There was much excitement in the New York dumpling community when Din Tai Fung announced it would open an outpost in Manhattan — the Taiwanese restaurant chain’s 182nd opening worldwide and its 16th location in the United States, but the first one east of Las Vegas. In July, thousands of hopefuls kept vigil at their laptops to score reservations as they were released, only to watch them vanish in minutes.
A dumpling lover faces long odds at Din Tai Fung.
The first restaurant opened in 1972 in Taipei, specializing in xiao long bao, or Shanghai-style soup dumplings (also called steamed buns or juicy buns). As a global chain, it now offers a more expansive menu, but it’s still the xiao long bao that pull in the fans. Din Tai Fung’s famously dainty dumplings are regarded as paragons of the form.
The xiao long bao, said to have originated in Nanxiang more than a century ago, is a balancing act of wrapper, filling and soup. Its nucleus, a loose-knit mound of fatty meat, is speckled with jellied cubes of chilled broth that must stay solid while being quickly wrapped. That wrapper can vary from translucent to fluffy, depending on the style. The jelly melts as the dumplings steam, filling them with hot, savory soup that cascades thrillingly across the tongue when you slurp.
Precision and uniformity are the goal at Din Tai Fung, where each xiao long bao weighs exactly 21 grams, the gossamer wrappers pleated 18 times. At the New York branch you can watch the dumpling makers speedily rolling, pinching, stuffing and twisting the dough in a glassed-in prep room. A team of about 34 chefs produces an astonishing 16,000 dumplings a day, and over the course of five visits I’ve become obsessed with trying to get one of the good ones.
Because despite Din Tai Fung’s obsession for detail, I’ve found the Manhattan restaurant wildly, frustratingly inconsistent.
I got the ideal experience on my first visit, in August. I brought a group of Din Tai Fung devotees, one of whom had stayed up late to pounce on a 7 p.m. reservation. (If you go to bed early you’ll have to dine on dumplings in the afternoon.)
As befits the restaurant’s location on Broadway just north of Times Square, the setting is dramatic, the white-clad prep chefs fluttering like moths against the dark plums, browns and blacks of the elegant dining room. This is reportedly the most upscale of the chain, but it’s also dim and disorienting, with a mazelike layout that can be hard to navigate. The labyrinth echoed boisterously with couples on dates, families with young children, blasé locals and chirruping tourists. Our party of four was seated at a round table big enough for six, which we quickly crowded with too much food.
Small plates of vegetables came first: snappy cabbage, silky spinach and crisp green beans suffused with garlic; floppy curls of vinegary wood-ear mushrooms; a pyramid of chile-dotted cucumber rounds. All proved reliably excellent on every visit.
The noodles, too, were very fine, especially the egg-yellow strands in fragrant Taiwanese soup with wobbly chunks of braised beef.
And at last, our reason for coming appeared: bamboo towers of xiao long bao, shao mai and steamed buns. I lifted a pork xiao long bao, its taut skin bulging with heady, savory soup, and eased it tenderly into a wide porcelain spoon. Mindful of the instructions placed on every table to prevent newbies from staining their shirts, I dabbed ginger and vinegar on top, nibbled a hole in the swirled knot and blew on it carefully. I slurped, and I understood.
The pork dumplings, centered on brawny Kurobuta meat (a Japanese version of Berkshire pork) were a stunning combination of feathery yet elastic dumpling skin and intensely flavored, umami-rich broth. Unexpectedly, the sweet and gingery chicken xiao long bao may have been my favorite, with a complex, velvety broth. Both versions hit that trifecta of soft filling, rich soup and paper-thin skin. Their delicacy was a revelation.
The non-soup dumplings were nearly as impressive, including plump wontons in a fiery dressing, pink kimchi-pork dumplings that exploded with gorgeous funk, and chewy, earthy black sesame dumplings dunked in frothy sea salt cream.
By the time I left, lips slick with soup, I was prepared to wait at my laptop as long as it took to get another reservation.
A few weeks later, a friend and I arrived for an early reservation at the bar. After a 25-minute stint in the purgatorial waiting area, we were seated in front of a bored-looking bartender shaking lychee mojitos and an acid green Elphaba’s Elixir (a tie-in with the musical “Wicked”) for a raucous pre-theater crowd.
The xiao long bao, when they finally arrived, were deflated and slack, having leaked puddles in their basket, and the dribbles of soup left inside the skins were hardly enough to moisten the chalky meat. Cod-filled dumplings were so bland my friend asked to have them boxed up to take back for her sick dog (four stars from the dog). Shanghai-style rice cakes were threaded with hard nubs of overcooked shrimp and not much by way of seasoning.
On my next two visits, the food ranged from quite good (the pork sticky-rice wrap) to lackluster (oddly odorless truffle dumplings) to awful (soggy pork chops, wan noodles, watery soups). A friend who’s a regular at Din Tai Fung in Los Angeles quipped that this was more like a P.F. Chang’s.
Still, a xiao long bao lover who works in Midtown can dream. I tried again, waiting until mid-October to give the restaurant time to work out the kinks. I snagged a table for 4:30 p.m. on a Tuesday and brought dumpling connoisseurs with whom I’d savored xiao long bao in Flushing one brothy night.
My luck improved, if only a little. The xiao long bao were in decent form, and the green vegetables were, as always, delightfully garlicky. (Give that vegetable chef a raise.) We skipped the reliably dull fried rice dishes, but were pleased with the spicy noodles, which, with a glossy, fiery sauce, lived up to their name. But none of it was as good as in August. Nor were the xiao long bao any better than the many other soup dumplings in town that are much less expensive.
At their best, Din Tai Fung’s are like beautifully wrapped gifts, the steaming soup and tender meat exhilarating every time. But too often, biting into them was like tearing into a beautifully wrapped package only to find a pair of crumpled gym socks inside.
From everything I know about Din Tai Fung, it’s a safe bet that someone, in some location, is enjoying a perfect xiao long bao. If you want to try your luck at the New York branch, there’s a small chance it could be you.
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