Breakfast at DinTaiFung

As in 2009, our first meal in Taiwan was at DinTaiFung. World famous, it seems, for their special juicy steams dumplings (foreground in picture 2). These dumplings are only served for one hour on Sunday mornings and people come from all across the city to get them. Chunnan tells me that a Japanese company payed something on the order of 100,000,000 Taiwanese Dollars for their chefs to learn from DinTaiFung's chefs. That's about $3 million US. Let me just tell you that they are very yummy indeed. There's a pork filling surrounded by juicy broth surrounded by a perfectly steamed dumpling wrapper. Along with the juicy dumplings and their soup, we had a couple of different types of less famous dumplings, some spicy wontons in pepper sauce, noodles in beef and bean curd sauce, and a really tasty appetizer made of shredded seaweed, bean curd, bean sprouts, green onions, and rice noodles in a light sauce. For desert, yes, it seems most meals end with a sweat treat but Taiwanese sweet is a lot less sweet than American sweet, we had both taro buns and red bean buns. We also ordered pea vines but they brought us sauteed shrimp. There shrimp was good but it wasn't pea vines. :-)

All of that held us really well. We skipped lunch, munched on some Dragon Fruit, Persimmons, and Apples in the early afternoon, then prepared for dinner. Dinner...wow...what can I say...there were 22 of us and the food just kept coming and coming and coming. Final tab was about $900 US. By that time I was way to tired to operate a camera so no pics of the food. But is was VAST! We went to bed about 8pm and slept a solid 8 hours. That's a lot for me. :-) I'll post more about the day's wanderings later.

Gina and Cher and the appetizer
Shu-Min, Mom, and the Dumplings
Shu-Min and the Spicy Wontons.
Shrimp Dumplings

As a teaser...here's a pic of an unsliced Dragon Fruit (red) and a Custard Apple or Buddha's Head, a new fruit Chunnan has been telling me about (green). He says that when it's ripe (a day or two more) it will be VERY tasty and we'll just pull it apart and suck out the custard and spit out the seeds!