BAO Soho
The guinea fowl rice here is a rebuild of the turkey rice bowls of Chiayi City, blowtorched and dressed in goose fat.
Why go
Because the menu stopped being about bao a long time ago. The kitchen's own heading for its dish list is Not like the Xiao Chi at home
, and what follows is a Taiwanese small-eats repertoire done with real technique: pig blood cake made using pig's blood & glutinous rice
, topped with a soy cured egg yolk; a forty-day aged Denver steak finished over charcoal
on Chi Shang rice; battered sweet potato with a ketchup they make from pickled plums (BAO Soho).
This is the original room, on Lexington Street since 2015, and the one site in a seven-restaurant group that still takes no bookings at all. Six siblings run three other formats, including a charcoal grill house at Borough that is a different proposition entirely.
Order this / avoid
- Order: the guinea fowl rice, then the pig blood cake if you want the dish the kitchen is proudest of.
- Avoid: waiting for a table you booked. There are none. And do not order this room like a bao counter.
What locals & experts say
- No critic has reviewed this address in anything reachable on 1 August 2026, and the single industry pick in the London chef-vote record names the Borough grill house rather than Soho. That is why the confidence on this entry is low.
- The venue prints a pull quote attributed to Lisa Markell of The Independent:
A standing ovation. If Michelin got off its starched-tablecloth arse and got modern, BAO would be a shoo-in.
1 That is quoted here as a line the restaurant chooses to print. The original piece was not read and its date is unknown, so it carries no endorsement weight. - The venue also claims a Michelin Bib Gourmand held for nine consecutive years, in English and in Chinese, on the same page. No trade coverage confirming it for this address was found, so it is recorded as the restaurant's claim and not as a distinction.
Good to know
- Sites: seven BAO rooms in London across three formats. This page is 53 Lexington Street W1F 9AS, the original Xiao Chi House. Nothing about the Grill House at Borough, the Bao Eateries at King's Cross and the City, or the Noodle Shops at Shoreditch and Battersea is claimed here.
- Booking: none. Walk-ins only, and the venue says so twice on its own page.
- Timing: noon to 3 and 5 to 10 Monday to Thursday, straight through to 10.30 Friday and Saturday, to 9 on Sunday.
- Operator: expansion group. Founded on a stall at Netil Market by Erchen Chang, Shing Tat Chung and Wai Ting Chung, backed by JKS Restaurants from 2015, with the Singapore-based Lo and Behold Group taking that position in July 2025.
- Hygiene: FSA rating 3, Westminster, inspected 8 January 2026. Components are food handling 10, structure 10 and management 5, where higher is worse. Seven months old and food handling is not clean, so it is stated here in full.2
Verdict
should-visit — Walk in and order the rice bowls. The guinea fowl rice here is built off the turkey rice bowls of Chiayi City, blowtorched and dressed in goose fat; the pig blood cake is made with glutinous rice and topped with a soy cured egg yolk; the beef is a forty-day aged Denver finished over charcoal on Chi Shang rice. The venue's own heading for that list is 'Not like the Xiao Chi at home', which is a fair description of what it is doing: a Taiwanese small-eats house rather than the bao counter it is remembered as. It has been on Lexington Street since 2015 and it is the one BAO room you cannot book, which in Soho at the two-dollar band is part of the appeal. What holds it here rather than higher is that no critic has written about this address in anything we can reach, the group's one industry pick in our record names the Borough grill house instead, and the Bib Gourmand the venue claims for nine years could not be sourced to anything citable. One more thing worth knowing before you order: Westminster inspected the kitchen in January 2026 and rated it 3, with food handling marked at 10.