Restaurant Review: At Din Tai Fung, Soup Dumplings with a Side of Spectacle

Honestly, it’s not that hard of a sell. As at Americans’ favorite quasi-upscale chain, the Cheesecake Factory, Din Tai Fung’s success hinges on utterly reliable, totally consistent quality. On each of my two recent visits, the food was exactly the same; each time, it was unimpeachably excellent. A beef noodle soup was warming and rich; a dish of Taiwanese-style cabbage, sautéed with incredible amounts of garlic, was bright and crisp-tender. Chilled cucumber salad, a signature, is plated with thick slices stacked in a ziggurat; it arrives dripping with chile oil so bright it verges on safety orange. The fried rice is just fine, but the fried pork chop you can get on top is phenomenal—boneless, juicy, duskily aflame with black and white ground pepper. But we’re here for the xiao long bao, which come in four varieties, to suit a range of gastronomic moods. The pork dumplings, the most traditional and seemingly the most popular, are served as a brace of ten in a steamer basket. On my visits, the meat—which comes from Kurobuta pigs, the Japanese name for the heritage Berkshire breed—was nicely seasoned and the broth both expectedly sticky and surprisingly bright; encased in thin, nearly translucent wrappers, the dumplings were lighter and more lively than nearly any I’d had before. A pork-and-crab iteration was heavy on the crab, with an appealingly intense minerality. For the high rollers, there’s a deluxe pork-and-truffle option, at twenty-eight dollars for a mere five dumplings but worthy of the price, with huge slices of black truffle slipped inside the wrapper with the meat, making the whole package earthy and wild. My favorite, perhaps controversially, was the chicken variety, whose meat was tender and whose broth was sweet with carrot and sharp with ginger, a golden panacea. (For vegetarians, there are vegan dumplings and wontons of the brothless variety, and they’re quite good, but against the dizzying excitement of the soup dumplings they do land a little bit like an afterthought.)