Why the best Chinese food might be outside Boston

Take Beijing Chinese Dining in Lexington, where nearly 1 in 10 inhabitants is of Chinese descent, according to 2010 census data. The restaurant opened a year and a half ago, and owner Paul Po ambitiously renovated the second-floor space. Light filters through in the afternoon. The elegant room, painted gray and cream and red, seems to float above the street below in a sort of glowing hush.

Po also brought chef Hue Zhang over from Beijing to run the kitchen. Though the menu sports the old American-Chinese standbys, Beijing Chinese Dining specializes in dishes from Zhang’s former home. The spaetzle and egg drop soup, difficult to find elsewhere, is reason enough to visit, a luscious blur of acid (tomatoes), silkiness (stirred-in egg), and toothsome carbs (those floating spaetzle). Dim sum is offered on the weekends.

Many of the cooks and servers at Beijing Chinese Dining commute 30 miles to Lexington from Quincy, which some call Chinatown South. (Almost 1 in 6 is Chinese.) Why Quincy? Chris Walker, a spokesman for Mayor Tom Koch, cites proximity to Chinatown plus benefits of its own. “It’s about the schools,” Walker says. “Also the parks and amenities.”

Here Kam Man Food, a supermarket the size of several Home Depots, offers possibly every Asian product currently in production, starting with a glass case of dried sea cucumbers that meets you when you step inside. Interested in a whole pig in the act of being barbecued? Check. A ginseng and herb purveyor that looks like a 19th-century apothecary? Check. A variety of bristlingly fresh fish, locally caught, that will never grace the meek ice of Whole Foods or Stop and Shop? Check.

And a stellar Cantonese place called South Garden sits next door. Let your eye slide right past the blotchy windows and mixed Yelp! reviews. (Brusque service translates to an unfair 3½-star rating.) The chow fun, arriving on a large platter and laced with flavorful beef, is enough for three. But the garlic chicken is the Destination Maker. It can be ordered as either a half or whole bird, which is flash-fried and comes buried under an addictive mountain of minced fried garlic. Try, just try, to stop eating this, as the waiter, with twinkling eye and gruff affect, makes sure to keep your water topped off. Take that, indiscriminate Yelp!

Sometimes opening farther afield is simply practical. Nadia Liu Spellman, owner of Dumpling Daughter in Weston, was born into Chinese culinary royalty, Boston-style. Her parents owned Sally Ling’s (named for her mother) in the ’80s, an ambitious, white tablecloth eatery next to legendary Jasper’s in the North End. At one point the couple owned eight restaurants, including one atop the Hyatt Regency on Memorial Drive.

After Spellman decided to get into the family business, for three frustrating years she scoured Cambridge for a location. She wanted high traffic. But then she would be handed, as she puts it, “a 60-page lease, with terms that were bad, tying you down for 10 years.” Then her husband suggested a location in Weston wedged between a bagel shop and supermarket.

Spellman grew up in Weston, and her father, who died in 2009, once dreamed of opening a restaurant there. Things suddenly felt just right. Now the airy, contemporary space is thronged with diners feasting on the comfort food she grew up eating. (The formula has been so successful, it allegedly led to imitators. Last year Spellman sued Millbury restaurant Dumpling Girl, started by former employees. The case was settled out of court; the other restaurant, now called Star Dumplings, has since made changes to its menu.) “Dumplings were my mac and cheese,” she says. As children, she and her sister, who has joined the business, staged dumpling-eating contests. And those wonderful dumplings are center stage here, surrounded by zeitgeist-y ramens and overflowing, artful rice bowls. A dish called Grandma’s Beijing meat sauce over spaghetti is seemingly scarfed down by all.

In 2013 that same Beijing grandma, near the end of her life, craved the knife-cut noodles of her youth. So Spellman took her to Gene’s Chinese Flatbread Cafe, then located in Chelmsford; it has since moved to Woburn and now has a location in Boston. The atmosphere could not be further from that at Dumpling Daughter. All devotion to aesthetics has been funneled into Gene’s deceptively simple, spectacular noodle combinations. When an order surfaces in the kitchen, the hand-pulling of noodles begins. They come topped with chile oil and cilantro. They also arrive in soup — floating in a lamb broth with tiny, long-stemmed mushrooms, the noodles are thumb-wide, slightly thick, with an abraded texture that soaks up the surrounding essence. It’s the sort of elemental eating experience that can echo through one’s mind for hours, days, decades.

And if we are lucky, it will have as long a run as C.K. Shanghai. Operating in Wellesley for more than a decade, the restaurant reminds us that although high-level Chinese cooking is increasingly common in the suburbs, it isn’t new. Spellman connection: Chef C.K. Sau was the executive chef of Sally Ling’s back in the ’80s. He has a mighty pedigree, including 10 years spent cooking in Italy. Around 2004, Sau sold his restaurant in Boston and planned to retire. He traveled for a year. He got bored, and Wellesley got lucky.

Sau’s daughter, Anna, says her father figured the restaurant would be a low-key project with which to occupy his later years. He never anticipated so many city fans hauling over the Mass. Pike and Route 16 to join locals in packing his new place. Anna Sau says, “When the food is unique, they come from all over.”

She says that Ming Tsai, who owns the celebrated Blue Ginger in Wellesley, so loved her father’s scallion pancakes that Tsai asked him to cook and freeze them for his own use. Those pancakes, paired with shredded beef and julienned vegetables, are perfect for splitting, even if you may secretly want to keep them all for yourself. The Sichuan spicy wontons, traced with peanut and chile heat, feature a pasta that evokes Bologna as much as Chengdu.

You can also opt for more of a blow-your-head-off take on Sichuan. For great fun, there’s Fuloon, in Malden and now Beverly, which offers up a tremendous platter of hot diced chicken in an atmosphere you could call Unfaux Bohemian, including wicker walls and an algae-choked fish tank and Singapore Slings.

But it’s Sichuan Gourmet that has the Chinese suburban formula down like no other. To start, owners Peter and Lijun Liu — “Unrelated, though maybe centuries ago,” they joke — inspected a map and decided to cover it. Why the suburbs? Because the Chinese people who make up most of their customer base have moved here for the schools. “Living for the next generation,” says Peter Liu.

Their business strategy — opening locations in Billerica, Framingham, Brookline, and Sharon — translates to a restaurant in striking distance for any Sichuan-committed inhabitant of Eastern Massachusetts.

On a recent Saturday afternoon in Framingham, their busiest location, not an empty table can be found. “People come from surrounding towns, from out of state, even from Beijing,” Peter Liu says, adding with a chuckle that they say it tastes better than home. The bowl of pickled vegetables that first arrives, gratis, manages just the right bite, tang, and crunch. It primes one’s palate to order — more likely over-order, which you won’t regret with food this tremendous.

Lijun Liu, in charge of recipes and all four kitchens, calls on a Sichuan repertoire numbering into the thousands. The ingredients, including the mouth-numbing hua jiao (Sichuan peppercorn), may be simple, but combining them in the right proportions, cutting them to the right size, cooking them swiftly, is nothing less than an art.

And the food tastes like art. Wonton with spicy chile sauce, dan dan noodles, Gangou dry fish fillets, double-cooked bacon, ma po tofu, smoky hot shredded chicken with cayenne. . . . With 133 items on the menu, there’s really no reason to stop. Happy new year, indeed.

More coverage:

Where to eat and what to order in Boston’s Chinatown

Ted Weesner can be reached at tedweesner@gmail.com.