In the early 1970s,
Yang Bing-Yi
was a struggling seller of cooking oil in Taipei. As demand for his bottled peanut oil sank, Mr. Yang and his wife, Lai Pen-Mei, diversified in 1972 by offering soup dumplings and other Chinese delicacies.
These treats proved so popular that the Yangs abandoned the cooking-oil business to focus on Shanghai-style dumplings and other food, sold at a restaurant called Din Tai Fung. Until 1993, it was known almost exclusively to local connoisseurs. Then the
New York Times
included Din Tai Fung in an article extolling 10 “top-notch tables” around the world. It was described as unpretentious and “sparkling clean.”
Suddenly, Din Tai Fung was attracting curious foreigners. A few years later, a Din Tai Fung restaurant opened in Tokyo. Then came one in Arcadia, Calif., in 2000. Now Din Tai Fung has more than 170 locations worldwide, including 13 in the U.S., concentrated along the West Coast and in Nevada. The chain aims to open one in Manhattan by late this year or early in 2024.
Though Din Tai Fung offers a variety of noodles, fried rice and soups, the pleated, broth-filled dumplings are the leading attraction. An ABC News report quoted a Din Tai Fung chef as saying kitchen staff members need at least six months to learn the craft, including the 18 precise folds required to seal each dumpling.
The company announced recently that Mr. Yang had died at the age of 96.
Mr. Yang was born in China’s Shanxi province in 1927. In the 1940s, he enlisted in the army of one of the warlords who then ruled parts of China, according to a history of Chinese food, “From Canton Restaurant to Panda Express,” by Haiming Liu.
After tiring of military life, Mr. Yang fled China’s civil war and found his way to Taiwan, where one of his uncles lived. He worked as a delivery man for a cooking oil business and was later promoted to manager of a store. He met his future wife, a Hakka Chinese, at work. When the store went bankrupt, Mr. Yang started his own cooking oil business in 1958.
One of Mr. Yang’s sons, Frank Yang, told the Los Angeles Times in 2002 that his father discouraged him from going into the restaurant business when he moved to Southern California in the 1980s. Restaurant hours were too long, his father said.
So the younger Mr. Yang worked for 13 years as a garment inspector. He re-evaluated his career choice after discovering that some Southern California restaurant owners were hijacking the Din Tai Fung name to offer their own versions of the original dumplings. To save the family’s reputation, he decided to open a genuine Din Tai Fung restaurant in Arcadia, near Los Angeles. Before long, customers were lining up outside the front door.
Write to James R. Hagerty at [email protected]
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Appeared in the April 1, 2023, print edition as ‘Soup Dumpling Maker Created Global Brand.’
