Dispatches from the present
We had managed to secure a reservation for two, for lunch, the day after the Mid-Autumn festival—some consolation for not celebrating the night of as we might have elsewhere: lantern riddles and glow sticks on the beach, dark crowds encircling haphazard fires in the stifling night. It was like entering a villain’s chamber, descending the stairs from a sunlit glass entryway to the gleaming restaurant sunken below. I sat on a leather bench next to a bronze statue of a soup dumpling for a few minutes before heading to check in at the front desk, where I was handed a pen and a paper menu, directed to a secondary, smaller seating area and told to return to the front desk when my companion arrived.
Until this summer, Din Tai Fung had eight locations in California, four in Washington, two in Oregon, one in Vegas and none on the East Coast. The chain began as a soup-dumpling restaurant in Taipei, founded in 1972 by a couple from Shanxi who ran a cooking-oil shop, and now has more than 170 branches worldwide. I’d dined at its flagship as a child (we’d waited an hour to be seated, as it used to take walk-ins only), its Kaohsiung and Michelin-starred Hong Kong offshoots as a teen and, years later, its Seattle and San Diego successors, with comparable pleasure. In August it was announced that all fourteen of its locations in northern China would close, owing to the region’s declining economy—yet here was the largest of them all, a 25,000-square-foot tract freshly carved out in Times Square.
We were led to a booth that could seat four, curled up around one corner, and read the menu like an old friend. First to arrive (“We have three separate kitchens, so not everything will arrive at the same time,” our waiter noted as we handed in our order) were the sweet-and-sour ribs, which were delightful, and “authentic,” though, as my companion noted, the sauce was runnier than what you’d find in Shanghai. The pork was sticky and taut against the bone, lean with the right murmurings of fat. We left the bones clean.
Unlike their cousins—dumplings, wontons, potstickers, steamed buns—soup dumplings are particularly difficult to make from scratch, rendering them a de facto restaurant delicacy. As a child I could eat two dozen of them in a day—twelve for breakfast and twelve for dinner—and spent a summer in Shanghai doing just that, my main reprieve from the daunting day camp my sister and I were enrolled in. Each day was bracketed by meals with our father bearing steaming baskets of Anthony Bourdain’s “pillows of happiness”: firm and succulent, tender and lardy, the skin like a soft balloon.
How to convey, then, the blow dealt to us by these dumplings? The ten of them sat petite and appetizing in their steamer, but we might have seen it coming. Any restaurant with printouts at each table priming patrons on how to eat a soup dumpling, however renowned the brand, is likely not catering to the most critical crowd. (Step three—“Place the Xiao Long Bao into the spoon. Poke a small hole to release the broth”—depicts a punctured dumpling hovering atop a pool of, one shudders to imagine, already cooled broth.)
These directives, if well-intentioned, bastardize a sacred ritual between the dumplings and the diner, a necessary negotiation among his patience, agility and virility. For eating a soup dumpling is not unlike walking: even if taught how to do it, you’ll form your own gait. I’ve watched tablemates unwittingly tear the soft skin apart with their chopsticks; draw an opening in the dumpling so as to extract the core and eat it first, before stuffing the skin in their mouth like an afterthought; or chew off the hat of dough and then take it, somehow, from there. All better, so long as the broth is not wasted, than heeding counsel from some vague authority. The dumplings—the real thing—will sate any which way.
There in the grand underground, in distant view of a terrarium of toiling chefs kneading the dough, packing the parcels and pinching them shut, I was dismayed by my first sip of broth, which, like the filling that followed, was hardly anything but salty. Not umami or redolent of well-marinated pork—rich, malty, slightly sweet—but scantly seasoned and mealy to the tongue. We tried to place the flavor and landed on an underwhelming ginger. Bao after bao produced the same dull taste, a dullness so dull it kicked.
I had been led to hope for, if not greatness, then at least familiarity, by Helen Rosner’s encouraging review in the New Yorker, in which she called the new outpost “unimpeachably excellent.” But between affected musings on ambience (“I was struck with the disorienting feeling that I was hovering at the edge of the void”), furniture-speak (“The grid of tables and their identical accent lamps recede into the distance with mathematical regularity”) and rote contradictions (“Time flows quickly, and also slowly”), Rosner left little room to impart the essence of the food itself. “The real excitement was for the brand,” she wrote, though it was unclear whose excitement she was referring to. “Din Tai Fung is in the business of not only selling dinner but also selling nostalgia, selling familiarity, selling Din Tai Fung.”
In fact, the Times Square branch represents an edge case in which certain things have proven intransmissible, flavors and textures lost across supply chains and assembly lines in a bid not just for mass marketability but, this time, a new echelon of prestige. I’d thought that this Din Tai Fung might relieve the difficulty I’ve had in the city of finding great Chinese food that is patently high-end. Instead it deepened my suspicion that upscale “ethnic” cuisine here—the pop-ups and establishments lauded in the papers and patronized by resident tastemakers—is largely intended for someone else. “The more high-profile, the more high-foot-traffic locations there are, the more we’re able to share our food and culture,” said one of the two brothers now carrying on their grandparents’ legacy. Yet, seated in that sleek space, we were brushed with a cool vertigo, having been sold one thing and met with another.
I wished then to go home, wherever that was now, to crouch in the damp sand with my friends, unencumbered by my token attempts to preserve the admittedly piecemeal traditions I grew up with: forgetting major festivals until days after they passed, marshaling belated half-hearted group dim sums and, this year, just to prove something, shelling out three dollars for a mini mooncake from a booth off the Canal Street sidewalk, where I stood in line next to but did not greet two half Asians I recognized from a Chinese Politics seminar we’d taken together in college. The moon had been looming large lately; I’d neglected to think of Chang’e.
As we boxed up our leftovers—a sad bok choy, a bland fried rice, shao mai we should have fought over and a boneless chicken soup noodle with none of the slick golden sheen I had come to expect—my companion, who is from Wuhan and now lives in Hong Kong, remarked that she was glad we hadn’t been able to snag a dinner slot the day prior. “Imagine eating this,” she said, “on the night of the festival. What a dreadful way to celebrate!”
Image credit: Eden, Janine and Jim (Flickr, CC / BY 2.0)