Finding a seat at the Din Tai Fung restaurant that churns out around 22,000 dumplings and other dishes per day is much more difficult than going up to the 89th floor of the Taipei 101 skyscraper.
The 101-floor building was for some time the tallest in the world.
While it takes just 37 seconds to reach the 89th floor from the fifth floor, one has to wait in a queue outside the 360-cover Din Tai Fung restaurant.
A digital signboard outside the eatery informs the waiting queue of diners that their chance to enter the restaurant would come in around 35 minutes.
The diners didn't mind the wait as it's worth it.
But what is so special about the outlet's dumplings so as to send out around 22,000 pieces a day out of its kitchen?
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"The dough for each dumpling weighs exactly five grams and the filling 16 grams. Each dumpling has 18-20 folds. We make around 20,000 to 22,000 dumplings every day," Laura Lo, an employee, told IANS.
Guests can see a group of kitchen staff behind a glass partition working at a hectic pace, cutting out small pieces of dough, flattening them to form a round wrapper and filling them up.
Though there is a small weighing scale to measure dough or the fillings weight it was rarely used.
The restaurant serves six varieties of xialongbao and seven varieties of steamed dumplings. Some of its fast-moving items are pork xialongbao, shrimp fried rice, shrimp fried rice with pork, pork fried rice, pot sticker, spicy shrimp and pork wonton.
At the table the appetisers, stewed spongy gluten and the egg flower soup, tasted good.
They were followed by chicken xialongbao. One can pop the xialongbao in the mouth so as to savour its taste or take some sauce and puncture it with a chopstick or a fork.
Both ways the taste was yummy. So was the steamed vegetable mushroom dumpling. The shrimp fried rice with egg that followed xialongbao was divine.
According to Lo, a meal at Din Tai Fung would cost around Taiwan $400-500 ($13-16) per person.
Din Tai Fung outlets can also be found in Australia, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Macau, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, the UAE and the US.
After the meal tourists can shop for Taiwanese sweets and other items at the Taipei 101 building.
From the 89th floor one can enjoy the beautiful sight of Taipei at night.
With Taiwan regularly experiencing typhoons, the skyscraper has a 660 tonne tuned mass damper between the 87th and 91st floors to stabilise it against movements caused by high-speed winds.
The huge damper, hung on thick cables, can be viewed by the visitors.
The building is one of the architectural wonders as it stands in an active seismic area and in a region where typhoons are common. As a result, the building has to be flexible at the foundation to manage earthquakes and at the same time, to be strong against typhoons.
For compulsive shoppers, there are several luxury branded stores for splurging.
(The writer's visit was at the invitation of Scoot Airlines and the Taiwan Tourism Board. Venkatachari Jagannathan can be contacted at v.jagannathan@ians.in)
--IANS
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