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.

Fine dining Hell’s Kitchen newcomer Yingtao from first time restaurateur Bolun Yao covers many regional Chinese bases with its menu, including dishes from Shanghai, Chengdu, and Guangzhou, but also Xi’an, where his grandma is from. The 10-course, $165 tasting menu includes pipa duck, served with pumpkin bao, and a creative variation on a famous bean curd dish poetically called “memory of mapo.”

This Beijing-based hot pot chain has been in Flushing for five years and remains loads of fun, especially for groups. It boasts one of the largest collections of ingredients than nearly any other hot pot in town, including seafood, vegetables, mushrooms, well-marbles meats, dumplings, and tofu. Pick your broth combinations and assemble your dipping sauces at the sideboard. Even lining up to get in is fun — there are snacks, games, and manicure services, among other attractions — as you wait to be seated on busy weekend afternoons.

For the last decade, more Yunnan restaurants have opened in the city, 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.

Unexpectedly located right across the street from the Port Authority on the fringes of the burgeoning Hell’s Kitchen Chinese restaurant scene, Sky Pavilion is quite simply one of the city’s best Sichuan restaurants. The dining room is strictly utilitarian, but the menu is lush with dishes like braised whole fish with ground pork, freshly made tofu pudding veined with chile oil, and Zigong-style spicy rabbit.

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.

With a formal tea service and a 100-item menu that offers seemingly endless permutations of familiar dishes, Uluh is every inch a modern Chinese restaurant. 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: pig trotters in chile oil, Nanjing salted duck, and a lobster ma po tofu are all good.

This ambitious new restaurant — anomalously located deep in the Lower East Side — centers on the cuisine of Ningbo, where hunks of fish are smoked and lacquered with sauces, soup dumplings are shaped like nuclear reactor towers, and taro root transformed into a thick satisfying soup dotted with pork cracklings. Under chef Xing Zhong Qiu, the elegant dining room is filled with good smells, and vegetables like bottle gourd and winter melon are imbued with flavor and transformed into rich dishes. The wine list is mainly French.

Bowery was once lined with Chinese-language movie theaters, and this younger sibling of Potluck Club cleaves to the same show biz theme, complete with a box office in front, movie-lobby feel to the premises, and dramatic seating in pools of light. The brief menu runs to transformed Chinese American food — such dishes as you tiao shot with black olives, salt and pepper cuttlefish, and lobster sticky rice.

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.

Tolo is 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.

Far downtown on Pearl Street, this hotel dining room is an offshoot of August Gatherings, and both restaurants seek to elevate Cantonese cuisine to its highest level yet. Expect lots of abalone, sea cucumber, truffles, duck, whole fish, Berkshire pork, Dungeness crab, organic mushrooms, and steak. There are six preparations of whole fish alone, running from purely Cantonese (with scallion oil) to wildly creative (the one with tangerine peel).

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 sprouting cauliflower dish that arrives sizzling in a wok.

Also known as New Phoenix Seafood Restaurant, 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.