A modest little restaurant in Fremont, 19 Gold is a busy destination for Taiwanese food and bubble tea. The braised combination platters are a good place to start, featuring duck wings and pork intestines, but the main draw is the malatang bowls. They feature 19 different spices — hence the name of the restaurant — and you can order them with meat, seafood, vegetables, dumplings, and even udon noodles. The minced pork over rice or noodles is seemingly simple but spectacular. Unsurprisingly, 19 Gold is also a perfect place to sample the national dish of Taiwan: a beef noodle soup with a rich bone marrow base and a slightly spicy kick.

Enter through the main doors of the Asian Family Market at 130th and Aurora, and you’ll immediately be drawn to the chile-laden dishes at Spicy Style of Sichuan just to your right. The boiled dishes, like the water-boiled beef, are gorgeous to look at and intense to eat (you’ll need bowls of rice on the side). There’s an endless selection of entrees here, including dry pots with your choice of cured bacon, sizzling spicy squid, and various vegetables as well as more adventurous dishes like grilled black tripe, spicy trotters with mustard, stir-fried apple snail meat with chile, and chicken gizzards with pickled cowpeas.

Washington is one of only five US states where you’ll find the xiao long bao soup dumpling palace known as Din Tai Fung, which now has Seattle-area locations at University Village, Southcenter (Tukwila), Pacific Place, and Lincoln Square (Bellevue). This Taiwanese import is a great place to explore a diverse menu of dumpling, noodle, and rice dishes. It’s almost hypnotizing to watch through the window as workers make the chain’s famous soup dumplings, which are as delicate and delicious as everyone says, although the shrimp-and-pork shao mai are arguably even better.

The celebrated Sichuan chain from Southern California opened its first Seattle location in the Chinatown-International District in 2020, serving popular specialties such as toothpick lamb with cumin, mung bean jelly noodles drenched in chile sauce, and a cold spring onion chicken in pepper sauce. Boiled beef in hot sauce offers a double whammy of chiles and chile paste, and mapo tofu aficionados should definitely give Chengdu Taste’s version a try. If dining in, boboji is a fun cold dish comprised of chicken and vegetable skewers in either a red chile or green pepper sauce. This is also a great place to try maoxuewang. Sometimes called duck blood casserole, it actually has a wide variety of ingredients including fish, ham/spam, organ meats, and more in a spicy broth.

At Ten Seconds Yunnan, the flagship dish is Crossing the Bridge Noodles, available with a variety of broth flavors. Diners pour accompanying bowls of quail egg, fish, or meat (the beef brisket is a favorite), vegetables, tofu, herbs, and condiments into the broth, followed by the rice noodles — which cook for 10 seconds before the dish is ready to eat. While the Bellevue location has been around longer, the Chinatown–International District location is co-branded with Nai Brother Chinese Sauerkraut Fish, so diners can also enjoy big bowls of fish in hot-and-sour broth in the same setting.

Mike’s Noodle House may be the ultimate in Chinese comfort food. For a quick and inexpensive meal, it’s hard to beat this Chinatown–International District shop’s bowls of wontons, dumplings, and toothpick-thin noodles. The place gets especially crowded on weekends when diners start their day by choosing from a wide variety of congee bowls (including preserved egg, rock cod, and pork liver), paired with a youtiao (savory Chinese cruller).

One of the Chinatown–International District’s oldest and best-known restaurants, Tai Tung is as solid as ever. Many Seattle legends have dined at Tai Tung since it opened in 1935— you can sit in the Bruce Lee Memorial Booth where his cardboard cutout will watch while you eat his beloved beef with oyster sauce — and even international celebrities, like the late Anthony Bourdain, have visited the place. The extensive menu is full of classics, from chop suey to egg foo young to chow mein, which are especially fun to eat family-style.

It’s easy to overlook this sliver of a storefront in the Chinatown–International District, but let the sight of hanging meats draw you in, and you won’t be disappointed. The roasted duck has crackly skin, while the poached free-range chicken comes with a bright ginger-scallion sauce. With an advance order, the restaurant will even set up a whole pig to go for your special occasion.

Specializing in the Dongbei cuisine of northeastern China, this cozy little restaurant is tucked behind a laundromat in the University District. One of the specialties is guo bao rou: sweet-and-sour pork made from thin slices of meat coated in potato starch, twice-cooked, and then covered in a thick gingery sauce. Eggplant with peppers and potato is another typical Dongbei dish, as is anything featuring “sauerkraut” (pickled Chinese cabbage), such as the sauerkraut with plain boiled pork and tofu—in a broth that puckers the lips and yet is perfectly comforting.

Regent Bakery and Cafe, known for Asian-style cakes, pastries and cookies, is an Eastside favorite in Bellevue and Redmond. (There are plans to open in Issaquah.) You can stop by for pineapple buns, almond tuiles, walnut cookies and red bean mochi, but it’s best to order cakes (the mango mousse cake is especially popular) in advance. Mooncakes are available for the Mid-Autumn Festival, and the Redmond location also has sit-down (and takeout) service of Hong Kong/American-style Chinese food such as chow fun, salt and pepper pork chops, and honey-walnut prawns.

Master Bing serves up a northern Chinese street food treat right on “The Ave” in Seattle’s University District. Jianbing is a savory folded “crepe,” stuffed with a wide variety of fillings, often eaten with soy milk for breakfast but great any time of day as a snack. It typically includes a choice of protein, black bean paste, chile sauce, pickled mustard greens, green onions and cilantro—plus strips of fried cracker for additional texture. Spiced lamb and Peking duck are good choices, and you can pair your jianbing with hot and sour glass noodles to make it a meal.

Dinner service is available, but daytime dim sum is the real reason to go to Triumph Valley in Kent. (A second location is slated to open any day in Shoreline.) It’s best to arrive before opening time on weekends to avoid the long lines of people who agree that this dim sum is better than what’s currently available in Seattle and Bellevue. Order from a tablet on the table, with highlights that include crispy shrimp rice rolls, salted egg yolk mochi, and pan-fried dumplings with chive, shrimp, and pork. 

This Bellevue outpost of a Shanghai-based chain is one of the best hot pot restaurants in the metro area. In contrast to most other places, which feature a large shared pot, diners at Bellevue’s Dolar Shop get their own individual hot pots — still with the option of a split bowl containing two different broths. It’s the quality of the broths that puts Dolar above the others, whether it’s pork leg bone, mushroom, Szechuan hot and spicy, or tomato and oxtail. In addition, the options to add to the hot pot are impeccable, the sauce bar is forever customizable, and you can always count on a refreshing ice cream cone at the end of the meal.