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When you name your restaurant Irritable Bao, you’d better dish out a great product. Judging from the lines of hungry customers that form outside this Auburn eatery, husband-and-wife owners Whitley Dykes and Kunyu Li have hit the mark with their traditional and fusion bao, a dumpling-like Chinese fare that consists of airy dome-shaped steamed bread enveloping savory and sweet fillings.
“That’s just our sense of humor,” says Dykes of the name, who started out with a dumpling-focused food truck, Dumps Like A Truck, that sold handcrafted snacks made by Li, who was born in China. “It gives people a chuckle.”
The truck premiered in December 2017 and the couple’s tiny original bao shop in west-central Auburn opened in October 2018. The Irritable Bao moved to its current, more spacious downtown location on Magnolia Avenue in June 2020.
Li is from the northeast city of Changchun, the capital of the Jilin Province, which is known for very flavorful food. Li’s mother had experience running a restaurant and the family was particularly adept at making meat-filled dumplings to steam or pan-fry.
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Dykes met, fell in love with, and married Li while doing mission work and teaching English in China. He says he also fell in love with the in-laws’ dumplings, which inspired the food truck once the couple settled in Auburn. After opening the brick-and-mortar restaurant, Li returned briefly to China to learn bao-making from one of her cousins, a restaurateur.
“She’s always been a great cook and always been creative,” Dykes says. “She is self-taught. But what she does is incredible.”
People would wait in line for an hour or more to purchase food at the original Irritable Bao. Even with more production room and a bigger staff to speed sales at the current location, lines still snake out the door for the snow-white steamed buns and other dishes.
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