Born in Paris to a Vietnamese-Dutch family, Anaïs van Manen is a thoroughly well-travelled chef. She moved with her family to Vietnam at the age of three and lived there for fifteen years, absorbing the sights and smells of Ho Chi Minh City’s incredible street food scene before moving again to Singapore, then back to Paris, then to London, then to Bogota, and finally back to London, where I find her sitting in the window of her favourite café in Borough Market.
Right next door, a big team are hard at work putting the finishing touches on what will soon become Bao Borough. It’s the fourth permanent site for the all-conquering Taiwanese street food restaurant – fifth if you include stylish Soho offshoot Xu – and Anaïs has had a big hand in the opening, helping founder Erchen Chang with research and dish development. ‘Most of the time when we put a new dish on the menu, it’s the result of a really long discussion about how to bring this Taiwanese dish into Bao – how to modernise the flavour and adapt it for a different audience,’ she explains.
Bao Borough (affectionately nicknamed ‘BB’ by Anaïs) is taking a slightly different tack to previous sites. There will of course be baos aplenty – the BB menu includes a new chicken nugget bao alongside the usual selection, and there’s a grab-and-go hatch for takeaways – but there’s also a considerable yakitori section and a twelve-person karaoke room in the basement. ‘The vibe is based on late-night drinking bars,’ says Anaïs. ‘It feels like a Hong Kong canteen to me – it’s warm and comfortable, and we’re going towards more home-style cooking with the food.
‘We’ve been testing the karaoke,’ she grins. ‘There’s some Taylor Swift, and some Britney Spears, which is more my style! It's going to be fun and wild – that’s the idea behind BB.’