I featured the delicious food from Din Tai Fung in yesterday’s post. Today, a quick look at the restaurant’s dramatic architecture at the Aria Las Vegas. The Aria itself is a beautiful hotel, which I will talk about tomorrow, and it makes sense that restaurants in the hotel also share a striking design.

This cluster of wooden lanterns adorned the entrance near the check-in counter. You can see a sliver of a glass-enclosed room where they freshly make the Xiao Long Bao, which I showed yesterday.

I quickly snapped a picture of the main dining area, which blew me away in size and scale. I sat roughly at the mid-point, and this is the view to my right. There was another sizable area to my left. I’ve never been to Taiwan or other Din Tai Fung locations, so I have no idea how big they are. However, I imagined a significantly smaller and modest space for a restaurant serving Xiao Long Bao. Obviously, I was utterly wrong.

Part of the size may be due to Las Vegas, which does things on an ambitious scale. And, even with such an enormous restaurant, it was packed, and I needed reservations. I felt like a small-town tourist coming to the big city.

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