Taipei's famous dumpling restaurant Din Tai Fung well worth the wait

An army of cooks stand in a small kitchen
preparing the soup-filled dumplings all day.

DATELINE TAIWAN – You don’t come to this amazing country and not try the national dish – Xiao Long Bao, Taiwan’s dumpling equivalent to Hong Kong’s Dim Sum.

So, while touring Taipei, it made sense to stop at the most famous dumpling restaurant in the country, the original Din Tai Fung room located a short walk away from the city’s iconic Taipei 101 – until recently the tallest building in the world.

I arrived just before noon and already the lineup stretched outside the restaurant onto the street – a normal scene I’m told.

The line moves quickly, though, and soon I’m sitting at a table on the third floor of the four-storey restaurant, which opened in what’s known as Taipei’s Section 2 in the 1970s.

The baskets of Xiao Long Bao started arriving shortly after and although I’ve enjoyed the dish before in Toronto, it never tasted this good – the wrapping that holds the soup and meat in place melted as soon as it touched my tongue and the hot broth was unlike anything I’ve ever tried before.

The pillows of goodness come in a number of varieties and an army of chefs huddle in a small kitchen off the main entrance making them all day – in excess of 10,000 a day.

The restaurant is the most famous in Taipei, written about by the likes of the New York Times, and many of the patrons are foreigners who just have to try something they’ve read about.

They’re not disappointed. I’ll have more on Din Tai Fung in upcoming issues of TraveLife so stay tuned.