For noodles with plenty of Sichuan peppercorns, check out spicy tingly lamb soup, or go for more inventive dishes like the so-called Beijing bolognese. The dumplings here come in four flavor options and are served steamed or fried — opt for the latter. Scallion pancakes, vegetable sides, and iced teas also available. Order online.

Atlas Kitchen is the most elegant of the new crop of Chinese restaurants appearing south of the Columbia University campus. The bilevel space is decorated with themed murals that inspired the restaurant’s name, and chef Kaiyuan Li cooks food from several regions, including Sichuan, Beijing, Shanghai, and Dongbei, with special focus on Hunan. A separate section of the menu presents Chinese-American classics. Order online.

This dry hot pot hailing from Chongqing stands up to any Chinese restaurant in town at a similar price. Here’s how it works: Step up to a lavish display of raw ingredients, including meat, seafood, vegetables, and poultry deposited in metal tubs. An attendant with a sense of humor, her baseball cap turned askew, will assemble the chosen ingredients, and send them to the kitchen to be stir-fried. Receive your finished bowl and traipse to the sidewalk seating area. Outdoor dining. Order online.

The original location of this full-on empire from restaurateur Jason Wang opened in Flushing. As its reputation grew, branches started popping up all over the city with its spicy, fragrant style of cooking from northwestern China, inflected with Middle Eastern spices. Try any of the hand-pulled noodles and the spicy cumin lamb burger — the meat is rich, the bread has a crunchy sear on the outside, and the bun is soft enough inside to soak up plenty of lamb juices. Order online.

Friendship Foods BBQ — a chain with locations in five states, including three in NYC — is a favorite of kids in its Flushing neighborhood, including high schoolers who might drop by for cumin-dusted kebabs and a hot pot. The theme of the restaurant is off-road vehicles and whimsical sculptures. While kebabs in the Xinjiang style are a major part of the menu, fried rice and noodle dishes are also available. Seafood and organ meats abound; beer can be had. Outdoor dining. Call for takeout and delivery.

Recently moved to more luxurious premises down Prince Street, Nan Xiang Xiao Long Bao opened its new dining room last November with 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 regional specialties, from chicken in wine sauce to rice cake with mustard greens. Order online for pickup or local delivery.

Of the half dozen food courts in Flushing, New World Mall had the best, located in the basement and approached by dramatically long escalators. Now 20 or so of those vendors have moved outside and lined up along Roosevelt Avenue. The collection of stalls varies, but most offer prepared noodles, dumplings, stir-fries, and charcuterie, many ready to go in carryout containers at bargain prices.

Boasting an obscure entranceway off the beaten path, Alley 41 is outfitted more like a dance club than the Sichuan restaurant it partly is. The name refers to owner Yao Hua’s childhood, when he lived in a “picturesque alley.” Enjoy all the Sichuan classics and all sorts of bar snacks and invented dishes, too, appearing on various separate menus. This place is loads of fun, with dishes like beef burrito (shown), mashed potatoes, and okra and peanut butter. Outdoor dining. Order online.

The advent of Uighur restaurants run by Uighurs, a persecuted minority in China, was big news a few months ago in Flushing, and this is the one still open. Feast on charcoal-grilled kebabs (shown), the lamb pilaf here called polo, the triangular turnovers called samsa, and pearl noodles — little farinaceous nuggets interspersed with beef and tomato, a tuck-in of marvelous proportions. The restaurant is run by Adil Nurdun and Arkin Ali. Outdoor dining. Call to order.

Open for 23 years under chef and owner Yu Te Lin, Main Street Imperial Taiwanese Gourmet is one of the best traditional Taiwanese restaurants in town. All the classics are found here, including stinky tofu, three-cup chicken, oyster omelet, and mochi-like ba wan or “Taiwanese meatball,” — meat tidbits embedded in gooey sweet potato starch (shown). Call for carryout. 

This neighborhood favorite in the shadow of the elevated LIRR tracks is wildly popular with the multiple national and cultural groups that inhabit Elmhurst. Simply everyone loves the pot stickers sold here, and lines form around lunch and in the late afternoons. Other offerings run to hand-pulled noodles in soups and congees. Outdoor dining. Call for takeout and local delivery.

This rollicking Elmhurst spot from chef Chih Shen Hsu showcases the Taiwanese cuisine in its myriad variations, including beef stew and tendon with wide rice noodles, and pork and pickled cabbage rice cake. For the young ’uns are modern dishes such as salt-and-pepper fried chicken nuggets and fried calamari; for the old folks, there’s a menu of Taiwanese classics like oyster omelet (shown) and stinky tofu. Order online.

The Dongbei cuisine of China’s northeastern province — and that of northern China, including Shandong and Tianjin — is presented in more complete form at the 14th Street Auntie Guan’s than Manhattan has seen before. Thrill to “green bean sheet jelly,” a smorgasbord of salad ingredients surrounding a heap of clear mung bean noodles (shown); and pork with pickled cabbage, a casserole that seems almost German with its sauerkraut-like fermented cabbage. Outdoor dining. Order online.

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 mapo 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 over a device like laundry on a line. Expect a wait during prime times, and bring a crew to finish huge portions. Outdoor dining. Order online.

The name here says it all: Trailing peppercorns, this brick-walled cafe flew into the East Village in early 2016. It sought to popularize the dry hot pot, by which any combination of ingredients can be selected to be stir-fried with plenty of peppercorns and other flavorings. The menu, from restaurateurs Amelie Kang and Meng Ai, offers a variety of meats loved in China. There’s an additional location in Midtown. Outdoor dining. Order online.

The East Village has had a spate of stylish Chinese restaurants, and Hunan Slurp perhaps goes harder than any other on creating a sleek, artistic setting, covered in blonde wood planks, which was created by chef and owner Chao Wang. The food focuses on Hunan. Rice noodles called mifen give the restaurant its theme, but the other options — like Hunan charcuterie and smoked pork — stand out just as much. Order online.

Glorious chewy rice noodle rolls are a triumph at Yan Liang’s Green Garden Village, like the one with youtiao (fried dough), dried scallop, and dried shrimp (shown). But this Cantonese restaurant also specializes in fresh seafood and expert charcuterie in a particularly impressive selection of roasted meats, including three kinds of roast duck, roast pig, and roasted baby pig. Order online.

Stunning cheung fun, or rice noodle rolls, come out hot and fresh from this tiny storefront on Elizabeth Street via Guangdong native and manager Windy Wu. Place an order and minutes later, an efficient cook will produce a freshly scraped rice roll that’s best paired with barbecue pork or dried shrimp, portioned judiciously enough so as not to distract from the main event: the soft, toothsome noodles. Call for takeout and local delivery.

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 (shown) and ask for one or two orders of noodles to toss in the garlicky sauce. They’re hand-pulled, with a hearty bite to them. More can always be ordered. Brisket mei fun are another don’t-miss dish. Order online.

Opened in the midst of the epidemic, Public Village offers a beguiling combination of food from Sichuan and Dongbei via co-owners Kiyomi Wang and Karen Song. It also cooks up things you might not expect to see in this neighborhood, including poached and pickled chicken feet, french fries dusted with Sichuan peppercorns, and “grill chilled noodle wrap,” a delightful new variation on jian bing, with a hot dog surprise inside, perfect picnic fare. Outdoor dining. Call for carryout and delivery.

Chinatown’s 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 (shown). From Hong Kong itself are the steamed rice dishes called bo zai fan, plus British and American adapted snacks that run from condensed milk toast to spaghetti and meatballs. How about a mug of Horlick’s to wash this stuff down? Outdoor dining. Call for carryout and delivery.

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. The rest of the menu is currently not available, but come for the wonderful dumplings. Takeout only.

The updated and slightly upscale Sichuan restaurant from Xian Zhang and Yiming Wang of China Cafe came as a surprise when it opened three years ago in Williamsburg, but it really hits the mark with dishes like mapo tofu (shown), three-pepper chicken, and sauteed duck with ginger, the latter served with steamed bao. The dim sum selection is particularly robust, much representing parts of China other than Sichuan. Outdoor dining. Order online.

This Taiwanese restaurant from owner Andy Wang on picturesque Doyers Street in Chinatown has become famous for the excellence and inexpensiveness of its menu, beginning with the first two items: pork chop over rice and chicken leg over rice. Both come highly spiced with pickled greens and a crumbled meat sauce, and devotees fight over which one is better. I vote for the pork chop, which is really several conjoined chops. Outdoor dining. Order online.

While the downstairs original, founded in 1938 and still owned by the Huang family, remains closed, its 15 Mott street-level counterpart, in place since 1976, thrives with a nifty outdoor cafe. Classic Chinese-American fare dominates the menu. Today, the food reads as remarkably healthy (high in vegetables, low in grease), and dishes like chop suey, chow mein, and egg foo young are really quite delicious. Outdoor dining. Order online.

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 are a provincial classic that shouldn’t be missed. Eat them and then google the story behind the name. Call for carryout and local delivery.

New York’s rising standards for Sichuan restaurants hit Sunset Park in 2018 in the form of Chuan Tian Xia, a restaurant bedecked with colorful mask murals owned by married couple 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 cauliflower that arrives at the table in a wok. Outdoor dining. Call for takeout and local delivery.

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 familiar and arcane varieties. Its signature dish is lobster steamed in sticky rice (shown). And don’t miss the deconstructed version of wonton noodle soup. Call for carryout and local delivery.