FindingDin Tai Fung was the easiest thing in the world. I got off the elevator and all I had to do was look for the line. At the hostess stand, I was told it would be 45 minutes before I could get a table. She marked my menu, handed it over, and looked back over her shoulder into the full room behind her with its traffic of servers and customers walking out with pretty black and white and red bags of leftovers.
Joshua Huston
Like Ghostbusters, minus the ghosts.
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Din Tai Fung 700 Bellevue Way N.E., 425-698-1095, dintaifungusa.com. 11 a.m.–10 p.m. Mon.–Fri., 10 a.m.–10 p.m. Sat.–Sun.
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It was an hour before I saw the inside of that room again, and I was lucky.
Once inside, I ate shrimp and pork shu mai, bottle-necked and cinched like beggar's purses with a shot of broth in the bottom and an orange-pink shrimp stopping their mouths. I ate a bowl of house beef soup that was nothing but slabs of grayish boiled beef in a clear broth that tasted vaguely of salt and was haunted by the barest hint of lemongrass. I moved the spoon between the bowl and my mouth with my eyes closed, pressed in close among the flood of other customers who had been let in along with me, and tried not to think about how long I'd waited for this. I hefted a pork bun, weighty in my hand, and bit into it as if I were taking a chunk out of a baseball filled with barbecued pig. It was good—the dough pillowy and warm, the meat candied like a pork SweeTart—and I tried not to think about the hostess walking the hallway at Lincoln Square like an Atlantic City ring card girl, smudged white board held high, singing out, "Two hundred and lower!" while I looked at the top of my menu and its number: 294.
I ate shrimp and pork dumplings, fingernail-crimped in the fish tank full of dumpling-makers at the front of the restaurant, and they were good, packed tightly with ground pork and chunks of shrimp and shards of green onion. I ate sautéed spinach that came in a green dome set on a white plate— snapping at it with my chopsticks and smelling more than tasting the sting of the garlic from its pan. The dumplings I dipped in a bowl of black vinegar with a nose like tear gas and a powerful, sour flavor that I couldn't get enough of. With the spinach, I chewed sticks of ginger. And then I ate more dumplings: the xiao long bao—"juicy pork dumplings" on the menu—that are the pride and the draw at Din Tai Fung, the soup dumplings that people go crazy for and wait an hour, two, three in order to taste. I pick one up by the little twist at the top and watch it, waiting for its full belly to droop, pregnant with broth.
My dumpling hangs there, pinioned between my chopsticks, resolutely refusing to impress me with its weight, its fullness. It looks like a tiny, flat-bottomed UFO. And when I pop it in my mouth—the whole thing, all at once—it is fine. There is a squirt of broth when I bite down, a small flood of salty, meaty liquid preceding the texture of the dumpling skin, the pork.
It's a good dumpling, but not a great one. I try not to think about my bored pacing in the hallway outside Din Tai Fung, the way I'd stared into the glass-walled room full of dumpling makers like observing marmots at the zoo, watching them as if they were TV—the weirdest, slowest, quietest reality show ever. I try not to think about the seditious conversations that went on in my head while I'd waited ("Man, why don't you just go to Lucky Strike, bowl a few frames, eat some nachos, and go home") or all the hype that'd attended the announcement that Din Tai Fung was coming to Seattle. I chew, I taste, I swallow.
It's a really good dumpling. It's just not the best dumpling ever. And, unfortunately, "best" is what Din Tai Fung promises—set up right from the start to offer an experience it cannot possibly provide. Go online. Read the fawning reviews of other locations (one in L.A., others scattered around the Pacific Rim—in Kyoto, Sendai, Beijing, Hong Kong, Singapore, Jakarta, Seoul, and elsewhere) and the way that people make a mecca of this place, render unto it revelatory powers and lay claim to crowded dining-room epiphanies. Din Tai Fung has been around for decades, started in Taiwan by a Chinese army deserter named Bingyi Yang, who began with an oil shop that sold a few steamed dumplings and noodles to make ends meet. Now it's a worldwide dumpling superpower. You don't go to Din Tai Fung for dumplings; you go for the best dumplings in the world. That's what I was expecting, rubbing shoulders with all the other dumpling supplicants and then sitting in the actual dining room, dying for that first taste and ready for a revelation of my own.
Didn't have one. Shouldn't have expected it. It was my David Foster Wallace moment: another supposedly fun thing I'll never do again.
