Bao Makers – Singapore’s Little Bao?

Posted on March 1, 2016 by lancescape Leave a comment

Bao Makers as its name suggest is a BAO-centric café selling HOT fluffy buns (Bao) with a modern fusion twist. Other than Baos, it serves other mains such as Buta Yaki Spaghetti, teriyaki don and sides such as nacho cheese fries or the ever popular truffle fries.

Situated a few doors apart from The Bravery Café and Two Bakers, the emergence of Bao Makers offers another retreat for the hipster crowd in the Jalan Besar region.

Having been there on two separate occasions, we tried all 6 Baos on the menu and our favourite is the chili crab and the classic one.

Chilli Crab – golden fried mantou with chunks of crab meat in an impeccable spicy tangy sauce. The crispy fried mantou sets it apart from the other Baos that were steamed to a fluffy soft. We loved how this bears a close resemblance to our Zichar chili crab but HANDS-free from the de-shelling of crabs.

Classic – slow cooked pork belly with preserved vegetable. This is a hard to go wrong combination where the pork belly had a good balance of lean and fatty meat but a little short of melt-in-the-mouth texture.

Salted Egg Shrimp – We felt that the salted egg sauce was subtle and could have been thicker and more generous, maybe we had expected too much for it.

Salted egg Shrimp BAO

Teriyaki/ Nanban Chicken – Deep fried chicken with teriyaki sauce/Japanese style tartar sauce. Among the two, we prefer the Nanban Chicken as the teriyaki sauce was sweet and could be better balanced off with some caramelized onions or pickled daikon.

We further order the mains since we had entertainer app (one-for-one) offer. We had the Katsu Teri Don ($12) and Buta Yaki Spaghetti ($12.90)

Buta Yaki Spaghetti

We loved the Katsu Teri Don -the deep fried chicken with an onsen egg and soft Japanese rice, our only gripe is that the rice went dry halfway and we had to transfer the sweet and savory sauce over from the Buta Yaki.

You could satisfy your sweet tooth with some Ice cream Bao ($5), likened to the idea of Little Bao in Hong Kong! The casual ambience here makes it an ideal place to spend a solo afternoon to relax and idle away.