Din Tai Fung Centre Point — Restaurant in London

I always pop into a Din Tai Fung wherever I travel. Taiwan, Hong Kong, Dubai, UK. Been to the Covent Garden branch a few times and was very satisfied. Saw they now have a new store(s) (2 actually) so I decided that would be one of the stops that I make.

Service: arrived today in a group of 3without a reservation. The host advised it would be an hour wait. And we decided to wait. Then I heard the host advised the next group of 4 that also did not have a reservation that their wait would be 30 min. Intrigued. Then I ask the host why would their wait time be 30 min but mine was an hour? She explained because 3 guests tables are different to the 4 guests table. And we are dining with a child which will refrain us from sitting on the high table…. Annoyed but alright and did not say one word. Then she added on saying she felt something personal was going on. And this wasn’t personal… blah blah blah… “Miss, did I say anything?” Totally annoyed. But that did ended the excessive conversation.

The 20 minute wait (ended up not being 1 hour) at the bar was a nice touch. At least you can order a drink and some snacks.

But then at the table, we have to flag down the server to have food ordered. No one checked on us while we were dining. Completely different than the service in Asia (or even ex-Covent Garden branch) where they explained to you about the menu, how to enjoy the Xiao Long Bao, continuously check up on you. Maybe they were understaff….

And maybe we ordered too much food for 3 persons. We had to help sort the table to make room for the dishes….

Food: most food were excellent and maintained the same quality level around the word. EXCEPT FOR THE XIAO LONG BAO. the skin/dough was good as always. Thin but al dente. But the filling was disappointing. Meat and the juice had no flavor nor meat umami… tasted like a low quality cut of meat…. BUT the vegan mushroom Xiao Long Bao was exceptional.

Price: typical Londoner pricing.

Will I recommend to a friend? Yes. But will advise them not to go for original pork XLB but...

For a restaurant that places themselves on the higher end, they really should rectify their service. They have more waiting staff than most restaurants I've been to but they somehow manage to be less helpful than most.

We went there as a party of 6 on a busy Saturday night. Orders are made through their webapp so there is a limited amount of human interaction. The app can really do with improvements - It's difficult to navigate and some items, when listed on the order sheet, is missing the name of the dish.

The first round of orders came swiftly, but when we ordered extra xiao long bao they took over 30mins to arrive. Judging by the slowness we decided to order desserts befor whilst waiting and ultimately we had to wait an extra 90mins for the custard baos (and had to chase 4 times). I understand Saturday services can be hectic but I feel like the heavy reliance on the app has made the waiting staff lost the sense of responsibility for serving the table - I can understand things can go wrong and we may have to chase, but if a customer has chased once the waiting staff should feel a responsibility to see it through and make sure the request is met - this obviously did not happen.

In the end we were so unhappy that we complained to the manager and asked for the service charge to be remove. I gave the service 2 stars for how swiftly the manager acted during the situation and the staff remained polite and friendly.

There is also a ridiculous markup on drinks: £15 for a very small cocktail, £6 for 330ml beer. The quality of the food is decent, but for every dish we've tried, there is somewhere else in China town that is fairly on par with Din Tai Fung and is cheaper

It was a disappointing experience and I cannot recommend this place. I've heard covent garden branch is better so if you really fancy Din Tai Fung consider going...

Really left a lot to be desired. We've been to quite a few Din Tai Fung around the world and from service to quality of food, this was the worst one.

We arrived early for our reservation and were told to wait at the bar and we would be served drinks while waiting. We waited for around 25 minutes, and no one came to ask us if we'd like water or anything to drink. When we were called up for our reservation, the hostess asked if we were able to order drinks and I explained that no one had stopped by to ask and we couldn't flag anyone down. Her response was "Okay, that's fine." We chalked it up to this location being new and none of the staff having adequate time for training.

We ordered our food and asked our waitress for some chili sauce, specifying not chili oil. But she corrected us saying "Oh, chili oil?" and we chalked that up to a difference in referring to it. When we were leaving though, we clearly saw that this location had the exact chili sauce we were asking for on sale, as well as the chili oil we did not ask for, showing that there clearly is a distinction between the two and that they refer to them in the same way we do.

To top it all off, the soup dumplings were really subpar, most noticeably because they had no soup in them. I literally poked a hole in my soup dumpling, turned it upside down to see if I could even get a single drop of soup out, and it was dry. Very confused as to why it's being advertised as a soup dumpling vs a regular one.

Super unhappy with our experience as well as the overall aloofness of the staff. Would not recommend visiting this...