Din Tai Fung earns more per restaurant than any other chain in the US
Dumplings, Disneyland, and long lines of diners are a multimillion-dollar recipe for success.
Though no one can quite agree on just how many branches of Din Tai Fung, the buzzy dumpling spot, there are in the US — The Wall Street Journal went for 16 this week, Bloomberg put it at 17 in early October, and the chain’s website lists a host of new openings that might muddy the waters further in months to come — everyone does concur on one thing: each one is a finely tuned orchestration that turns dough into tens of millions of dollars.
The Bao generation
In the early 1970s, when tinned cooking oil started eating into sales at their shop in Taipei, Din Tai Fung founder Bing-Yi Yang and his wife decided to convert half the store into a restaurant making and selling Xiao Long Bao — the soup dumplings it’s famous around the world for to this day. The pivot proved popular and, after the Taiwanese spot cropped up in The New York Times’ “Top-Notch Tables” in 1993, international expansion would be only a matter of time.
However, when the company opened its first US branch in Arcadia, California, in March 2000, even the most evangelical DTF fan might not have predicted that it would grow into the stateside hit it is today, as America’s top-earning restaurant chain. With a string of locations along the West Coast, some prime real estate in New York City, and an outpost in Disneyland to boot, each Din Tai Fung brought in a whopping $27.4 million on average last year, per figures from industry research firm Technomic.
To put that into context, at the world’s largest Din Tai Fung branch in Times Square (where, as of April, a portion of 10 traditional Xiao Long Bao sets you back $18.50), $27.4 million would equate to the restaurant shifting a staggering ~15 million individual dumplings across 2024.
The $27.4 million figure is impressive in its own right, but it becomes even more so when stacked up against the other top-earning restaurant chains in the Technomic report, such as The Cheesecake Factory or Nobu.
According to Restaurant Business Magazine, a chain must do three things to secure the sort of turnover DTF is posting: it must be big, busy, and customers must spend a decent amount when they’re there. Thanks to its expansive floor plans, snaking lines outside most restaurants, and a menu made up of items that lend themselves nicely to sprawling family-style banquets, Restaurant Business says the Taiwanese chain ticks the boxes on all three counts.
It’s impressive when compared to the world of fast food, too, where, despite most outlets famously closing on Sundays, Chick-fil-A has soared above the competition on sales per restaurant for some time. But still, even the chicken sandwich shop’s impressive $7.5 million per-store average, boosted by busy (if slow) drive-thru lanes at most locations, is nowhere near Din Tai Fung’s output.
