Din Tai Fung @ Tsim Sha Tsui

After being trapped at home for almost 2 whole weeks, my hand's burned injury is finally approaching a "stable recovery" state. The outer burned skin (now blacken) was slowly peeling off, while the new inner skin (very red and sensitive) is glowing, slowly and "itchily".

Though still far from 100% healed, I couldn't wait to break out from my recovery "cage" and went to a restaurant that Mike and I have meant to try for a long time, the recently-opened Din Tai Fung at Tsim Sha Tsui.

New Restaurant, Yay!!

Din Tai Fung (鼎泰豐) is a must-visit restaurant in Taipei, famous for its "little dragon buns" (Shanghai style steamed buns with meat fillings). They have chains in lots of countries and cities (unfortunately not in SF). They just recently opened their first one in Hong Kong.

Mike LOVES the Taipei main branch of this restaurant. We visited twice in our last very short three-days Taipei trip. He was willing to give up an opportunity to try other yummy restaurants just for this, so you know....

Not to mention that he alone ate 15+ steamed buns in our second visit....

Other Yummy Food

Besides steamed buns, we also tried a bunch of things that we didn't try last time when were in its Taipei branch.

Such as this tofu veggie vermicelli soup.

"Dan Dan Noodles" with peanut sauce.

It always made me soooooo happy to see all the yummy-looking, freshly made food steaming all at once in front of me on the table !!

The Hungry Couple

"Itatakimasu!!!"

Yup... and that would be my "bundled-up" injured hand that you saw from the picture.

Luckily my recovery was finally at a state where I could hold my own chopsticks, otherwise I'd need to use my "un-chopstick-trained" left hand and I'm sure there would be lots of food dropping and sauce splashing, or Mike would have to feed me very "lovingly".... haha... ^_~

See how relieved (or .... cynical?) he was knowing that he didn't need to hand-feed me!!

The steamed buns were juicy and fresh, but just.... hmm.... didn't seem to be as yummy as the ones in Taipei.

Also, they cut the number of buns served in each order. In Taipei, you get 10 for each order, but it's only 6 here. The missing 4 made this dish look less "fulfilling"....

Regardless of the slight decrease in quality, I was just too happy to be out and enjoying delicious food, after almost two weeks of "cage-life"!!! =D (I know I know... it's for the sake of my own hand's recovery, but still...... I was almost bored out of my mind starring at my poor blistered hand with pain for soooooooo long!!)

More, please!!

Apparently we still had room for more after what we ordered. I told Mike to "go totally out" and ordered whatever he wanted! And guess what....

Yup, he has been having the Japanese-style fried pork cutlet craving for awhile now, and here we are! Taiwanese fried rice with pork cutlet it was!!

Close up!

And it was absolutely delightful! Easiest the most delicious dish of the night!

I would totally come back to this restaurant just for this dish! haha....

Even for Mike, who is a pseudo-vegetarian (i.e., he likes to pretend to be a vegetarian most of the time, except when he goes eat burgers and sushi), helped me clean the entire plate (not including the 3 dishes that we finished prior to this one).

By the time we left, there were already giant queues outside. We were glad that we got in early to avoid the busy dinner crowd on a Saturday night!! =D