![]() Din Tai Fung Covent Garden’s dining room is a large, two-level space featuring wooden accents and plenty of natural light which comes in via a large skylight in the centre of the space. Today, Din Tai Fung operates more than 170 locations around the world across 13 countries, its menu has expanded to a pages-long affair of Taiwanese dishes, and its Hong Kong branch boasts a much sought-after Michelin star.ĭin Tai Fung Covent Garden is the brand’s first London location, and can be found on Henrietta Street, which also houses several other big name dining destinations such as Cora Pearl, Frenchie and The Oystermen. The xiao long bao became so popular that Yang decided to open a fully-fledged restaurant solely serving the dish. Yang opened a humble shop selling cooking oil and xiao long bao: steamed dumplings that conceal a pork and hot soup filling. Taiwanese restaurant royalty, Din Tai Fung was initially founded by Bing-Yi Yang, who moved to Taiwan from China at a young age seeking a better life for himself. If you hate queues but love Chinese food, we'd suggest you wait for the second London branch of Din Tai Fung to open at Centre Point, by which point you hopefully won't have to take the afternoon off work to eat here.įew restaurants have come to London enjoying the levels of pre-opening hype that Din Tai Fung has, with media predicting five-hour long queues on opening day (although whether or not this actually happened is disputed). The preparation of the dumplings is technically accomplished, but the results taste no better than those served at London's other dim-sum specialists and, given the spartan surrounds (cheap-feeling glassware, tea served in bags rather than loose leaves), we were surprised by the size of the bill figure on around £50 a head without booze. We enjoyed our meal here, but to be blunt, we couldn't see what the big deal about Din Tai Fung is. The tough meat in a braised beef noodle soup, however, impressed far less. ![]() Our favourite dish was a non-dumpling one involving rolled-up slivers of cold pork which acted as a conduit for a pungent filling of crushed garlic. Prawn and pork shumai, opened out at one end like a flower unfurling around a pink filling, were equally well constructed but just as underwhelming on the flavour front the only dumpling we ate that lived up to its savoury-sounding billing was steamed chilli crab and pork buns. The contents are less mesmerising: a pleasant pork stock designed to mingle with the vinegar and ginger the dumplings should be eaten with. The classic pork xiao long bao are a marvel of engineering, their contents held in place with a pliable dough case, pleated 18 times, that trembles like an unexploded water bomb and doesn't burst at the first jab of a chopstick. Suited and waistcoated staff deliver notably cheerful service, though the dumplings themselves are brought to the table by chefs wearing white coats and hygiene masks and who can be seen crafting dumplings in the glass-walled kitchen (each dumpling reputedly takes 40 minutes to make). We enountered a pleasantly dated experience not unlike the upmarket Chinese restaurants of old, with a neutral wood decor and echoey acoustics spread over two floors where the only natural illumination comes from a skylight. ![]() ![]() It’s worth noting, though, that if you arrive off peak (4pm on a Monday in our case) you'll be able to walk straight in, with only Asian students and curious tourists for company. The Taiwanese dumpling specialist is famous for making what many say are the world’s best xiao long bao, for its Michelin-approved Hong Kong outpost and for having 150 outlets spanning Asia, Australia, North America – and now London, where it has become famous primarily for the size of the queues. Din Tai Fung was the most-searched restaurant on SquareMeal in 2018 – not bad for somewhere that didn’t open until December.
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