Gros Bao is an imposing, red-hued restaurant overlooking the Canal Saint-Martin. Picturesque and gaudy in all the right ways, it seeks to do in the French capital for Chinese cuisine what the Big Mamma group has done for Italian.
I must admit… I have little patience for these restaurants: for their no-reservations policies that means you’re always either going way too early or starving by the time you sit down; for their style-over-substance approach to décor. But I have wanted to like Gros Bao; I have wanted to think that you can have both style and substance.
So far, I have been disappointed.
I have visited Gros Bao three times since it first opened. My first visit was during its inaugural weekend, when a technical snafu meant that the namesake buns were unavailable. A friend and I split the duck meant to be the other star of the menu, finding it uninspiring and overpriced.
I returned a second time during deconfinement, when indoor dining was still forbidden, but one could get takeaway buns and other delicacies to enjoy on the canal just steps away. It was perhaps the most enjoyable of my visits, notably introducing me to what I actually believe to be the star of the menu, the Hong Shao eggplant with a meltingly tender texture and sweet-and-spicy soy sauce.
Aside from this eggplant, though, everything at Gros Bao is, in a word, fine.
The mapo tofu is silky, with a thick sauce that lacks some depth and – more importantly (and unsurprisingly) some spice. Am I glad that it’s plant-based? Sure. Do I need to have it again? Probably not.
The namesake bao are giant and pillowy, but they, too, lack depth of flavor.
The pork ones are pretty good, but nowhere near as good as the ones you find, for example at Tricotin in the 13th. The vegetarian bao, meanwhile, is downright bland without some help from dipping sauces.
The fried rice, too, falls into the slightly less-than-fine category, somehow both greasy and dry. Not a fan.
Even the beer brewed by my favorite Parisian brewer, Deck & Donohue, manages to fall slightly flat, as the promised Sichuan pepper flavor never really emerges from the otherwise very nice blonde.
In fact, in a very out-of-character move for me, the only thing I really need to go back to Gros Bao for (aside from the eggplant, that is…) is dessert (and soup dumplings, which were unavailable due to another technical snafu). The lava bao on my last visit were of the chocolate rather than the custard variety (the latter of which I’ve been told is very much worth the hype), so we sampled instead the sesame balls, filled with mung bean paste and coconut. Crispy and crunchy and just the right balance of savory and sweet, they were absolutely delicious.
Gros Bao is certainly a fun place to dine with great views over the Canal Saint-Martin. But as the panoply of choices in Belleville are a mere 15 minutes’ walk away, it’s not going to become my regular any time soon.
Gros Bao – 72, Quai de Jemmapes, 75010