pork soup dumplings, cucumber salad, green beans, vegan chili oil dumplings, shanghai rice cakes with shrimp, vegan steamed buns and and chocolate mochi soup dumplings.
They ordered a lot of vegetable and vegan dishes for a vegetarian in their midst, she said the vegan chili oil dumplings were good but the steamed buns were not worth ordering again.
Everything else she thought was great and she singled out the chocolate soup dumplings as exceptional.
Best,
NY Times review
The secret for a good meal seems to be order everything but the XLB
A certain (misnamed) Alanis Morissette tune comes to mind…
I had non-xlb stuff there on my one visit and wasn’t overwhelmed. I do plan to go back, though, and try some more things.
For the record the New Yorker had a more positive take:
Yes, as I said in my OP.
I ate at one of the CA branches last week, and it holds.
The wontons are good (just not the vegan ones, which were disappointing in both filling and sauce).
The NYT weighs in.
(Perhaps more interesting than the review is that Melissa Clark is the other interim restaurant critic.)
Someone elsewhere wondered why they didn’t send her to all the DTF’s. If you’re gonna review all the Carbones…
Hahaha I also wondered this, but Carbone wasn’t a restaurant review, it was a feature article.
Melissa “ate at Din Tai Fung in New York five times, sampling 38 different dishes. For research, she also ate xiao long bao in restaurants across the city.”
I did wonder which other XLB she ate.
Of course then I went back to the headnotes of Priya Krishna’s reviews for further amusement:
She:
dined in disguise on one visit to Le Veau d’Or, but was promptly recognized when her wig fell off. She has since figured out better ways to secure wigs.
is originally from Texas and therefore very picky about tacos.
visited Bungalow three times. On her last two visits, she wore a disguise that deceived not only the restaurant but also her aunt, whom she ran into on the sidewalk.
I am interested in who the NYT is gonna ultimately go with as their reviewer, because I’m not crazy about either of the members of this tag team.
I’m wondering if they’re interviewing outside, or are just going the way of a social media pleasing internal candidate which both these would be – Clark has a big following from her cookbooks (though this would probably put a crimp in that career path). And actual restaurant reviewing credibility be damned.
Yes, this is my point. I’d like to see Eric Asimov. Or they could poach Helen Rosner from the NYer.
I’m enjoying having the two of them as interim critics. Makes for a change!
Depends on what you’re looking for. If it’s credible restaurant reviews, not so much.
Since I live on the west coast, I read the reviews mostly for entertainment! 
I know, but it shouldn’t come as a shock that some of us are still reading them as intended, which is as reviews of local restaurants, lol.
Why would you think the NYT would provide that? They never have.
I like Eater NY’s Robert Sietsema. But I’m not a local NY’er and as such don’t really have a dog in the race.
I have a lot of problems with him. His beat used to be cheap restaurants offering less common cuisines, often in the outer boroughs. And he was pretty good at that, but he was also often wrong about things - shoddy research skills. But now he’s Eater’s only NY critic since they fired Ryan Sutton. Sutton was the “high end” guy, and now Sietsema is the “high end” guy, and he doesn’t know fuck all about high end. Nor does he seem interested in learning.
You think Frank Bruni wants his old job back?
Ha
I doubt it
