Eighteen pleats that turned an oil shop into a Michelin restaurant
Din Tai Fung is no longer only a place in Taipei.
The same sign appears in Los Angeles, London, and Singapore.
The same bamboo steamers are stacked.
The same lines form.
Many people think they are eating a Taiwanese taste.
What is less often mentioned is that the origin was not a famous dumpling shop, but an oil store that was close to failing.
How did one shop in Taipei become this large.
The key seems to have been not only talent in flavor, but a way of changing the craft world into another form.
1948: retreat, and the age of oil
The story does not begin with food.
The founder, Yang Bingyi, is said to have been born in Shanxi, China, in 1927.
In 1948, the civil war intensified.
He crossed to Taiwan with only twenty dollars and began a new life as something close to an exile.
Postwar Taiwan was a place where newcomers gathered in the city, searched for work, and rebuilt ordinary life.
He moved within that flow.
In 1958, he opened a small shop selling cooking oil by weight.
The name was Din Tai Fung Oil Shop.
It handled peanut oil and similar staples, a modest business that supported daily life in Taipei.
In the 1970s, the environment changed.
Bottled salad oil spread.
The old model of measuring oil into containers began to collapse.
Oil moved from something bought at a neighborhood shop to something sealed in a factory.
Small stores lost their role.
1972: a decision to survive
In 1972, the shop faced a choice.
Close, or find another path.
What they chose was to remodel half the space, hire a Shanghai dim sum chef, and begin selling dumplings.
It may have been less about cooking what they wanted, and more about doing what could keep them alive.
Soup dumplings already existed in Taiwan at the time.
They are often described as part of the Jiangzhe culinary flow brought by postwar migration.
Din Tai Fung did not invent the dish from nothing.
It took something that already existed and tried to make it work in a different way.
Turning craft into repeatable technique
Back then, soup dumplings varied widely from shop to shop.
The thickness of the wrapper, the amount of filling, the finish after steaming.
Everything moved with the hands that made them.
That was not a flaw.
Dim sum was simply that kind of food.
Din Tai Fung’s shift was toward reducing that movement while keeping the craft alive.
It is often said that the second generation, Yang Jihua, led this direction.
This is where the specifications appear.
Five grams of wrapper.
Sixteen grams of filling.
Eighteen pleats.
Twenty-one grams in total.
They introduced scales and numbers into a world that had been held by touch.
The scene resembles a workshop more than a dumpling shop.
This was not only for beauty.
It was a condition for serving the same thing, in the same way, wherever it was made.
A soup dumpling is built on a narrow balance of heat and thinness.
Too thin, and it breaks.
Too thick, and it becomes heavy.
The edge of that balance was turned into something shareable, not left inside one person’s hands.
1993: the New York Times moment
There is a date that marks the moment the world noticed the shop.
January 17, 1993, in The New York Times.
In an article titled “Top-Notch Tables; Teapots and Dip,” Din Tai Fung was introduced as one of the world’s ten great restaurants.
At the time, it was still only a single location in Taipei.
It was placed beside famous restaurants in distant cities.
For readers outside Taiwan, soup dumplings were likely still local dim sum.
Then suddenly, they were written into a global map of dining.
This was not only an evaluation of one restaurant.
It also felt like the beginning of Taipei being seen from outside, at the same time the city was becoming a destination for travel and business.
1996: Japan as a filter
The first major overseas milestone came in 1996.
The shop entered Japan, at Takashimaya in Shinjuku.
Not America.
Not Europe.
Japan came first.
That order says something about the nature of this expansion.
At the time, Chinese food carried a vague image: good, but not clean.
Dishes with street origins carried that suspicion more strongly.
A department store does not sell food alone.
It sells cleanliness, safety, uniform quality, and the status of the place itself.
Japanese department stores are known for strict standards.
To open there and draw a line.
That fact carried weight back in Taiwan, and in the next countries.
A shop that Japanese customers line up for functions like a certificate.
Japan became a device that converted soup dumplings from ethnic food into luxury dining.
The taste did not cross as-is.
It passed through Japan once, and came out with a sharpened outline.
That outline became the standard form for global expansion.
The glass kitchen as visible reassurance
Many Din Tai Fung locations place the kitchen behind glass.
White coats, masks, caps.
Workers folding dumplings in silence.
This is not only for cooking.
It is also for trust.
Taste needs language.
Cleanliness can be delivered through sight.
The old unease of Chinese food—what happens behind the wall—gets removed in advance.
The restaurant does not only refine the dumpling.
It refines the environment around it.
The dumpling stops being a food that ends inside a steamer.
The air of the room, the waiting time, and the way it is shown become part of the product.
2010: dim sum with a star
Another milestone in this international story is 2010.
A Din Tai Fung branch in Hong Kong, in Tsim Sha Tsui, received a Michelin star.
Dim sum had long been eaten in stalls and small eateries.
Near morning markets, steamers stack up, people eat quickly, and leave.
Speed was part of the dish.
Then the same category is placed on the same scale as French or Japanese fine dining.
A star here feels less like a prize for taste, and more like a shift in coordinates.
The restaurant is a chain, but the food is delicate.
There is a procedure.
The space is controlled.
Din Tai Fung made that contradiction hold.
The soup dumpling begins to step out of the frame of casual street food.
It moves from a travel souvenir to one kind of urban luxury dining.
It also changes how dim sum itself is seen.
A small steamed dish becomes something “formal” across borders.
From this point, the dumpling needs less explanation.
It becomes a known object.
Why Din Tai Fung became separate
It is hard to say there is no better soup dumpling than Din Tai Fung.
Taipei has older shops.
Other cities have their own strong places.
But Din Tai Fung built a form that could work anywhere, first.
That difference seems to have widened over time.
Taiwanese food often carries strong signatures.
Star anise.
Shacha sauce.
Sweetness and heat.
Offal.
Fermented aromas.
They are part of the appeal, and also a barrier for first-time visitors.
Din Tai Fung lowers that barrier.
No star anise.
No shacha.
Not sweet-hot.
The taste rests on salt, pork, wheat, vinegar, and ginger.
Neutrality becomes not weakness, but portability.
Portability crosses borders.
Service and hygiene also change by country.
Din Tai Fung aligned itself with a high standard.
That alignment helped fix it in the category of luxury.
What is folded into eighteen pleats
Din Tai Fung’s dumplings are unusually uniform.
The pleats match.
The wrapper thickness repeats.
The temperature of the soup arrives as expected.
This is beauty, but it is also a survival shape.
A family that lost a homeland in war, watched an oil business fade with time, and rebuilt work in another form produced a kind of order.
In uncertainty, they did not leave things to chance.
They reduced movement.
They chose reproducibility.
That accumulation carried one Taipei shop across the world.
When we eat at Din Tai Fung, we eat a good soup dumpling.
At the same time, we may be touching one finished form of a culture Taiwan accepted, adjusted, and polished.
The lid opens.
Steam rises.
In that short interval, exile, urbanization, and the work of starting over seem to be folded inside.
