We decided we’d waited too long to go try out some xiao long bao, and prompted by the Time Out London scandal, we headed to Hangzhou Xiao Long Bao 杭州小籠湯包.

Din Tai Fung may have mass queues and a Michelin star in their Hong Kong branch, but Hangzhou has a wonderful atmosphere of familiarity that the big ‘famous’ branches of Xiao Long Bao struggle to recreate.

Hangzhou comes to about 300ntd per person, you obviously need to order the classic Xiao Long Bao, and make sure you pick up some xiao cai (little vegetable) plates (my particular favourite is the eggplant!) when grabbing your soy sauce and ginger. Additional favourites on the menu are the pumpkin cake dumplings and the steamed vegetable dumplings. On top of this, the radish cake was probably the best we’ve had in Taipei so far, and the potstickers were some of the freshest too.

Teaching Time Out London a lesson.

The menu is conveniently in both English and Chinese.

Hangzhou has a fabulous website that talks about their journey from a tiny street food stall to their stunning restaurant near the CKS Memorial Hall, and is definitely something you should check out – it’s rare for a Taiwanese establishment to have such an extensively informed website in both English and Chinese! They also have the benefit of having a fantastically competitive domain name (thebestxiaolongbao.com) which is certainly reason enough to find out for yourself if they match up to their websites namesake.