Michelin, Michelin

If only I had the same skill with cooking vegetables that Asian restaurants have. This is the thought I have throughout any meal at Din Tai Fung, a Taiwanese Chinese restaurant Michelin-starred since 2010. It’s a treat whenever I am in L.A. It’s hard to have dim sum anywhere else. A small room crammed with people in all-white garb complete with white hats and masks is dumpling central.  This is where all the perfectly uniformed and delicious pieces of dim sum originate.

The staff is synchronized in their excellence, anticipating your every need and delivering extraordinary food with no unusual lapse in time between your order and arrival. Considering the sheer volume of business, this is no small feat. Din Tai Fung is not cheap, but factoring in the level of polish and efficiency, neither is it expensive.  We love this place, and don’t even mind the hour to two-hour wait.

Our order is always the same: a few orders of soup dumplings and shumai, wonton soup, pot stickers, green beans, broccoli, lo mein, fried rice, and sometimes more broccoli and green beans.

It is hard to explain how I could quit after the green beans or broccoli, but these vegetables turned out by this kitchen are otherworldly.

They are fresh, cooked to the sweet spot of cooked through but not at all overcooked. There is a light coating of oil and garlic in the green beans, 

and slivers of almonds in the broccoli. Both are the best versions of these vegetables I have ever encountered anywhere.

That goes double for the delicate dumplings from the dumpling room. Whether it is trendy soup dumplings (xiao long bao) 

or shumai, 

these are light and consistently perfect. With the thin shreds of pickled ginger and the chili sauce and rice wine vinegar for dipping, a lot of these little morsels disappear quickly.

The fried rice comes in a vegetarian version and we got the shrimp one too. The shrimp are served in a pile on top of the mound of rice, which is unusual in my experience. Both are just stir fried without any coloring or intense flavoring, which is easy enough to add. It took me a bit to get used to this but I like this style.

The lo mein is always the least interesting thing on the table, but it is good enough. We get the one with shreds of chicken.

This time we ordered dessert, which was a xiao long bao filled with chocolate. The dumpling came with a sea salt cream for dipping that was topped with hazelnut dust and ginger.

No matter how many times we indulge in this dim sum experience, I am always impressed with the level of everything here. Cost be damned, Din Tai Fung is consistently next level, by a wide margin. Old school Michelin.