Near the northern verge of the Upper West Side, which has always been an under-the-radar location for excellent Chinese restaurants, lies the agreeably, accurately, and alliteratively-named Happy Hot Hunan. Few restaurants serve such a wide range of Hunan specialties (quite different than Sichuan ones, and often spicier). Foods preserved by pickling, drying, and smoking provide unique flavors in Hunan food, including one dish of smoked pork with smoked bamboo shoots that tastes like Texas barbecue. Too much smoking? Nah!

We thought we’d lost this Flushing mainstay when it closed a few years ago, but then discovered there was another branch across the Queens border in Great Neck. It also features the food of Dongbei — the three provinces in northernmost China once known as Manchuria. Try the pork with sour cabbage, sweet and sour fish, and green-bean sheet jelly (mung bean noodles, pressed tofu, and cloud ear fungus with tahini in a sort of toss-it-yourself salad).

There’s no better prelude or conclusion to a Museum of Natural History visit or stroll in Central Park than this nominally Shanghai restaurant, where strong cocktails are part of the package. Though lion’s head meatballs, soup dumplings, West Lake beef soup, and other Shanghai regional delicacies are presented, the menu goes further afield with Sichuan, Cantonese (including lots of dim sum for convenient snacking), and even Teochew dishes.

This Shanghai restaurant in Bayside, Queens, serves the best soup dumplings in town. Smaller than usual, they’re thin skinned and bulging with a delicate gravy. With a fuller menu than its Flushing branch, it features a range of Shanghai specialties, including small plates, noodles, soups, and bigger feeds like braised pork shoulder, sweet and sour sea bass, and eel in hot oil.

When it moved to more luxurious premises down Prince Street in 2019, Nan Xiang Xiao Long Bao opened its new dining room to much fanfare. But carryout and delivery are still available from this place, owned by Tai Ma, that helped popularize Shanghai soup dumplings. The restaurant now makes them in a rainbow of colors and also offers a menu rich in other Shanghai specialties, from chicken in wine sauce to rice cake with mustard greens. (And there’s now an express location in Forest Hills.)

Street food takes center stage here in the form of the popular jian bing, a crepe-like sandwich. The restaurant offers nearly a dozen different kinds jian bing with fillings like spicy ramen, peking duck, and spiced beef. But the menu extends well beyond jian bing, offering roasted cold noodles, crispy beef patties, and a variety of bao. The restaurant is a takeout-only operation.

The lunchtime Sichuan mainstay of office workers from Yiming Wang and Xian Zhang moved a couple of blocks west recently and became much grander, seating over 300 with three full floors of seating options in dining room with a 1930s theme. The food remains every bit as good, if a bit pricier. Recommended dishes include pork dumplings in hot oil, loofah and dried scallops, ma po tofu, and especially braised beef in red soup.

As the city’s hulking Chinese banquet halls were emptying out under the strains of the pandemic and other economic challenges, making dim sum of a sophisticated sort harder to get, modern Hong Kong teahouse Hey Yuet stepped forward to fill the gap. It provides a wide range of pristine and modern dim sum, even offering backdrops for selfies that make it seem like you’re in one of the great banquet halls.

Named after Shorty Tang, the Taiwanese chef who introduced Sichuan food to Chinatown in the ‘60s, Tangy Noodle is a Chelsea storefront that sells some of his specialties and some newer concoctions, too. His cold sesame noodles, a simple dish with a mellow sauce supposedly invented or at least adapted by him, is still the thing to get, with noodles firmer than usual, but then the homemade wontons in chile sauce and spicy beef noodle soup are also well worth contemplating.

The Dongbei cuisine of China’s northeastern province — and that of northern China, including Shandong and Tianjin — is presented in more complete form at Auntie Guan’s than Manhattan has seen before. Consider the “green bean sheet jelly,” a smorgasbord of salad ingredients surrounding a heap of clear mung bean noodles; and pork with pickled cabbage, a casserole that seems almost German with its sauerkraut-like fermented cabbage.

West Villagers worried that this modest carryout Chinese spot was gone forever when it closed for a few months, but now it’s back and better than ever. All the classics are there in splendid form, including egg foo young, beef chow fun with or without gravy, and chow mein in all its lively guises. But over the years Sichuan, Hunan, Mandarin, and even Thai dishes have been added, and they’re quite good, too.

With a tea service that treats the beverage like a sacrament, and a 100-item menu that offers seemingly endless permutations of familiar dishes, Uluh is every inch a modern Chinese restaurant. It caters to a crowd that’s very sophisticated about its Chinese food. A large proportion of the menu highlights Sichuan, but there’s also a good proportion of northern Chinese, along with dim sum and other Cantonese flourishes. Then there are pig trotters in chile oil, Nanjing salted duck, and a lobster version of ma po tofu.

NYC is a town of superb Sichuan restaurants. Envelope-pushing Szechuan Mountain House expanded from Flushing to the East Village with a second-story St. Mark’s Place location, managed by Leo Ge. There are stellar versions of classics like ma po tofu and twice-cooked pork, but also find less ubiquitous fare. Every table will likely have the sliced pork belly with chile-garlic sauce, where pork hangs like laundry on a line.

The East Village has had a spate of stylish Chinese restaurants, and Hunan Slurp goes further than any other to create a sleek, artistic setting, covered in blonde wood planks, created by chef and owner Chao Wang. The Hunan rice noodles called mifen give the restaurant its theme, but the other options — like Hunan charcuterie including smoked pork and other meats — stand out just as prominently.

The gloriously chewy rice noodle rolls are the foremost order at Yan Liang’s Green Garden Village, like the versions stuffed with youtiao (fried dough), dried scallops, and dried shrimp. But this Cantonese restaurant also specializes in fresh seafood and expert charcuterie carved in the front window, including roast pig, roast baby pig, Hainanese chicken, cuttlefish, tripe, and three kinds of roast duck.

This tiny restaurant owned by Wendy Lian and her family serves some of the most heart-warming and delicious Henan food in Chinatown. Order the big tray of spicy chicken and ask for an extra order of noodles to toss in the chile-oil-spiked sauce. The noodles are wide and hand-pulled, with a hearty bite to them. Brisket mei fun is another don’t-miss dish, and don’t forget your greens or the garlicky cucumber appetizer.

Chiuchow (or Teochew) is a city in eastern Guangdong with its own dialect — and a population that has been dispersed throughout Southeast Asia and beyond. This results in the wonderful hybrid cuisine that you’ll find at Bo Ky, a restaurant serving the unique cuisine since 1986. Find Vietnamese and Cambodian soups, in addition to Cantonese, as well as a braised duck quite unlike the roast ducks found elsewhere in Chinatown.

Chinatown’s most stylish Hong Kong cafe covers all the bases when it comes to noodle and rice dishes from China’s southeast coast. From the port city of Xiamen comes a delightful stir-fried rice vermicelli rife with ham and other goodies. From Hong Kong itself arrive the steamed rice dishes called bo zai fan, plus British and American adapted snacks that run from condensed milk toast to spaghetti and meatballs. Spam aplenty, and how about a mug of Horlicks to wash everything down?

An offshoot of the first dollar dumpling stall on Allen Street, Fried Dumpling is a closet located on Mosco Street. As the generic name suggests, the menu is as bare bones as can be, currently offering only fried pork dumplings. Takeout only, eat in the park at the bottom of the street. Cash only.

Founded in 1938 and still owned by the Huang family, this Chinatown mainstay has a strong local following. Classic Chinese American fare dominates the menu. Whether seated upstairs or downstairs, dishes like chop suey, chow mein, and egg foo young are really quite delicious, with plenty of vegetables incorporated, making many of the antique dishes seem modern.

Yun Nan Flavour Garden is one of the city’s first Yunnan restaurants, an offshoot of a much smaller noodle shop farther north in Sunset Park specializing in mixian rice noodles. Crossing-the-bridge noodles (lamb or beef) are a provincial classic that shouldn’t be missed. Eat them and then Google the story behind the name.

New York’s rising appreciation for Sichuan food hit Sunset Park in 2018 in the form of Chuan Tian Xia, a restaurant bedecked with colorful masks owned by owners, Queenie Dong and Zee Zheng. It immediately became famous for stellar versions of the cuisine’s classics and a long menu that includes lesser-seen options like spicy frog. Its liangfen, a mung bean noodle, is popular; as is a smoky, spicy green-stemmed cauliflower dish ( a cross between broccoli and cauliflower) that arrives in a wok.

If you’re looking for Chinese restaurants in maritime Brooklyn, don’t neglect the massive number of them strung along 86th Street as it passes through Dyker Heights, Bensonhurst, and Bath Beach. Among them is super-Cantonese Farmers Restaurant from owner Jinxue Cai in a modest space but with a penchant for fresh seafood of arcane varieties. Its signature dish is lobster steamed in sticky rice. And don’t miss the deconstructed version of wonton noodle soup.

This carryout restaurant has been delighting Staten Islanders for nearly five decades in its somewhat obscure location in Manor Heights, just west of Todt Hill. The charcuterie often comes with thick sauce (the roast pork is a fave), but perhaps the best dish on the menu is Singapore curried noodles, which packs quite a wallop of heat. A highly recommended spot; eat nearby in one of the borough’s Greenbelt parks.