1108 South Baldwin Avenue
Arcadia, California 91007

People rave about this place. Lets go ahead and discard the commentary from non-Asians. Like I always say, people who grow up eating macaroni and cheese and hamburgers don’t have the experience, authority, or credibility to review food — particularly Asian food. This leaves the Asians and specifically the Chinese. They line up to eat here in patient queues the likes of which even red China has never seen. The wait time used to be close to an hour before the restaurant expanded to a separate dining room in the adjacent mini mall with Wells Fargo as its anchor tenant. Including tonight, I’ve tried this restaurant three or four times.

Din Tai Fung is located in Arcadia, closer to the 210 than the 10. With no traffic, it takes close to 30 minutes to get there from downtown. Tonight, it took an hour from Koreatown. So, are the dumplings that incredible? Are they worth the time, energy, and gasoline? In a word… no. They’re just dumplings for god sakes.

Some people swear by the juicy pork dumplings, where the thin dumpling skin encloses not just the ball of pork but a small amount of greasy pork juices. Phenomenal? No. But, not bad. Sit in the restaurant and watch as people dip all the varieties of dumplings into the same vinegar and ginger sauce before consumption. The dipping sauce overwhelms the subtleties of the constituent ingredients leaving you with the experience of eating the same universal dumpling, regardless of what is actually supposed to be inside. So, only a patron who eats a dumpling without vinegar and ginger is likely to truly be able to appreciate the minor differences in texture or flavor between the various dumplings. However, as most customers ostensibly douse their dumplings, these restaurant goers are not eating to savor anything in particular. They simply dine here for the sake of eating dumplings in a popular dumpling restaurant in an area where dumpling restaurants don’t abound.

The rest of the non-dumpling entrees at Din Tai Fung are quite mediocre. The seasonal vegetables are simply steamed or fried with garlic. The fried rice is flavorless filler. And, the soups are quite vapid. I guarantee that you will better appreciate an evening at home with steamed supermarket dumplings and without the hassle.

Still, if curiosity has you in its unrelenting grasps, go once and check out the hype for yourself. Its nothing but hot steam. And, when they inevitably cool down, the dumplings return to their actual, ordinary nature.