Fresh Off the Boat (36 page)

Anyway, reader questions …

I didn’t know where the blog or the restaurant was headed, but I was having fun and honestly that’s all that mattered. I wanted to keep that mindset and energy that I’d had just chillin’ in Fort Greene playing ball and hustling every day. I never wanted to find myself in a situation again where I was doing things because someone told me I was supposed to. From the ground up, I was going to detox my identity of any and everything that someone else put there without my blessing.

I knew that I couldn’t afford a big space in Manhattan so I started my search for spaces in Brooklyn: Fort Greene and Bedford-Stuyvesant. A lot of people still thought of Bed-Stuy as “Do or Die.” I kicked it out there, hung out at Pratt after playing ball, and went to house parties in the fragrant old brownstones with scrolling stonework on the façades. To me, it was dope, even though I realized that if you had a restaurant in Bed-Stuy, you weren’t going to draw customers from outside Bed-Stuy. That was OK with me. The concepts that worked in Bed-Stuy were neighborhood restaurants or grab-’n’-go, casual-seating type joints, which fit what I was trying to do.

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 Plus, it was kinda cool making baos since Grandpa originally made his living selling mantou, which uses the same dough as a bao, just shaped differently.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.

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.