The cult dumpling chain Din Tai Fung is reportedly in talks to bring its Din Tai Fung King’s Cross location to Lewis Cubitt Walk, occupying the former site of Babel Beerhouse next to Lightroom, as the Taiwanese brand pushes its London presence to five restaurants.
Soup dumplings, wontons and fried rice are thought to be among the dishes heading to the development, though exact details of the restaurant remain under wraps and no opening date has been announced. What is confirmed is the address: the beerhouse beside Lightroom closed in May before the site was taken on by the dumpling chain.
What makes Din Tai Fung King’s Cross worth the queue
If you have stood outside one of the chain’s existing London restaurants on a wet Tuesday and decided the wait was entirely worth it, you will understand the logic of the expansion. Din Tai Fung was founded in 1958 and today operates 170 sites around the world, each built around the xiao long bao, the Shanghainese soup dumpling that has become one of the most imitated and least equalled dishes in global food culture.
The dumplings themselves are a study in precision. Each delicate wrapper is hand-folded at least 18 times, encasing a rich pork filling along with the hot, savour-forward broth that gives the dumpling its name. Variations run to crab, chicken and truffle, and the queues outside the doors of the current London sites suggest that the novelty has not worn thin for anyone who has tried them.
London currently holds four Din Tai Fung addresses: Canary Wharf, Covent Garden, Selfridges and Centre Point by Tottenham Court Road station. King’s Cross would be the fifth, and it would arrive into a neighbourhood that has spent the better part of a decade becoming one of the more interesting eating destinations north of the river.
A neighbourhood already stacked with serious restaurants
Lewis Cubitt Walk sits within striking distance of Coal Drops Yard, the restored Victorian gasworks complex that now houses Dishoom, Lina Stores and Barrafina, among others. For Din Tai Fung, the King’s Cross site places it squarely in that company, in a part of London where the architecture is as considered as the menus and where weekend footfall has grown steadily since the area’s regeneration gathered pace.
The beerhouse that previously occupied the Lewis Cubitt Walk unit drew a different crowd, the kind drawn by craft ale and a relaxed, cavernous room. Its closure in May left a space that, by the sounds of it, will now smell considerably more of star anise and steamed dough. The proximity to Lightroom, the large-scale digital art venue next door, brings its own footfall, visitors who have spent an hour inside an immersive exhibition and emerge wanting something restorative.
King’s Cross has a particular quality in the early evening, when the light catches the brickwork of the canal basin and the after-work crowd mixes with tourists arriving via St Pancras. A restaurant built around a dish that requires patience (queuing, waiting, the slow ritual of dipping and eating) fits the rhythm of a neighbourhood that rewards those willing to linger.
With no opening date yet confirmed and the chain described as still in talks, the precise timeline for Din Tai Fung King’s Cross remains open. But the direction of travel is clear enough: London’s appetite for the hand-folded, broth-filled dumpling shows no sign of cooling, and a fifth site in one of the city’s most visited postcodes suggests the chain is betting heavily on that appetite holding.