Din Tai Fung
Din Tai Fung may only be a dumpling joint at heart, but it is legendary. It’s everywhere in Asia, popping up in America, and immensely popular wherever you can find one. The best place to look is in a huge mall, on a higher floor (and usually next to a Uniqlo store, for some reason).
Don't try going on a Saturday. The lines are insane. They have a very efficient reservation system at the front. You get a number and a time when the table will be ready (and they are usually exactly right about the time). A two-hour wait is not unusual. But, hell, you’re in a giant mall, so go shopping, work up an appetite, and come back hungry.
(Tip for cutting your wait time: go for a late lunch on a weekday in an out-of-the-way mall.)
Why is it so popular? No, it’s not getting a brief Instagram jolt (Please, Insties, lay off this place). It’s because the food is delicious, especially the soup dumplings.
There’s a great story about how the founder of Din Tai Fung got started (I love these origin stories, probably embellished, but they make for good yarns.)
The founder, Mr. Bing-Yi Yang, immigrated from China to Taiwan in 1927 with twenty bucks to his name. He was a cooking oil deliveryman, but his business, called Din Tai Fung, was crappy. He was struggling.
So, in 1958, he dreamed up the Xiao Long Bao, known to Westerners as soup dumplings because they are filled with boiling liquid, which will scorch the mouths of the impatient.
Today, there are over 180 locations worldwide, including a recently opened giant one in Midtown Manhattan with 450 seats.
The coolest part of the experience (aside from burning the hell out of your mouth because you can’t wait for the dumplings to drop below the boiling point) is the dumpling kitchen. It’s a spacious, glassed-in area with an army of people (yeah, mostly guys) dressed in white, each focused on a particular dumpling task. One person is rolling out the skins, another is weighing the stuffing, and another is precisely folding the dumplings (18 folds!).
And they do it at light speed! Thousands of dumplings are piled into bamboo steamers every minute. I’ve made dumplings from scratch for years, and the best I can do is about a dozen in half an hour. These guys are so fast that they would laugh at my clumsiness. (Cross that career off my list.)