A short while ago Din Tai Fung announced on FB that the San Diego location will open October 1. During the initial months it will be reservations only, and it starts accepting reservations tonight.
This is exciting... I’ll be visiting SD again soon, will make a rez.
Hope their vegetarian options are enough for the folks I’ll be with... wish there was more than one type of dumpling for them, but the overall menu has more vegetarian choices than I expected.
I went this week: they are still in soft opening mode and only taking reservations online, no walk-ins.
We had crab/pork xlb, veg dumplings, chicken/mushroom bun, veg bun, spicy pork/shrimp wontons, and woodear mushrooms.
The dumpling skins may be the best I’ve ever had. The fillings seemed consistently under-seasoned. The sauce for the “spicy” wontons was surprisingly sweet, but the wontons were delicate and tasty.
Fried rice and greens at the next table looked good. I’m sure we’ll be back to try more things.
I went on Oct4 (4th day of soft opening). We went as a group of 8 (4 adults and 4 kids). Though my family had never been, our dinner companions had been to 3 other Din Tai Fung locations, in LA, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Everything was really good, but I'm not an expert. I have to say, that, overall, the execution was very consistent. However, that meant that some dishes were better than others. In other words, the really good dumplings were really good, but the others were reproducibly underwhelming.
We had a little bit of everything. The kids loved the pork fried rice and ribs. Adults loved the spincy chicken dumplings, crab dumplings and house chicken soup. We had 2 orders of XLB and, while, one order was perfect soupy hot and tender skins, the other had cracked skins with no soup and dried out tops. None of us got alcoholic beverages, but the kids had dessert drinks with boba/custard and the adults had lemonade and tea which wera ll spot on.
I have to say the service was super attentive and we recognized several servers from other restaurants in San Diego. It also helped that we had the private room in the back corner. So, we weren't as worried about the kids bothering other patrons. Though, I noticed as we were leaving that the main dining area room was very loud.
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