Long Island's best Chinese restaurants of 2024

Deng Ji has two locations in Flushing, Queens, and opened its largest, most extravagant outpost in a strip mall near Tri-County Bazaar flea market earlier this year. 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 is brimming with hanging lanterns and bamboo plants. Browsing the intimidating menu, non-Mandarin speakers will likely end up pointing to one of the many photographs with their desired combination of ingredients. (The menu now also has English in smaller type.) 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 Long Island’s only 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. Eatery 19’s 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. Other Taiwanese specialties include oyster pancakes, stinky tofu (not a value judgment, just a descriptor) and pork intestines with duck blood. The Taiwanese have a tradition of "railroad bento" meals that are sold at train stations to be enjoyed on board. Eatery 19, fittingly located within steps of 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.

If you need proof that Chinese cuisine is taking a great leap forward on Long Island, look no further than Jia, where culinary artistry, minimalist design and menu prices are more in line with fine dining. And why shouldn’t it be? Jia's mostly Cantonese menu will seem much more familiar to Americans since it is Cantonese cuisine that forms the basis of so much Chinese American food. Here are the dumplings that won our hearts, the stir-fried lobster, the steamed whole fish, the Peking duck, the 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. 

From the outside, the new 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. Among the noodle soups are sauteed tomato and egg, minced pork with pickled cowpeas and sliced beef. Starters include diced rabbit with peanuts and chili sauce, spicy beef jerky and the enigmatic house sweet Jell-O.

When Fu Run opened in Flushing in 2005, it was one of the first restaurants in New York to serve the cuisine of Dongbei, China's northeastern-most region. That restaurant closed, but its elegant offshoot, New Fu Run, has been serving the same menu in Great Neck since 2017. Dongbei cooking tends to be earthier than Cantonese, less incendiary than Sichuan. 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.

It took Peter Liu more than two years to transform the former Mio Posto into an opulent homage to Chinese culture. Much of the material comes straight from China — reclaimed bricks and tiles, a replica of a Tang-dynasty temple that mimics its own reflection in water — and the food, courtesy of James Beard Foundation Award semifinalist chef Eric Gao, is as grand as the décor. 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 "American 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, sautéed 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. 

By now 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. Stew fish is an enormous bowl filled to the brim with an opaque broth, soured with pickled vegetables and strewed with green Sichuan 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 them 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.