Long Island's best Chinese restaurants of 2024

Crossing-the-bridge rice noodles from Yunnan, China, is the latest craze to hit the scene. The Flushing, Queens, staple Deng Ji expanded to Levittown in early 2024. Despite the bustling crowd, the large dining room gives off a calming, serene warmth as it's designed to look like an outdoor space at a rural temple. Tables are spaced far apart and sectioned off, giving more privacy, and the room brims with hanging lanterns and bamboo plants. Even the modest rice noodle dishes boast at least a dozen toppings — spongy mushrooms, quail eggs, black fungus and chrysanthemum flower petals.

Eatery 19 is a charming mom-and-pop restaurant devoted to homestyle recipes from Taiwan. Don’t miss either of Taiwan’s most famous dishes. Braised beef noodle soup is rich with fat noodles, tender chunks of meat and tendon, and fresh and pickled greens; the broth ringing with star anise and cinnamon. Three-cup chicken (named for its use of similar amounts of rice wine, soy sauce and sesame oil) has a dark, sweet savor that contrasts with its garnish of fried Thai basil leaves. A Taiwanese dish that deserves to be more famous is the popcorn chicken, pieces of dark meat dredged in potato starch and then fried twice to achieve peak crunch. The Taiwanese have a tradition of "railroad bento" meals that are sold at train stations to be enjoyed on board. Eatery 19, fittingly located steps from the LIRR, sells two: one with a chicken leg, one with a pork chop. Both come with rice covered with ground meat, a soy-braised egg and a plump link of sweet Taiwanese pork sausage.

Upscale and serene, Jia boasts a mostly Cantonese menu that includes stir-fried lobster, steamed whole fish, Peking duck, plus sweet and sour pork. But those crystal shrimp dumplings, packed with shrimp and fresh bamboo shoots, are tinted pink and brushed with gold. Soup dumplings (a specialty of Shanghai) are handmade to order — evident in their gossamer but supple skins — and crowned with sweet-tart goji berries. Tea-smoked chicken is made with Bo Bo Farms heritage poultry; and seafood fried rice is made with lump crabmeat, jumbo shrimp, bay scallops and squid. The restaurant also has a standout cocktail menu. 

From the outside, Jiang Nan looks like an unassuming Chinese restaurant tucked into a Syosset strip mall. So it's astonishing to step through the doors and be greeted by a life-size peacock figurine, its white feathers cascading down an indoor tree, perched at the entrance of a stylish dining hall. Duck is the showpiece in a staggering menu of regional Chinese specialties at the first Long Island location of this rapidly expanding chain from downtown Flushing. A dish named "sautéed crab meat" becomes a tableside spectacle when a server opens two ramekins shaped like crabs and pours a soupy yellow crab sauce onto a dome of white rice, tops it with vinegar and then mixes it at the table until it becomes the texture of Italian risotto (but with an intense seafood punch). 

As soon as you walk into Kitchen Melody, you sense an air of refinement. The tiny dining room is bright but muted — sky blue walls and white woodwork, celadon china, plush chairs upholstered in gray and plum, tabletops of glossy marble. The menu is charming, too: a mere two pages of Chinese dishes, most of them from Sichuan province. You can’t (and shouldn't) miss the first item on the menu, fresh quarry fillet with pickled mustard soup: Afloat in a shallow bowl nearly 2 feet across are fillets, boneless and firm, in a savory, slightly sour broth that is garnished with pickled mustard greens, delicate white mushrooms, wedges of tiny cucumbers, fresh cilantro and, depending on how spicy you like it, brilliant red chilies. Other famous Sichuan mains splendidly rendered here are eggplant with minced meat (pork) and garlic sauce, and "ants climbing up a tree," minced pork clinging to gelatinous bean-thread noodles. 

New Fu Run serves the cuisine of Dongbei, China's northeastern-most region. Treat your taste buds to a cold starter of country-style beef shank with cucumber, stew cabbage (sauerkraut) with pork and vermicelli served in a gleaming soup tureen, triple delight vegetables (a salty-sweet stir fry of potatoes, eggplant and red and green peppers) and the signature dish — cumin lamb chop, a rack of lamb ribs that hasn't been seasoned so much as to be overwhelmed by cumin. Peking duck comes with all the accouterments.

When it opened in 2021, O Mandarin represented a giant leap forward for Long Island’s Chinese restaurant culture. The sprawling, sumptuously appointed dining rooms, refined yet authentic dishes and fine-dining prices were worlds away from the local takeout. The presentations are designed to impress: a ziggurat of wok-braised shrimp crowned with microgreens, succulent jasmine-tea-smoked duck reposing on a bed of ruffled shrimp chips, a tremblingly tender whole pork shank cradled in a stop-sign-sized lotus leaf. And, if you have room at the end of your meal, order the Emperor’s Eight Treasures, comprising eight sweets with recipes dating to the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) presented in a black-and-red lacquered box. This is fine-dining Chinese with fine-dining prices.

Located in the old Park City Diner, the vast space is split into three sections of four-tops, lazy Susans and a private party room. The huge menu boasts wonton and egg drop soups, egg rolls, spare ribs, egg foo young, chow mein, moo shu pork and General Tso’s chicken. Authentic Cantonese dim sum includes pork shumai, crystal shrimp dumplings, pan-fried leek dumplings, turnip cake, steamed rice noodles and sticky rice in lotus leaves. The Cantonese menu also features winter melon soup, sautéed snow pea leaves with garlic, crispy fried chicken with garlic, shrimp with Chinese broccoli, shredded pork with Chinese celery and casseroles of lamb and bean thread, and preserved duck and taro. About half of it is devoted to seafood dishes such as salt-and-pepper shrimp, sliced conch and squid with scallions, sauteed lobster with salty egg yolk and steamed whole sea bass. The three-tiered fish tank displays lobster, shrimp and king and Dungeness crab. Dim sum is served from carts on the weekends from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

There are so many real Sichuan restaurants on Long Island, intrepid diners have a good idea of what regional specialties they'll find on the menu, among them: mapo tofu, wontons in chili oil, dandan noodles and braised or stewed fish. Sichuan Garden excels in all of them. The mapo tofu, with big, fluffy tofu cubes lightly veiled in a sauce of enviable clarity, is a standout. Stewed fish is an enormous bowl filled to the brim with an opaque broth, soured with pickled vegetables and strewed with Sichuan green peppercorns, that barely conceals fat shards of tender fish. For a mellow counterpoint to all the spice, order the yam noodles with sliced cabbage. 

No noodles are more famous than the hand-pulled ones called lamian, the specialty of the city of Lanzhou in the province of Gansu. A restaurant specializing in lamian will employ a chef who makes it throughout the day. At Splendid Noodle, diners are afforded a view of the kitchen, where the noodlemaker plies his craft: He folds, twists and stretches a salami-thick rope of dough to develop a sinewy, elastic texture. Served in a bowl of soup, the noodles have the uncanny uniformity of boxed spaghetti. And the cold noodles are superb as well; smothered with savory minced pork, they are generously garnished with cilantro and cucumber to cut the richness and heat.