Din Tai Fung

Last night Whitney, Amma and I met for dinner at Din Tai Fung, an award-winning Taiwanese restaurant with locations all over Southeast Asia. In 1993, the New York Times ranked DTF one of the world's 10 best restaurants. DTF is well-known for its xiaolongbao or soup dumplings. They're really delicious but you have to be careful when using chop sticks not to punch a hole in them, or else the broth will spill out everywhere.


Here's Whitney assembling our homemade chicken noodle soup. You can see the soup dumplings in their steam tray in the lower left-hand corner.


Here are the dumpling chefs hard at work. I love to watch them make homemade noodles, it's such an art.

DTF is located in one of the shopping centers on Orchard Road. Before dinner, I tooled around another for an hour or so - all 6 floors of it - and discovered a moon cake festival in the lowest level. I had a better moon cake experience here. Apparently there are two types: the traditional kind like I had in the office and another variety known as snowskin. They look something like this, and are much lighter.


My favorite flavor? Cranberry! My least favorite? Durian! It was my first time trying anything durian and I was not a fan. The worst part was I thought from the color that it would be mango. It's like the equivalent of thinking something is strawberry when in reality it's sweat sock.

Luckily I had no such disappointments at dinner! Tonight I'm headed to Ilana's for Mexican, which I've been craving for a while. Gotta mix in some Western food here and there, especially before our big trip. By this time next week, we'll already be on a plane back from Beijing!