Every retail center has its own Bermuda triangle, an unlucky patch of commerce space that capsizes businesses and makes shoppers hurry past, holding tight to their wallets.
For Rick Caruso’s Americana at Brand, the developer’s second shopping center/lifestyle dream after the successful fantasia at the Grove, that place has been the Brand Boulevard strip. While the inner round of the mall features sleek stores like Barney’s Co-op, Calvin Klein and Apple, Brand Boulevard sports a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, a Pinkberry and (until recently) a Rite Aid, not exactly chic rarities. And then there’s Area 51, the head shop a few doors up from the mall entrance, threatening to fog over the whole place with its vapin’ vibes.
But just five years after opening, the Americana is experiencing a more lively kind of atmosphere on its outskirts. Caruso Affiliated, Americana’s development team, will welcome some high-profile tenants to Brand Boulevard this fall and in early 2014. One of them, Nordstrom, is fleeing their 80s-era Glendale Galleria space for glossy new digs at the Americana, replete with a farm-to-table restaurant, Bar Verde. Also on the restaurant front, James Beard award-winning chef Michael Mina is opening his sixth Bourbon Steak location.
Promising developments-and yet for many, more exciting still is the arrival on Brand Boulevard of the little steamed dumplings called xiao long bao (XLB to the cognoscenti), bite-sized envelopes of tender pork, painstakingly made with 18 delicate crimps at the neck. In late October, Din Tai Fung, the xiao long bao stars of the San Gabriel Valley, opened a 6,800-square-foot location with a liquor license (both of the chain’s Arcadia locations are dry).
Ask Dave Williams, Caruso Affiliated’s executive vice president of architecture, which of the new Americana at Brand businesses inspired the most chatter beforehand and the answer might surprise. While he thinks the raft of new upscale shops and eateries “will absolutely transform Glendale,” he says the name on everyone’s tongue is Din Tai Fung. “The fact that they’re expanding is huge industry news,” Williams says. “That’s what everyone wants to talk about.”
So what’s the big deal? Now with eighty locations in Asia and two perennially mobbed places in Arcadia that have long waits every night, Din Tai Fung originally skyrocketed to international fame in 1993 when the New York Times named it one of the 10 best restaurants in the world. Owned by the Yang family, it’s most famous for the thin-skinned soup dumplings that explode with light, salty juices, but the rest of the menu, including steamed chicken soup and fragrant spicy noodles, inspires rabid devotion as well.
Despite or maybe because of their aversion to marketing, Din Tai Fung is also subject to foodie speculation and woo-woo conspiracy theories. Rumors abound about the management’s superstitions and their reliance on astrology and feng shui, all of which the Yang family denies (yes, we asked).
Blogger David Chan, a well-known connoisseur of Chinese cuisine who keeps a spreadsheet of all the places he’s tried (6,357 and counting), understands the clamor.
“When I read they were opening in the Americana, I was floored by the news,” Chan says. “They don’t open new locations in the U.S. very often.” Besides Arcadia, Din Tai Fung’s sole other American location is in Seattle, though every week they are begged by various New York entrepreneurs to partner up.
Indeed, Caruso and Williams chased after Din Tai Fung for years. “The first time I tried to go there, there was a line out the door,” Williams recalls. “It was clearly a very successful local merchant. They fit our ‘best in class’ formula perfectly.”
Din Tai Fung, on the other hand, didn’t always think the Americana was a fit, but then again, it’s in Frank Yang’s nature to come around to ideas slowly. His father, Bingyi Yang, toiled away at the original Taipei location of Din Tai Fung, a cooking oils store that developed into a full-blown restaurant in 1974. Bingyi warned his son, who moved to the San Gabriel Valley in 1990 after studying at Parsons School of Design in New York, not to follow in his footsteps in the U.S.
“It’s typical Chinese, Taiwanese thinking,” Yang says. “My father said, ‘Why would you want to enter the restaurant business? You have to work around the clock.’”
Frank was ready to steer clear of the family trade, but a few things spurred him to open Din Tai Fung in California. First, his older brother opened the second Din Tai Fung in Tokyo in 1996 to great success. Second, a copycat restaurant of sorts opened in the San Gabriel Valley a few years later. Eventually it went out of business, but still, if someone else was going to profit off of Din Tai Fung’s good name, why not Frank?
In March of 2000, the first Arcadia location opened to an eager crowd, mostly Taiwanese hungry for a taste of home. Frank remembers they had to close for two days after opening to prepare more tissue-thin dough-and to catch their breath.
In the following thirteen years, Din Tai Fung expanded significantly, with locations in Singapore, Seoul, Tokyo, Osaka, Jakarta, Bangkok and Sydney, to tick off a few. All of the Asian locations are operated by Frank’s older brother, Chi-hua, but Bingyi, now eighty six, still walks daily to the original Taipei location to have lunch and check in.
Hardcore fans flock to Din Tai Fung locations all over the world, checking them off the list, bragging about their conquests to Frank and his son, Aaron, who’s helping to open the Americana location. One fan, an Exxon Mobile executive based in Singapore, called Frank to ask him to deliver the juicy pork dumplings to his son’s birthday party, which happened to be in Newport Beach. Good thing they only had to come from 30 miles away.
So why was it time for Din Tai Fung to move into the Americana? “We want to go more mainstream,” Aaron Yang says. He’s finishing a hospitality degree at Cornell University, and he’s taken more of a role in the new Americana location, as well as a 2014 expansion planned for Orange County’s South Coast Plaza. “We’re really stepping up the ambience-a full bar, dimmer lighting, really great design. Just more of what an average American restaurant offers.”
And quite simply, Arcadia can’t handle all the action. The wait staff, fresh-scrubbed twentysomethings in purple jackets and wireless microphones, look like they may break into choreographed song, a la Glee, at any second, but it’s still not enough to buffer two-hour waits on the weekends.
Not only is Din Tai Fung bound to attract more Chinese-American shoppers to the Americana, it’ll also “bring a younger, hipper customer to the property,” Williams says, from neighborhoods like Silver Lake or Echo Park.
And the place is likely to be a magnet for stylish customers living right upstairs, where the residents of the Americana’s condos and apartments boast more than $300,000 in annual household income.
It’s a publicity machine that is almost self-generating. Take the recent pairing of the name Tom Cruise with Din Tai Fung, as the actor tried his hand at making the dumplings on a recent promotional blitz in Taiwan for Oblivion. Chi-hua guided him through the process, but Aaron was there, too.
So how did Cruise, who famously attempts any stunt he can possibly carry off himself, pull off the feat of making the perfect xiao long bao? The crimps alone can take six months of training to execute correctly. “It was pretty good for someone’s first try,” Aaron says. “He got it to hold together.”