Every Saturday, Taiwanese restaurant chain Din Tai Fung plates as many as 20,000 of its delicate, steamy dumplings. And that’s just in Times Square.
No one is cashing in on America’s craze for dumplings more than the fast-growing Taiwanese restaurant group. After starting in the U.S. on the West Coast and relying on suburban shopping-mall traffic, Din Tai Fung is now leaning into core downtown neighborhoods on the East Coast.
Its Manhattan restaurant in Times Square is the chain’s top-selling location in the U.S. Next up: Din Tai Fung will announce on Monday plans to open a 20,000-square-foot Downtown Brooklyn location.
Chief Financial Officer Nilesh Patel said Brooklyn was the natural next step. “It’s diverse, it’s creative, it’s authentic,” he said.
The company’s 16 restaurants in the U.S. generated an average of $27 million in annual sales last year, according to market-research firm Technomic. That number is easily the highest among the 1,500 restaurant chains with five or more locations tracked by Technomic.
“Ridiculous numbers,” said Keith Durst, owner of the hospitality advisory firm Friend of Chef. “We’re talking about unbelievably busy” restaurants.
Din Tai Fung opened two additional restaurants in the past year, in Santa Monica, Calif., and in Vancouver.
The Cheesecake Factory, by contrast, sold an average of $12.4 million per location in 2024, while the steakhouse chain Del Frisco’s Double Eagle Steakhouse averaged $13.8 million.
Din Tai Fung has a simple playbook for success: large footprints of 15,000 or more square feet, rapid service and a never-ending production of hand-folded soup dumplings.
Even though lines queue up outside the door at many Din Tai Fung locations, “I’ve never had slow service,” said Andrew Skotdal, a real-estate executive in the Seattle area who is friendly with one of Din Tai Fung’s owners.
At the bustling Times Square location, Din Tai Fung chefs on display behind glass walls mold the 18 folds standard to the chain’s soup dumplings. A small robot ferries takeout orders between the kitchen and the pickup station.
Placards on the table provide instructions on how to eat Din Tai Fung’s xiao long bao, or soup dumplings, and diners mark their orders on long slips of paper that are then collected by servers.
“I’m a big foodie, and it was spot-on,” said Amaryllis Avelar, a New Jersey resident who ate lunch at Din Tai Fung with two co-workers. The group spent about $320 on the meal, including green beans, ribs, fried rice, shrimp dumplings, dessert dumplings and drinks.
The company’s American expansion coincides with an expanding Asian population in the U.S. Asians have the highest levels of disposable income of any minority group in the country and “spend the most money eating out,” said Naveen Jaggi, president of retail advisory services at real-estate firm JLL.
Din Tai Fung is a family business that sold its first dumpling in Taipei in 1972 and now numbers more than 165 locations worldwide. It opened its first U.S. restaurant in 2000 in Arcadia, Calif., and it has since expanded slowly across the state and Pacific Northwest.
More than half of Din Tai Fung’s locations are in malls, which the chain has sought out for the ample parking, exposure to new customers and entertainment they provide while diners wait for a table. The malls benefit too: An analysis by data firm Placer.ai found that evening visits and the amount of time customers spent at the Santa Monica Place mall in California increased after Din Tai Fung opened there.
In Brooklyn, Din Tai Fung plans to open in 2027 on the ground floor of the Brook, a luxury apartment building where rent for a studio starts at $3,875 a month.
The company is looking to continue expanding across the tri-state area and in top-10 markets across the country. Planned openings are already announced for the Fashion Square mall in Scottsdale, Ariz., and the Irvine Spectrum Center and Brea Mall in California.
“We’re definitely growing,” Patel said.
Write to Kate King at kate.king@wsj.com