Din Tai Fung Brand Guidelines: A 1958 Taipei Oil Shop Turned Xiaolongbao Chain

A cooking-oil shop on Xinyi Road.

Din Tai Fung began as a cooking-oil shop in Taipei. The Taipei Times, in a “Taiwan in Time” history column published on 23 March 2025, says Yang Bing-yi, a native of Shanxi province, worked for about ten years at an oil retailer called Heng Tai Fung, rising from deliveryman to store manager, and opened his own oil shop in 1958 with his wife Lai Pen-mei, a former co-worker there. The name joined the old employer’s with that of the couple’s supplier, Din Mei, the paper says. The company’s own history page tells the same story and presents the name as a way of thanking Heng Tai Fung’s owner.

The oil business delivered to shops and restaurants across Taipei and Taoyuan, including the city’s Shanghainese restaurants, and in 1963 the couple bought a shop front on Xinyi Road, by Yongkang Street, according to the Taipei Times. Its sign was written by the calligrapher Yu You-jen, then president of the Control Yuan. The company says the original sign, reading “Din Tai Fung Oil Retail,” still hangs near the entrance of the Xinyi restaurant, and both the paper and the company say the telephone number obtained in 1958 is still in use there.

Around 1972 the old oil trade gave way to mass-produced “salad oil,” and sales faltered. The Taipei Times says a friend, Tang Yung-chang, owner of the Shanghai restaurant Fuxingyuan, advised Yang to sell Shanghai-style dim sum rather than the Shanxi noodles other friends suggested, and introduced one of his former dim sum chefs. In 1972 Yang set three tables in one half of the oil shop. Business was slow at first, the paper says. Two years later the first chef left, a new dim sum chef was hired, and Din Tai Fung took over the whole storefront, selling the xiaolongbao, or steamed soup dumplings, still at the centre of its menu. English Wikipedia also gives 1972 as the year the shop stopped selling oil and became a restaurant.

Eighteen folds and a food critic.

The dumpling’s form came from inside the family. The Taipei Times says the founder’s teenage son, Yang Chi-hua, learned to make the dumplings from the shop’s chefs and later helped devise its formula of 18 folds in the skin. The company’s history page opens with the same number, describing a thin, delicate skin “complete with 18 folds,” and English Wikipedia says the chain is known internationally for paper-thin wrappers folded the same way.

Recognition came from writers. In 1978 the food critic Tang Lu-sun praised the shop’s crab paste soup dumplings in the United Daily News, and after a second article in December 1982 the crowds arrived, the Taipei Times reports. Yongkang Street had become a tourist area: Taiwan’s Tourism Bureau mentioned the restaurant in a brochure carried on China Airlines flights, and a Japan-based businessman wrote about the dumplings in the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, drawing Japanese visitors.

Yang Chi-hua began working full time at the restaurant in 1982 and was running its daily business by 1988; his father retired in 1995, according to the Taipei Times.

Expansion was not the family’s first instinct. Father and son turned down many offers to open more shops, the Taipei Times says, until the Taiwan head of the Japanese department store Takashimaya kept asking. Yang Chi-hua agreed on condition that Takashimaya send staff to Taiwan for a year of training, and the first branch abroad opened in Japan in 1996. English Wikipedia places that first international restaurant in Tokyo.

Dumpling kitchens and dim-sum baskets.

Asian restaurant chains tend to present themselves through what happens in the kitchen. Din Tai Fung’s own history page opens with the xiaolongbao and its count of 18 folds, and the Taipei Times traced that formula to the founder’s son working alongside the shop’s first dim sum chefs.

Names and shop fronts carry a lot of the identity. Tim Ho Wan’s Chinese name means “to add good luck,” English Wikipedia says, and Din Tai Fung’s joins the names of a former employer and an oil supplier, according to the company and the Taipei Times. Long-kept signs, such as the brushed board that Din Tai Fung says still hangs at its first restaurant on Xinyi Road, link a chain of many branches back to one room.

Dish naming is usually plain and descriptive: barbecue pork buns, steamed rice rolls, pan-fried turnip cake, soup dumplings. Groups can list signature dishes by name when they announce deals, as Jollibee Foods Corporation did for Tim Ho Wan in November 2024, GMA News reported. Guidebook recognition travels with a name too: Tim Ho Wan’s first shop in Mong Kok appeared with a star in the 2010 Michelin Guide, Gourmet Traveller reported in 2015, and that star still features in how the chain is introduced in press coverage.

The corporate side is published too. Company pages set out founders and founding years, parent groups describe their portfolios in stock exchange disclosures, and franchise partners appear in trade press when rights change hands. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it and how it grew — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From Xinyi Road to many countries.

From Japan the chain spread across Asia and beyond. English Wikipedia lists branches in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Macau, mainland China, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada, and says the chain had more than 170 locations as of 2024. It dates the first mainland China and first North American restaurants to 2000, the latter in Arcadia, California, which closed in June 2020; the first European branch to London in December 2018; a large New York restaurant to 2024; and the first Canadian branch, in Vancouver, to May 2025. The company’s own chronology lists further openings through 2026, including Scottsdale, Arizona, in April and Glorietta in Manila in October.

In Hong Kong, English Wikipedia says the 2010 Hong Kong and Macau edition of the Michelin Guide, published in November 2009, gave the chain’s first Hong Kong branch, in Tsim Sha Tsui, a Michelin star. In the United States, it says, the Arcadia restaurant was run by a son of the founders rather than a franchisee, and grandsons of the founders now lead the North American business.

One former operator ended up in court. In April 2024 Australia’s Federal Court penalised two companies that had employed staff at Din Tai Fung restaurants in Sydney and Melbourne, for underpaying 17 employees between 2014 and 2018 and for keeping false records, Inside Retail reported, citing the Fair Work Ombudsman; the publication described the companies as the restaurants’ former operators.

For a design guide, Din Tai Fung shows how a single dish, a counted number of folds and a brushed shop sign can carry a family business into many countries. Compare Tim Ho Wan, the Hong Kong dim sum chain, and Crystal Jade, from Singapore. For this guide we use a lacquer red, a steamer-bamboo tan and a brush ink on rice-paper white with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Din Tai Fung’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.