Din Tai Fung - Americana Glendale

New thing today, tried Din Tai Fung at the Americana at Glendale. Din Tai Fung are Taiwanese dumplings filled with soup. My sister raved and loved it, so we had to try it and took mom out for Mother's day celebration there. 

The husband likes ordering these better than dim sum ordering - as you have a menu sheet and choose - sort of like for Japanese sushi. Then you get 8-10 pieces per order so it's larger for sharing. 

We got the pork dumplings here. 

There's a special way to eat them. As the soup is hot and may burn your tongue, they recommend breaking the dumpling into a soup spoon, drinking the soup first, then eating it. We did this for some dumplings, but I found that if you wait awhile, and let the dumplings cool off, it's worth it to just bite it whole and get the mouth full of juicy warm soup into your bite of dumpling.

These are the shrimp and pork shumai dumplings filled with soup, which a few of us thought were tastier than the regular pork ones. The fuzzy in the photo is the steam :) I liked these dipped into soy sauce and a bit of vinegar, than chomped whole once it has cooled - if you can fit in your mouth :) Good stuff.

Bak Choi - plain and not great. Sort of a waste, but at least it was healthy.

We also got wonton soup and pork friend rice. I have no photos of that, but it was average. I prefer regular dim sum wonton soup and I wasn't loving the fried rice.

Below are the to-go containers. I like how they bagged it up for you, and mom took the goodies home.

Overall I was a bit underwhelmed. We waited an hour for our table, but they at least had the tech to get my phone number and send a text when our table was almost ready, so we could enjoy ourselves around the Americana and just come back once our table was almost ready. That was awesome. Service was EXCELLENT overall! It was a packed night but everyone was fantastic. At the entrance you can watch them make the dumplings, so that was really neat. Overall just a fun experience.

The food itself wasn't that great. I felt like I wasn't loving the flavors. But it was rather a fun experience and a very very new one for us all. It was more fun than flavorful. Others at my table liked the food better and I would gladly go back. I thought it was good, just not great. Also my heart still belongs to regular dim sum! 

Try it! There are a ton of fans and it really appeals to quite a few people :)