Walking into Din Tai Fung was unreal, euphoric. And unexpected. I had never thought of going there until I was led in the door to a friend's table.
I'm not talking about Din Tai Fung in Arcadia, near Los Angeles. But Din Tai Fung in Taipei, where this mother of all dumpling houses originated.
It is so legendary that when the Arcadia branch opened, the media went into a frenzy, and the lines to get in were monstrous.
It's still like that in Taipei. The branch I went to had a line out the door, a mad clamor inside, servers whisking stacks of bamboo steamers back and forth. Crowded tables. A steaming hubbub of food.
Service is fast, and there's no lingering, just serious eating, and then you leave.
I wasn't in the original restaurant but in the second Din Tai Fung. This didn't make any difference, because food for all the outlets in Taipei comes from a central kitchen, I'm told.
First to arrive was a steamer basket of the restaurant's most famous dumpling, xiao long bao.
These soup dumplings spurted into my teacup in Arcadia, but seemed less loaded with soup here. Perhaps I was just eating them more efficiently.
How does soup get into a dumpling? Stock so rich that it congeals into aspic is the secret. A spoonful of that goes into the wrapper along with meat. As the dumpling steams, the aspic melts.
Our xiao long bao were filled with pork. There's another, French-inspired version that adds truffle to the pork. The plain pork dumplings are about $6.35 for 10. The truffle xiao long bao are $15 for 5, or $3 each.
A non-stop parade of steamer baskets brought vegetable dumplings with wrappers so thin the green showed through, followed by pork and shrimp dumplings, fluted at the top and steamed on their side.
Xiao long bao are not fluted. They are round, carefully pleated to the top and steamed upright.
A style of shui mai that I hadn't seen before had an unusual filling, sticky rice and ground pork.
The pork was so finely ground that I didn't notice it. Perhaps it only served as seasoning for the rice. The shape was different too, pinched at the waist and ruffled at the top.
We ate cold dishes such as shredded dry bean curd with seaweed, bean sprouts, glass noodles, sesame oil and chile oil; bean curd with fat fresh green beans and deliciously spongy, sweet cubes of bean curd that were red, almost like meat.
Fried rice appeared too. Then the waitress brought a bowl of beef noodle soup. As quickly as she set it down, she took it away. A mistake, I thought. The soup was meant for another table. But before long it reappeared, divided into little bowls for each person.
The beef noodle soup that I had eaten at another restaurant in Taipei was dark with soy sauce and seasoned with star anise.
Din Tai Fung's soup wasn't so exotic. It could have passed for American beef stew. The noodles resembled spaghetti.
Our last dish was the restaurant's most famous dessert, dumplings stuffed with sweetened red bean paste, small, simple and all we could eat after such a fast-paced, filling feast.
Din Tai Fung, Zhong Xiao E. Rd. Sec. 4 No. 218, Taipei, Taiwan. Tel: 886-2-2721-7890.
The North American branch is at 1108 S. Baldwin Ave., Arcadia, CA 91007. Tel: (626) 574-7068.
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