Restaurant: Din Tai Fung (鼎泰豐)  
Address: 市府路45號B1, 台北市, 11049, 臺灣
City: Taipei, Taiwan

My sister and I met up with my college friend at Taipei 101 to have lunch at Din Tai Fung! My friend is actually a San Jose, CA native and happened to be in Taipei for a month visiting her relatives. My sister isn’t fluent in Mandarin and I only know English, so we were fortunate to hang out with my friend for the day!

Din Tai Fung is a famous Taiwanese dumpling chain. My family went to Din Tai Fung in Arcadia, California last December. So we had to check out DTF in Taipei! We were told DTF at Taipei 101 is the best one in Taipei, not the original location on Yongkang St. near Dongmen Station.

If you take the MRT to Taipei 101, take Exit 4 to the entrance of Taipei 101 and DTF will be on your right.

The entrance is packed with people! To wait in line, you grab a number ticket from the front desk. The queue times vary depending on party size, but the general wait time is displayed under “Fung” in the photo above. When your number is selected, your number will be announced and the numbers will also display on the monitor. There’s a big menu out in the front in with Chinese and English names for browsing while waiting.

When we were seated, we placed our bags in a large bag next to our chair. My friend placed her bags on an empty chair next to her. The waitress immediately covered our bags! We suspect this is to reduce the smell of sweat, body odor, etc. on our belongings from the humidity. We were provided a menu, an order form, and served tea. Most of the dumplings had the option of ordering in 5 or 10 pieces.

We ordered pork xiaolongbao, crab xiaolongbao, spicy wonton, shrimp and pork siu mai, potstickers, & sweet and sour soup.

The DTF in Arcadia does not even compare to this one! My sister and I really liked the spicy wontons. I also liked the soup. The most impressive thing about the xiaolongbao (XLB) was actually the tensile strength of the wrapping rather than its taste. The siu mai was presented well and the wrapper also had the same tensile strength from the XLB, but we preferred the traditional Cantonese siu mai. We were also impressed by their service; they kept refilling our tea and and checked up on us every now and then. Our table was able to communicate with the waiters and waitresses in both Mandarin and English.