Last October, 40 new hires were in the underground midtown space that, until recently, was most famous for once being the cosmos-themed restaurant Mars 2112. Soon, however, it would become the first East Coast branch of the Taiwanese chain Din Tai Fung. The employees were beginning a 12-week program that would stretch into the New Year, focused on perfecting just one dish: Din Tai Fung’s xiao long bao.
“Consistency is our North Star, and we can only achieve that through rigorous training,” says Albert Yang, who runs the American operation of Din Tai Fung with his brother, Aaron.
“Interestingly, we have run a lot of data on the training programs and found out that there was no correlation whatsoever between previous cooking experiences and the ability to make excellent xiao long bao,” Aaron says. “Less than one percent of our applicants have xiao long bao experience — they still end up making excellent dumplings.”
Din Tai Fung does make excellent dumplings: Exactly 18 perfect little folds adorn each one. The skin is surprisingly thin but still holds its shape when lifted from a bamboo steamer basket. They are agreeably small — 21 grams apiece — and hold rich broth with pork or crab that is best eaten by biting a small hole in the side, slurping some broth, and gobbling the rest of the dumpling in one bite.
At any of the chain’s 171 locations, from Taipei to Tokyo, Shanghai, Seattle, or Los Angeles, the experience of eating at Din Tai Fung is the same: friendly service and delicious dim sum, regardless of time zone.
“They have somehow managed to have skill and scale grow at the same time. It’s extremely impressive, and improbable,” says Richard Ho, chef and founder of the beloved, if significantly smaller, Taiwanese restaurant Ho Foods in East Village.
Albert and Aaron have operated the U.S. locations for the past decade. They are grandsons of the original founder, Yang Bing-Yi, who arrived in Taiwan with the wave of Chinese refugees escaping civil war on the mainland and made his living by biking around Taipei selling cooking oil. In the 1970s, cooking oil industrialized, with canned products replacing artisan deliveries. To save his business that risked collapsing, Yang expanded to selling the kind of Shanghainese xiao long bao he had himself grown up with in China. “They were part of a generation of mainlanders who came to Taiwan and brought certain foods with them, and that eventually became Taiwanese food,” Albert says. These dumplings became so popular that he opened his first Din Tai Fung restaurant on Xinyi Road in central Taipei in 1972. The restaurant is still there today, in the same location, with the same phone number and the same xiao long bao.
When Yang Bing-Yi passed away last year, at 92, he was treated in Taiwan as a national hero. The New York Times called him the man “who brought soup dumplings to the world.” To Albert and Aaron, he was just Grandpa. “I remember our morning walks around Taipei,” Aaron says. “He would always rise early, and we would walk around the city at 6 a.m., before it gets too hot, and Grandpa would constantly be stopped by people who told him how much they admired the restaurant.”
As Din Tai Fung’s success in Taiwan attracted foreign visitors and an international reputation, the company opened its first branch abroad in Tokyo in 1996. Meanwhile, copycat restaurants went up in California using Din Tai Fung’s name, if not their attention to detail.
Yang Bing-Yi’s son, Frank Yang, the father of Albert and Aaron, had previously moved to California and decided to open the first American branch in Arcadia, in 2000, to distinguish the real thing from the imitations. The Los Angeles branch immediately gained a following, with hour-long waits on weekends. Albert remembers working in the restaurant from an early age, doing homework while running credit cards, and spending “at least a year” struggling in the kitchen, trying to make the soup dumplings. “We must have thrown away tens of thousands of failed dumplings before I was able to make a perfect one,” he says.
The Yangs have continued opening locations across the United States — an Anaheim location is opening at the Downtown Disney resort today, for example — but the New York outpost carries added pressure. For one thing, since its arrival was first announced back in 2022, every new development at the Manhattan location has been tracked on social media. For another, it’s going to be enormous.
“Unofficially, I think it will be the biggest restaurant anywhere in New York,” says Albert. Officially, it will be the biggest Din Tai Fung in the world, able to seat 450 diners at a time. An Apple Store–esque glass-cube entrance gives way to a 25,000-square-foot room designed by David Rockwell. “Since it’s smack in the middle of Broadway, we liked the idea of working with Rockwell, who has done so many spectacular stage sets for Broadway shows,” Aaron says. “We wanted to bring some of that energy into the room.”
This means a bigger and more centrally located bar than is typical of their U.S. branches, as well as a more extensive bar menu (yes, there is a new espresso martini, this version made with black sesame). For food, the menu will most closely resemble Din Tai Fung’s West Coast branches. The pork is the same Kurobuta breed from the same Iowa farms that supply the other American restaurants, “but every new location brings some new challenges and compromises,” says Albert — like mustard greens, which are a staple of the West Coast restaurants but have proven difficult to source locally. “Instead of compromising by serving sub-par mustard greens, we decided to just take it off the menu.”
Is that the reason for the delays that saw its opening bumped from 2023 to early 2024, and now to mid-July? There were a bunch of reasons, but it is close now. Reservations will go live tomorrow; the grand opening will happen on July 18.
A few weeks before the doors open to the public, executive chef Raphael Anderson showed me around the cavernous space, with 120 tables and 16 bar seats. At least 200 employees will work here on any given evening, Anderson explained, as he walked by a dozen kitchen staff cooking behind the large kitchen windows facing the dining room, a design feature of all Din Tai Fung restaurants. The staff made pilot versions of the xiao long bao, and during this latest round of training, they had small light boxes next to their tables, where the skin of each dumpling could be tested for thickness. “The skin should be as thin as possible,” Anderson said, “but if it’s transparent, if the light comes through, they might break when they’re lifted, and they have to be redone.”
This post has been updated to correct Raphael Anderson’s title.
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