Xu

The 1930s Taipei teahouse aesthetic that shaped Xu's two-storey Soho interior — low lighting, mahjong boards set into tables, a dedicated tea bar — was a deliberate act of cultural positioning from the Bao group founders Shing Tat Chung, Wai Ting Chung, and Erchen Chang. Where their original Bao sites leaned into the casual and the queue-dependent, Xu on Rupert Street was a more considered proposition: private dining areas, a grown-up atmosphere, and a menu that moved between modern Taiwanese cooking and Cantonese-influenced technique. The kitchen's approach to familiar ingredients produced dishes that drew consistent attention from London food press at launch. Shou pa chicken was widely cited as the restaurant's signature preparation, alongside combinations such as bone marrow with tofu, spring onion pancake with foie gras, and chicken wing with caviar — a menu that treated Taiwanese cooking as a starting point rather than a constraint. A pre-theatre menu priced around £19.50 and a typical dinner running roughly £60 per head placed Xu firmly in Soho's upper-mid-range bracket, comparable to the neighbourhood's more considered independent restaurants rather than its tourist-facing operations. Xu occupied a particular moment in London's engagement with Taiwanese food: it arrived before the broader wave of regional Chinese cooking had fully established itself in the capital's serious dining conversation, and it carried the credibility of the Bao group's existing reputation. Critical reception at opening was warm, though later coverage noted the restaurant struggled to maintain its initial momentum. It has since closed permanently. For those tracking the Bao group's evolution as one of London's more thoughtful operators in East Asian dining, Xu remains a reference point for what that team attempted at a more formal register.