Din Tai Fung Expands Vegan Menu With JUST Egg Across All U.S. Outlets

Famous Taiwanese restaurant chain Din Tai Fung has expanded their vegan offerings across its U.S. locations in partnership with San Francisco food tech Eat Just. Featuring the plant-based JUST Egg, the five new items range from noodles and dumplings, and have now landed on the menus of all thirteen restaurants it operates in the country. 

Din Tai Fung, the globally-recognised Taiwanese restaurant chain, has just added five new vegan dishes to its menu in response to surging demand for meatless options. Partnering with Eat Just, the restaurant has rolled out the new vegan dishes across all thirteen of its U.S. locations, all of them featuring the mung bean-based JUST Egg to recreate some of the most authentic dishes in Taiwanese cuisine. 

Dishes include Vegan Wontons with House Spicy Sauce and Vegan Wonton Soup with the wonton skins itself made with the plant-based JUST Egg and infused with freshly squeezed spinach juice to give a bright green colour. 

Other 100% plant-based items debuting on the menu are Vegan Noodles with Sesame Sauce, Vegan Noodles with House Spicy Sauce, and Vegan Noodle Soup – also handcrafted with Eat Just’s egg substitute and spinach juice. Launched this week, all the new dishes are now available to U.S. customers for both dine-in and takeaway. 

Some of the existing plant-based menu items on Din Tai Fung’s menu include Shanghainese Vegetarian Rice Cakes, Vegan Dumplings, Vegetable and Mushroom Bun, Cucumber Salad and Sauteed String Bean with Garlic. 

Commenting on the decision to expand its vegan choices, Albert Yang, VP of the iconic chain, whose restaurant network spans 170 outlets in thirteen countries worldwide, said: “We have received an incredible amount of feedback asking for more vegan options. We have been working hard to ensure these new offerings are up to the quality standards our guests expect.”

For now, the new JUST Egg vegan dishes will be exclusive to its U.S. branches, though the chain is likely to dive into the plant-based trend across other markets, especially as demand from consumers reaches new heights, thanks to a new wave of mainstream flexitarian diners. 

Din Tai Fung’s loyal fanbase will be particularly keen to see an expanded vegan menu in its iconic Hong Kong outlet, which has been awarded a Michelin star five times. 

For Eat Just, the latest restaurant partnership follows multiple successful foodservice launches all over the world, the most recent being its collaboration with street vendors all over Shanghai to launch plant-based JUST Egg jianbing – one of the most popular breakfast foods in China – across the city. 

The plant-forward move by Din Tai Fung is a pattern replicated across the foodservice industry, with numerous restaurants globally – including some of the world’s best known establishments – all announcing new plant-based menu options or have gone even further to ditch meat and dairy entirely. 

The Royal China Club, a renowned Chinese restaurant in London, has rolled out a standalone vegan menu in partnership with Hong Kong-based food tech OmniFoods, dishing out twelve new Cantonese-style dim sums, stir-fries and more featuring the vegan pork analogue OmniPork. 

British chain Wagamama, famous for their katsu curries and ramen, pledged to make at least 50% of its menu meat-free by the end of the year. 

Restaurants that have boldly ditched all animal products and gone completely vegan include New York’s three-Michelin-starred Eleven Madison Park, The Peninsula Bangkok’s Mei Jiang and Japanese burger joint Great Lakes Tokyo. 

All images courtesy of Din Tai Fung / lead image designed by Green Queen Media.