The Professor Errant

I know most people probably don’t care when a new restaurant opens in the Parks. Well, Rob and I aren’t most people! If it’s a place that fits our tastes, we are always eager to try it.

Din Tai Fung is a Taiwanese restaurant chain specializing in soup dumplings. We had walked by their location at the South Coast Plaza mall many times and were curious but had never tried it. With a newly-opened location on our doorstep at Downtown Disney, it was time to take the plunge.

We know they always have long lines of people waiting to get in, so we made sure to make a reservation ahead of time for our visit. They use Yelp as their reservation system (I didn’t know Yelp did that!). For better or worse, we scheduled our visit for the day after the U.S. elections. (It was worse) We both had the day off of work. After the short walk from our house, we got in the line to check in. I overheard a host telling someone in front of us that the wait was something like 45 minutes. As soon as we checked in, though, we were ushered inside the lobby for a short wait for our table. Yes, reservations paid off!

While waiting, we were given an order slip to write down our order. It took us a while, being completely new to the menu, and we were still considering when they seated us. We finally settled on crab and kurobuta pork xiao long bao (soup dumplings), an order of shrimp fried rice, and chocolate buns for dessert.

If you’ve never had xiao long bao before, they provide directions on how to eat them. You pick one up with your chopsticks, dip it in sauce if you want, place it on your spoon, poke a hole in it to release the soup inside, then EAT! I’m not sure how well we acquitted ourselves in the process but the dumplings were very tasty. The rice and chocolate buns were also delicious.

I feel like we only got a small sample of the entire menu, though we were definitely full with what we had. Of course, that just means we have to go back!