The renowned Din Tai Fung is now in Vancouver, and boy is it good! I’ve had soup dumplings many times, and never gotten all that excited about them, but Din Tai Fung has completely changed my mind.
The menu is about more than just dumplings, although you would be crazy to go here and not have an order of Xiao Long Bao as one of your items. We chose the Crab and Pork version. It was the perfect balance of both proteins, and the perfect amount of soup inside.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. We started with the cucumber salad, seasoned with a surprisingly complex blend of rice wine vinegar, soy sauce, and chili oil. Definitely a great starter.
The only dish I might not order again was the vegetable and mushroom fried rice, which was good, but not as complex as everything else. However we later dumped the leftover sauce from the next dish on it, and it was amazing.
Perhaps my favorite dish was the Shrimp and Pork Spicy Wontons. Again a perfect balance of proteins, and the spicy sauce was so rich and complex I could happily eat it with a spoon.
This place has only been open a week as of this writing, and it is already humming like a well-oiled machine. There are at least fifty people working here, and the place is packed. We were lucky, showed up at 11:30 am, and got the last pair of seats at the counter.
The counter, by the way, is a really good place to sit. Great service, great acoustics, and a pretty bar to look at.
Needless to say: Highly recommended!