I learned of the reservation system pretty early and managed to snag reservations for this past Saturday and Sunday night. Dim sum is always a game of which dish is going to be awful, so it was a delight to have two meals of small plates, with most dishes above-average to awesome, and no complete duds.
Some tips:
- Our reservations were at 7:45 and 815, and they had run out of the sweet-and-sour pork ribs, and wood ear mushrooms, and sesame buns on both nights. Various other dishes were gone too. If the reservation system allows, Preorder if it’s possible
- you have to ask them to pace the meal. We were juggling plates to make room on the table the first night, and time sensitive items like the xiao long bao and noodles suffered amidst the distraction. The second night, the server obliged our request to hold back generally, and to bring nothing until we finished our XLB.
- if they run out of black sesame buns, ask for black sesame XLB, which are off menu. Delicious, but eat quickly before the skins dry out.
- they’re not a Sichuan restaurant, so I found the “spicy” dishes mild. I’d request them to increase the heat, if possible.
Vegetable dishes (mustard greens with ginger, Chinese brocoli, kale with garlic, and fried string beans) were all excellent. Bright green and crisp. The string beans had more seasoning on our first night.
My favorite other dishes were the taro bun, the chicken dumplings, The pork chop noodle soup (clean, chickeny broth with what is essentially Chinese schnitzel ), The beef noodle soup, and the shanghai rice cakes with pork. The noodles with minced pork sauce and the noodles with spicy sauce had good noodles, and good sauce, but the sauce had a hard time adhering to the noodles.
Tang bao
If I understand the distinction correctly (see discussion), DTF’s soup dumplings, owing to their emphasis on thin skin and more soup relative to meatball, are technically ‘Nanjing tang bao’ rather than xiao long bao. From a construction and consistency standpoint, I’ve encountered no rival to DTF’s tang bao in the Bay Area. If the ones I had in Shanghai were a 95, these would be a 90. From an enjoyment standpoint, I like these as much as the dumplings at Shanghai Dumpling in Cupertino, who serve a different style of dumpling that is bigger, has more soup, and has a more intense bacon like flavor that I dig and My Dumplings in Milpitas, who serve a small, soupy thin skinned tang bao. However, DTF beats these two restaurants in terms of consistency, within a basket and across days.
DTF’s uses even spiral crimps, which help make the tang bao compact and easy to pick up at the midsection with chopsticks. Despite the thin skins, none burst, or even came close, which give them the edge over many of the xiao long bao in the bay area— no goofy conical top knot like Kingdom of Dumpling, excess dough with slippery meatballs like Shanghai dumpling king, stout meatball draped with a skin like Shanghai Dumpling Shop ( these are good, but not my stylistic preference), bottom punctures from machine made XLB sticking to spoons/foil cups at Dragon Beaux or MY China. Some other issues I’ve encountered are a stiff wrapper at Dim Sum Club, oversteaming at Yank Sing, and at other places, off flavors, pink sludge instead of a solid meatball, and gluey spots under the meatball. These aren’t eat to make.
People were divided on whether they liked the pork or pork/crab tang bao the best, so personal taste rather than execution was the arbiter. I preferred the crab, which lent a subtle flavor to the meatball more than the soup. Great flavor as a whole— I did a dissection. Clean flavored, light soup, not oily. I found the pork meatball lacking in flavor, but hadn’t noticed this when I ate the dumpling in its entirety, so no big deal.
The tops of tang bao that weren’t eaten immediately got dry. That’s the better outcome— XLB at other places turn into a saturated, hole filled mess after a few minutes.
Skins were as thin as you’ll find in the Bay Area— the tang bao makers roll a little wooden plank over a dowel to achieve this. I don’t recall seeing that before at DTF in Asia, and I wonder if it’s related to repetitive stress injuries. Anyway, the skins weren’t as extreme in their level of extra-soupy, translucent, droop that I had at the Shanghai DTF, but that didn’t diminish my enjoyment.
