Kevin Hsieh’s journey to restaurant ownership was an unusual one. Prior to founding Bao Bei, a ghost kitchen-turned restaurant specializing in Taiwanese street food and steamed buns, he had no prior experience working in restaurant kitchens or running a business. His expertise was as a financial analyst, but when he started to find the work unfulfilling, he looked toward his childhood memories of meals with his family for inspiration.
“I come from a family that enjoys cooking a lot. My father is a chef, and my grandma is a chef,” Hsieh explains. “They did all the cooking [in our family] when I was young, so I never needed or wanted to learn to do it myself.”
Hsieh didn’t actually learn to cook until he had set his mind on starting a restaurant. His initial lack of experience did little to hinder Bao Bei’s chances of success, though. Since 2022, the brand has grown from a stand that tabled at local food festivals to a brick-and-mortar location in Rockville’s Montrose Crossing shopping center, which opened its doors in late summer 2025.
Now, Bao Bei is a hub of fast-casual Taiwanese food. Its menu is fairly small, but features a variety of freshly-steamed buns, rice bowls packed with braised proteins and “The Big One” — a gargantuan piece of fried chicken and a variation on a dish commonly found at night markets around Taiwan.
Rockville is known for its vibrant culinary scene and especially its wide variety of Asian restaurants, so Bao Bei was entering a very competitive market. In order to get his foot in the door, Hsieh first opened Bao Bei as a ghost kitchen, serving as its owner and sole employee. These delivery-only restaurants started popping up in the mid-2010s, but garnered mainstream attention during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the restaurant industry was forced to become largely reliant on food delivery due to restrictions on indoor dining.
While many pandemic-era ghost kitchens have seen a drop in business since the early 2020s, Bao Bei made a name for itself at local food festivals and quickly received positive word of mouth, including reviews in the Washington Post and Washingtonian.
“It’s pretty risky to open a restaurant when you have no branding associated with it. The whole idea was to start a ghost kitchen to see if people approved of the concept and if I had what it took to open a full restaurant,” Hsieh says. “To me, the ghost kitchen was my institute. It was where I honed my skills and learned to make everything that Bao Bei needed from me, and then I felt confident enough to open up the store.”
People outside of the Rockville area may be most familiar with Bao Bei and Hsieh from his stint on the 17th season of the Food Network show “The Great Food Truck Race,” where he and his team made the finals. Hsieh notes that he did not go out of his way to apply to the competition — the show’s team found the restaurant’s Instagram and reached out to him. “The Great Food Truck Race” gave the Bao Bei team the opportunity to travel and gain experience working in a food truck.
Bao Bei’s menu features many dishes that may be familiar to any Taiwanese food enthusiast. The Bao Bei Bao, which comes in pork belly and tofu variants, is a twist on the classic gua bao, while the pork belly-topped Bao Bei Bowl is a lu rou fan under a different name.
These dishes are both inspired by the dishes Hsieh’s grandmother would cook and by fast food presentation. Diners don’t have to wait long for their food at the restaurant, but a lot of time and effort goes into preparing the ingredients, like braising the pork and tofu. The iconic steamed bao buns are all made from scratch, with Hsieh making more than 800 a week.
“There’s a lot of [Asian] restaurants around here, but our environment is very family-friendly,” Hsieh notes. “We use a fusion of ingredients and flavors that are very easy for Westerners to indulge in, so we don’t have to persuade people to try Taiwanese food, which they might be hesitant about.”
Bao Bei recently debuted a fried chicken bao, which Hsieh hopes the restaurant will become well-known for, even though the fried chicken sandwich market is just as competitive as Rockville’s Asian restaurant community is. He also hopes to open a second location in Virginia in the future.
