Savor Scout › Food guides › Chinese food
How to find good Chinese food
There is no such thing as Chinese food in the sense the phrase is usually used. There are at least eight major regional cuisines that differ from each other roughly as much as Italian differs from Swedish, and the most useful thing you can do is learn which one you want.
What separates a good one from a bad one
- A regional identity, stated — Sichuan, Hunan, Cantonese, Shanghainese, Dongbei, Xinjiang, Fujianese. A restaurant that names its region is cooking something specific. One that offers all of it is cooking a takeout menu.
- Two menus, or a second page — Common and worth asking about. Many restaurants run a translated regional menu alongside the American-Chinese one, and it is frequently where the good food is.
- Wok hei — The smoky char of a properly hot wok, unmistakable in fried rice, chow fun and stir-fried greens. Underpowered burners cannot produce it.
- Vegetables cooked with attention — Stir-fried greens with garlic is the cheapest thing on many menus and one of the best tests of the kitchen.
- Numbing, not just hot — For Sichuan food specifically. Real Sichuan peppercorn produces a tingling numbness distinct from chilli heat. Its absence means the kitchen is cooking Sichuan-style rather than Sichuan.
What to order
- Sichuan — Mapo tofu, dan dan mian, shuizhu fish, dry-fried green beans. Numbing and hot, and far more varied than its reputation.
- Cantonese — Dim sum, roast meats, steamed fish, clay pots. The most restrained and technically demanding of the major cuisines.
- Hunan — Hotter than Sichuan and without the numbing. Smoked and cured meats, pickled chillies.
- Shanghainese — Xiao long bao, red-braised pork, drunken chicken. Sweeter and richer, soy and sugar forward.
- Dongbei / Northeastern — Wheat rather than rice, cumin lamb, dumplings, pickled cabbage. Hearty and increasingly common in American cities.
- Xinjiang — Uyghur cooking — hand-pulled laghman, cumin lamb skewers, big plate chicken. Central Asian rather than East Asian in character.
- American Chinese — General Tso's, crab rangoon, chop suey. A genuine and historically significant American regional cuisine. Judge it on its own terms rather than as a failed imitation.
How Savor Scout looks for it
Chinese searches key off regional names first. Searching for Sichuan food returns kitchens whose menus and reviews use Sichuan vocabulary rather than the highest-rated restaurant with the word Chinese on the sign, and mentions of a separate or translated menu are treated as a strong positive signal.
Looking in a particular city?
Each of these opens Savor Scout with the location already set, so you can say what you want and it searches from there. It covers 1,000 US cities in total — these are simply the largest.
- New York, NY
- Los Angeles, CA
- Chicago, IL
- Houston, TX
- Philadelphia, PA
- Phoenix, AZ
- San Antonio, TX
- San Diego, CA
- Dallas, TX
- San Jose, CA
- Austin, TX
- Indianapolis, IN
- Jacksonville, FL
- San Francisco, CA
- Columbus, OH
- Charlotte, NC
- Fort Worth, TX
- Detroit, MI
- El Paso, TX
- Memphis, TN
- Seattle, WA
- Denver, CO
- Washington, DC
- Boston, MA
- Nashville, TN
- Baltimore, MD
- Oklahoma City, OK
- Louisville, KY
- Portland, OR
- Las Vegas, NV
- Milwaukee, WI
- Albuquerque, NM
- Tucson, AZ
- Fresno, CA
- Sacramento, CA
- Long Beach, CA
- Kansas City, MO
- Mesa, AZ
- Virginia Beach, VA
- Atlanta, GA
- Colorado Springs, CO
- Omaha, NE
- Raleigh, NC
- Miami, FL
- Oakland, CA
- Minneapolis, MN
- Tulsa, OK
- Cleveland, OH
- Wichita, KS
- Arlington, TX
- New Orleans, LA
- Bakersfield, CA
- Tampa, FL
- Honolulu, HI
- Aurora, CO
- Anaheim, CA
- Santa Ana, CA
- St. Louis, MO
- Riverside, CA
- Corpus Christi, TX
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When you might want this
- Where to eat with a big group
- Where to eat on a Sunday night
- Where to eat late at night
- Where to eat when half the group is vegetarian