WEALTH March 15, 2026 0 Comments

The Untold Secrets Behind Eva Pau’s Unstoppable Rise to Success—And How You Can Steal Her Playbook Today

Ever wonder what it takes to juggle running Ireland’s most beloved Asian supermarket while gearing up for a TV comeback and unveiling your own cookbook? Well, meet Eva Pau—a powerhouse who’s not just wearing many hats, she’s flipping them with flair. Stepping into the family business was never just about keeping the legacy alive; for Eva, it’s about expanding horizons, demystifying exotic ingredients for the everyday cook, and turning Asia Market into a nationwide phenomenon. From transforming a modest warehouse into a bustling retail hub, to nurturing a telesales team fluent in Mandarin, Cantonese, and English, Eva’s blueprint for growth is as bold as her recipes. So how does she keep all these balls in the air without dropping a single one? Stick around, because Eva Pau’s story is a masterclass in blending tradition with innovation—and trust me, it’s just getting started. LEARN MORE

The RTÉ chef and social media Eva Pau star talks to Jordan Mooney about taking over the family’s Asia Market business and how she’s expanding its retail and wholesale offering… while also preparing for a new TV series and releasing her own cookbook

As Eva Pau sits down in her office at the Asia Market facility in Ballymount, Dublin, it’s clear from the space alone that this is a woman wearing many hats and wearing them all well.

Her primary role is managing director of the country’s most popular Asian supermarket, but she’s a familiar face to many thanks to her RTÉ television show Eva Pau’s Asian Kitchen, as well as her various appearances on other programmes promoting Asian cuisine, popular social media recipes and upcoming cookbook.

The Ballymount campus, which is the second of two Asia Market locations, is Pau’s main base.

This office isn’t just where she takes meetings — it’s also where she plans out the future of the business, tests recipes, films content, peruses her massive cookbook collection and much more.

Right now, the biggest project she’s working on is an expansion of the facility’s warehouse area so they can store and supply more products around the country.

As she explains the plans, she notes that the Ballymount space came into existence after the company started to outgrow its initial Drury Street store.

“My father and my uncles started Asia Market in 1981 as a way to supply Chinese takeaways in Ireland and the growing Asian community with the ingredients they needed.

“My uncle, who owned a takeaway at the time,was driving to the UK every week to bring back the ingredients he needed for his restaurant and came up with the idea that there might be a demand to set up a business that supplied other Asian businesses, alongside a retail store,” Pau says.

“This was around the start of the growth of Chinese takeaways here, so our business grew alongside it. The Drury Street store was started as a way to supply retail items to Asian families.”

A few years later, Pau’s two uncles moved north to set up Asia Supermarket Belfast, with her parents remaining in Dublin to solely run their business, which continued to grow.

As a child, Pau recalls her father driving around to deliver ingredients to restaurants, saying he would always know everyone he worked with, while her mother had quite a solid brain for business.

The result was that the flagship store on Drury Street grew to take overmore space before they acquired the site at Ballymount.

Located within an industrial estate, it’s a 40,000 sq ft facility with a retail store alongside offices and warehouses. But it started much smaller.

“Initially it was just a warehouse with our own fleet of vans. While we had a small retail store, it was more of a cash-and-carry type facility. It wasn’t until eight or ten years ago that we extended the area to focus more space on retail,” Pau says.

“It was a bit of a risk, because there wasn’t much footfall. But we weren’t getting the footfall from restaurant customers anyway, so we thought that a store like ours in the city centre might work.

“We’ve been very lucky that customers have come in and made it worthwhile as we’ve grown the space, because the thing with retail is that if people don’t come, the stock has an expiry date.

“And that’s before you even see all the bills coming in. All I could think was that I needed to make this work.”

This retail expansion was one of Pau’s early projects when she joined the Asia Market team. While exposed to the business her whole life, Pau wasn’t always planning to be part of it.

She gained an undergraduate degree in information and communication technology at Trinity College Dublin, then completed a master’s degree in IT management and organisational change in the UK before moving to Hong Kong to work various short-term contracts across businesses such as FedEx.

“Then I worked with the RoyalBank of Scotland. Funnily enough,the head of the bank at the time was from Monaghan, I was from Dublin and our head office was in Singapore.

“I stayed with the company for eight years, working on different ITprojects, but I spent a lot of time thinking about starting my own business, the marketing of it, and what it might be,” Pau says.

“In the end, I thought that the best idea would be to come back to Dublin to learn from my parents first.

It would have been easy to just ask my parents to invest in my business, but I wanted to learn and make my own money before seeing what business I really wanted to start.

“I actually found that I loved the food business and it felt like my parents had been teaching me all about it from the start.”

Explaining that she learned a lot about cooking in her childhood from family members (she recalls a particularly fun period when an aunt visited from Australia and taught her to make sushi), Pau cites a lifelong interest in cookbooks as well as watching her excellent home-cook parents as driving factors behind her passion for food.

“People always ask if we just eat Asian food at home. But I grew up here [and] my dad lived in the UK for many years, as did my grandfather, so there were always lots of Western influences in what we ate too,” Pau says.

“I think that’s made me see how specific Irish-style Chinese food is to here, but also how the public have really grown to seek out more authentic ingredients and flavours.

“There’s much more of an interest in things like dried chillies, Szechuan peppercorns and that from the wider public now than there might have been when I was growing up.”

Pau’s early work with Asia Market was very project-based and focused on things she had noticed needed changing, such as consolidating the brand’s colour scheme to its now-signature colours and taking part in food festivals.

Engaging the community, she says, has been key for the company.

“I’m always trying to improve things. I joined about 15 years ago and realised that we needed people to get to know our brands, to build interest in Asian food and cooking.

“So I started doing in-store tastings as well as tours around the Drury Street store to help people familiarise themselves with us and products they may not [have been] aware of,” she says.

“One of my biggest projects hasbeen setting up our online store,which thankfully was fully online before Covid hit.

“It was a bit of a struggle because we weren’t fully sure if it would work and we weren’t getting that many orders for the first year and a half. But in my mind I kept thinking, ‘You have to start somewhere’. Then when Covid started, people became more in tune with buying online and that helped our business a lot — all I could think was, ‘Thank goodness we had this set up!’

“There’s huge growth there in our online store now. I think people like it because you can also find recipes, then directly add the ingredients to your basket and there’s same-day delivery in Dublin.”

While the online system has bolstered the company and added to its retail arm, Pau says that wholesaleis the biggest part of the business, accounting for about 75 per cent of sales.

Lucky Boat fine noodles are the biggest seller on the wholesale side, with 48,000 cases sold last year. With their wholesale customers located across the Republic, speaking different languages and having different purchasing needs, Pau says that the telesales team is crucial to the business — currently 15 of her 200 employees work in that area, speaking Mandarin, Cantonese and English.

As such, they often need to organise visas in order to hire people with these qualifications. This is why another huge project for Pau was creating an organisational structure within the business that would streamline things.

“When I started working here, my parents really weren’t used to any sort of structure. It was like a small mom and pop store that suddenly got really big.

“So when I joined, I felt it was really important to set down structure and introduce middle management to help our growth and redevelopment become sustainable,” Pau says.

“Everything we make, we put back into the business to help it grow, and I think we’re seeing that have an effect now.”

While Pau says that ingraining an organisational backbone in the business is the project she’s most proud of, she has plenty planned for Asia Market in 2026.

Asia Market in Ballymount

Alongside a multi-million euro 30,000 sq ft expansion of the Ballymount site’s warehouse facility, she intends to host more tastings, workshops and demos (which Asia Market has become very well known for) at both locations, especially for the upcoming Lunar New Year.

She will also launch season two of her cooking show in March and her first cookbook later this year. All of this amidst the day-to-day running of the business, travelling abroad to meet suppliers and source new ingredients, and continuing to grow the brand’s marketing strategy — she’s not slowing down any time soon.

“I’m still just trying to demystify Asian ingredients for the public,” Pau says, looking ahead.

“There’s a real appetite for Asian flavours now, so we will keep working on ingraining those into the public. I’ve a lot going on, but I’m excited.”