By David & Susan Greenberg
Like alien seed pods, Din Tai Fungs are landing and sprouting dumplings (and noodles) everywhere. They’re in Seattle, Times Square NYC, one is in downtown PDX, another in Washington Square Mall, 182 Din Tai Fungs worldwide.
Mr. Yang Bing Yi started the business in Taiwan in 1958 with his wife, Madame Lai Pen Mei, growing it from a business that originally sold cooking oil. He is the Elong Musk of dumplings, in particular soup dumplings, Xiao Long Bao, filled with pork gelatin which melts in the steaming process, yielding a dumpling filled with both pork and flavorful soup. These dumplings are clunky to make, especially en masse. He perfected the process of doing so. His Xiao Long Bao are the archangels of the dumplingverse, immeasurably delicious, always reaching high-earth orbit and sticking the landing. It’s common to dip them in a mixture of soy sauce, black vinegar, chile crisp, and slivered ginger.
Inside a clean-room with large observation windows, a production line of dumpling-makers, gowned and masked like NASA engineers, weighs out dough on decimal-point scales and crafts them, combining origami skills with the dexterity of microsurgeons. Each Xiao Long Bao weighs precisely 21 grams and has precisely 18 pleats.
Lots of other good stuff is dispensed, too. We started our lunch with a cucumber salad that extracted a cucumber’s maximum potential. Chinese cucumber salads are commonly based on smashed cucumbers (often with garlic) but Din Tai Fung prefers a neater, more restrained version with chilled, stacked pucks of cucumber in a soy-vinegar sauce wisped with sesame oil, no garlic.
We were then served our Xiao Long Bao shaped like large water droplets, with a small topknot (perfect for grasping with chopsticks) which came in a bamboo steamer. They were slam-bam-crazy delicious.
Their pot-stickers were good, if not transporting. Unlike most vended by today’s Chinese restaurants (using lackluster premade wrappers), they used handmade wrappers that are chewier, better. They were cooked in a cornstarch slurry which yielded a lovely, crunchy underlayment that bound them all together. Had they been even chewier, we wouldn’t have objected.
Their spicy wontons were a happy slurp.
Din Tai Fung makes precise, uniform dumplings. They’re polite, top students, who sit up straight in class. We can’t help but like them. We do wonder though if perfectionism blunts their fighting edge. We’re not certain how they’d do in a scrap with some of the lumpish dumplings we’ve had in obscure, shop-lined alleyways across Asia. We think of the large crab soup dumplings we ate in Tianjin, China with a wide-bore straw stuck through the top for sucking out the soup before eating the dumpling itself. Or Yang’s Fried Dumplings in Shanghai (in the far corner of a mall basement, shockingly inexpensive) which served dumplings bronzed on the bottom, so delicious that after eating them for dinner we got back in line for a second dinner. Or erstwhile Taste of Szechuan’s pot-stickers that looked as though they were shaped by toddlers, but tasted sublime. We adored Din Tai Fung’s Xiao Long Bao. But perhaps it would be fair to say that we think their other dumplings are excellent, not superb, that we like but don’t adore them.
We think we catch a whiff of corporate test-kitchen – leery of offending timid palates – underlying Din Tai Fung’s food. In order to secure its crown, we think Din Tai Fung needs to bust a move.
Though many cocktails were available at Din Tai Fung, we drank only Jasmine tea and, notwithstanding quibbles, we left, two happy dumplings.
Din Tai Fung, 700 SW 5th Ave, Portland, OR 97204, Located in Pioneer Place (503) 336-9085
