The first international locations opened in Bangkok, Thailand in 2014 and in Abu Dhabi, UAE. A shop in Xian, China and one in Hong Kong opened in 2015.[2] By 2017 there were shops in 6 different Asian countries.[1]
Name
The store was named after two homeless men for whom Robert Rook did pro bono work, who asked that the ice cream shop be named after them.[3] Emack and Bolio were mascots of a sort for the first store.[4]
It has been noted that Emacs, text editing software popular with computer programmers, and BOLIO, a text-formatting program, were developed within walking distance of a store near MIT. The explanation by the GNU Emacs Project does not indicate a connection.