Near the northern verge of the Upper West Side, which has always been an under-the-radar location for excellent Chinese restaurants, lies the 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, including one dish of smoked pork and smoked bamboo shoots that tastes like Texas barbecue.

Moon Kee is a magnificent recent addition to the cluster of Chinese restaurants on the far Upper West Side — almost a Chinatown at this point. Dim sum is an all-day specialty (though you won’t find the place open for breakfast), another is Hong Kong style clay pot cookery featuring ingredients like duck and sausage.

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).

The Korean neighborhood of Murray Hill (in Flushing, not Manhattan’s East Side) may not be the first place you’d look for a first-rate Cantonese restaurant, but this place has it all: dim sum, fried fish, noodles, great wonton soup (as the name suggests), and several premium lobster presentations. Don’t miss the deep-fried anchovies.

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.

For the last decade, the food of Yunnan has been increasingly appreciated here, centering on a handful of dishes featuring soft rice mixian noodles and lots of Southeast Asian flourishes, This newer branch of Deng Ji has the largest collection of big-deal rice noodle soups that the city has yet seen, most involving dramatic tableside presentations and add-in ingredients numbering 15 or more. This place is for the real Yunnan aficionado.

This Hell’s Kitchen newcomer is both fancy for Hell’s Kitchen, and fancy for a Sichuan restaurant, and lies at the bottom of the neighborhood’s 9th Avenue restaurant row, a few blocks south of 34th Street. A cocktail bar is the first thing you see when you enter, but the menu is filled with splendid, well-prepared dishes: cumin lamb, ma po tofu, and whole fish presentations.

This Sichuan mainstay moved a couple of blocks west and became much grander, seating over 300 with three full floors of dining rooms with a 1930s theme. The food remains every bit as good, if a bit pricier. Recommended dishes include pork dumplings in hot oil, luffa and dried scallops, ma po tofu, and especially braised beef in red soup.

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, 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 pork chunks and sauerkraut-like fermented cabbage.

This modest spot run by Becky Lin as an ode to her daughters features soups and dumplings and little else. A favorite is the unusual shrimp dumplings in a lime-chile sauce heaped with cilantro and scallions, giving the dumplings a Southeast Asian flavor. Taiwanese beef noodle soup is also a good bet.

Envelope-pushing Szechuan Mountain House expanded from Flushing to the East Village with a second-story St. Mark’s Place location. There are stellar versions of classics like 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.

Chef Tan is a mini chain with two branches in the NYC area, of which this is my favorite. It offers a cosmopolitan mix of Chinese cuisines, with a little each of Sichuan, Hunan, and Chinese American dishes, the perfect mix to please its customers. Don’t miss the fish head with diced red peppers or the eggplant, century egg, and green chiles smashed in a mortar from the Hunan portion of the menu.

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

Uncle Lou debuted late in 2021 and has drawn crowds since, showcasing Cantonese village cuisine from the middle of the last century with refined ingredients, including such dishes as homestyle Chenpi roast duck and beef sauteed with garlic chives.

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 menu 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.

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, hot soy milk, and hot and sour soup. It’s takeout only, so plan. to eat in the park at the bottom of the street.

Tolo is the latest thing on Chinatown’s far east side: A delightful wine bar offering glasses of vintage vino at discount prices, along with a menu of Chinese food. Does wine go well with Chinese food? Here it does, and the bill of fare encourages you to experiment with herb-sprinkled french fries, sweet and sour fish filet, oysters dribbled with chile oil, and plenty more mainly small dishes.

This is mainly Sichuan restaurant with Hunanese and Shanghainese flourishes. In addition to great soup dumplings from the latter, it offers food from the first two localities heavy with chiles in every form (try preserved duck egg with pickled chiles). Don’t worry, a glug of beer neutralizes the heat. And don’t miss the epic green-peppercorn fish stew.

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 classic that shouldn’t be missed.

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. It became famous for stellar versions of the cuisine’s classics and a long menu that includes lesser-seen options like spicy frog. Its liangfen dishes, a mung bean noodle, are also popular; as is a smoky, spicy green-stemmed cauliflower dish ( a cross between broccoli and cauliflower) that arrives sizzling in a wok.

This spot is the most recent and far flung of the Sunset Park banquet halls, offering dim sum in the morning until mid-afternoon. Yes, dim sum still cruises around on carts, and afterwards a seafood heavy menu kicks in, with plenty of pork, too. When you leave, the owner is likely to approach you and affably thank you for coming.

This carryout restaurant has been delighting Staten Islanders for nearly five decades 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.