down. I was sick of seeing them picking snow peas in the dining room after school and I was sick of not having a voice in America. The only Asian that I ever saw speak up for us was Miss Info on Hot 97 after the morning crew played a song making fun of the tsunami in Japan. My main objective with Baohaus was to become a voice for Asian Americans.† Whether you accept it or not, when you’re a visible Asian you have a torch to carry because we simply don’t have any other representation. About three weeks after opening, we were the number-one hot restaurant in New York on Yelp. I think Yelp is doo-doo, but it drove a lot of customers to the shop. Day after day, we kept running out of food by 9 P.M. We made more and more each day, but I was the only one that knew how to make the recipes and I simply didn’t have the time or equipment to braise more than thirty pounds of pork and beef each day. I’d show up at 8 A.M., work till midnight, clean up till 2 A.M., and take the train back to Brooklyn. If I got home before three I was lucky. We finally realized that the smart thing to do would be to close for an entire day, take a break, get bigger pots and pans, and hire some employees. We wanted to make sure the people we hired fit the idea of Baohaus so we decided to use nontraditional ads that weeded people out for us. The first post we ever put up was titled:
