One of the most famous restaurant in all of Taipei is Din Tai Fun, a restaurant that’s become famous and even synonymous for serving soup dumplings known as xiao long bao. The original location of Din Tai Fung, located on Xinyi street is only one of the many locations now around Taipei and even around the world. But since we were already visiting the Taipei 101, we decided to skip the original location and eat at the Din Tai Fung Taipei 101 branch for lunch one day.
One of the best things about the restaurant is the service and the branding – it almost runs like a fast food restaurant – the system works so well, yet of course they serve much higher quality food. We arrived to the restaurant at about 11 am and luckily that was early enough to beat the main Taipei lunch rush. We got situated down, and made our order. The dumplings are all handmade inside the restaurant, and as soon as you enter you’ll notice a small army of white dressed dumpling makers who look like they work at a hospital, but in fact they are making world class dumplings – all by hand.
The Din Tai Fung menu includes quite a few different things, but really the only reason everyone goes there is mainly to eat soup dumplings, the xiao long bao – everything else on the menu is sort of secondary, though it’s nice to have a variety of different foods on the table. But let’s start with the xiao long bao soup dumplings. What I really enjoyed about the xiao long bao at Din Tai Fung at Taipei 101 is that they were very delicate. The wrapper wasn’t too thick, but it was just nice and thin and the pork mixture inside was delicate and flavorful, but not overly salty like it can sometimes be. In order to eat xiao long bao, there was a handy instructions card on the table at the restaurant. The first step was to add some soy sauce and vinegar to your dipping bowl, then dip a dumpling into the sauce and top with ginger, then put your dumpling in your spoon and poke a hole in the wrapper to release all the soup juice, and then eat it all in one bite. The instructions worked well and I successfully enjoy all the xiao long bao.
Along with the soup dumplings another dish I tried was the minced pork topped noodles which came with a pile of hand-made noodles on the bottom with a minced pork and Chinese sausage mixture on the top. It was a little on the plain side, but it was pretty good. We also ordered a few other side dishes like pickled cucumber and the Din Tai Fung salad, all of which were good, but nothing compared to the xiao long bao.
Again, there are a number of location of Din Tai Fung around Taipei, and the Taipei 101 branch is a really nice restaurant. It’s clean, the service is really good, and it’s all about those soup dumplings.
The music in this video is from Audio Network
This food travel video was produced by Mark Wiens and Ying Wiens. For more information about us, check out our blogs: http://migrationology.com/blog & http://www.eatingthaifood.com/ & http://www.travelbyying.com/
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