Art of Dumpling Making
Among the traditional Chinese food, dumplings and buns have its long history. Asides of its history, Din Tai Fung Restaurant made its name in making dumplings and other traditional Chinese dishes. In 1993, this restaurant was selected as one of the top 10 restaurants in the world by the NY Times; in 2010, it was awarded one Michelin Star.
Photo source: DinTaiFung Instagram
The specialty of DTF is the soup dumpling. Each 5-gram skin gets 16 grams of carefully sourced all-natural ground pork filling. But the hard part is pinching, each 21-gram dumpling is pinched exactly 18 times to form the pleated, swirled seal at the top. When you pick up a hot dumpling from the bamboo basket with chopsticks, you can see the thin floury skin has just enough elasticity to give the dumpling some bounce, and the small pork meatball inside is delicately seasoned, boiling broth.
As a young man, the founder worked as a waiter for a street vendor. In 1958, he started his own dumpling restaurant. Decades later, when the business passed on to the 2nd generation, the new boss raised the bar and perfected the making of dumplings, it became a high-ranked restaurant in Taipei.
DTF soon expanded to several major cities in Asian and U.S. According to the current online sources, there are eight locations in Taiwan, four in the Los Angeles area, two in Seattle, and a dozen or so other cities around the world. Once the company decides on a new location, they send a team to stay in the city for a year to study the products of the local farms to ensure the local vendors can meet their quality demand.
We have tried their specialty and many other traditional Chinese dishes at the DTF restaurants in Arcadia (Los Angeles) and Bellevue (Seattle). The waiting is about 45 minutes during the daytime; it’s an hour or longer waiting during dinnertime.
Photo Source: DinTaiFung Instagram. Hi Helen, love to hear your experience, feel free to chime in. 🙂
WPC: Dinnertime
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