New York City / Chinese
Best Chinese Restaurants
in NYC
Peking duck, Cantonese banquet rooms, Sichuan, and the Flushing and Sunset Park counters that beat all of it on price.
Two lunch windows run on weekdays — Cafe China from 11:30am and Birds of a Feather from noon.
- 18 verified rooms
- whole duck from $79
- lunch from $14
- 5 cash-only spots
The short version
- Best Peking duckPeking Duck House — a whole bird for $79 in Chinatown, $88 for the same one in Midtown.
- Best valueBirds of a Feather — ma po tofu is $14 at lunch and $20 at dinner. Same kitchen, same dish.
- Best soup dumplingsNan Xiang in Flushing, walk-in only, open from 8am. Go at 10:30 and skip the wait.
- Best dim sumEast Harbor in Sunset Park — real carts, daily, but they stop by 2pm.
- Bring cashNoodletown, Joe’s Shanghai, Shu Jiao Fu Zhou, White Bear and Yun Nan Flavour Garden take no cards.
The best Chinese restaurants in NYC right now are Peking Duck House for a whole duck at $79, Cafe China and Birds of a Feather for Sichuan, Nan Xiang for soup dumplings, and East Harbor Seafood Palace for the last real pushcart dim sum in the city. The honest version of this list is that Manhattan Chinatown holds the old Cantonese institutions, the banquet halls and the duck rooms, while Flushing and Sunset Park hold the deeper, cheaper, more current regional cooking — and close earlier for it. We have grouped this guide by what you actually want to eat, flagged every cash-only counter, and printed the lunch windows where the same dish costs six dollars less. Prices below came off the restaurants’ own menus in August 2026.
At a glance
What to order at each, and when the kitchen is actually open. Tap a number on the map to place it.
| Restaurant | What to order | Days | Hours | $ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Peking Duck House | Whole duck $79; prix fixe from $51pp | Daily | 11:30am–10:30pm | $$$ |
| Decoy | $115pp whole-duck prix fixe | Daily | from 5pm | $$$ |
| Hwa Yuan Szechuan | Duck in courses; the original sesame noodles | Daily | 12–10pm | $$$ |
| Wu’s Wonton King | BYOB banquet room; roast suckling pig to order | Daily | all day | $$$ |
| Great N.Y. Noodletown | Salt-baked shrimp, roast pork; cash only | Daily | 9am–10pm/11pm | $$$ |
| Congee Village | Lobster congee, clay-pot rice | Daily | 11am–10/11pm | $$$ |
| Golden Unicorn | Cart dim sum (weekends only) | Sat–Sun | carts, 9am–2pm | $$$ |
| Cafe China | Lunch bento $15–$18; ma po tofu $19 | Mon–Fri | 11:30am–3pm | $$$ |
| Birds of a Feather | Lunch prices, free rice; tea smoked duck $25 | Mon–Fri | 12–4:30pm | $$$ |
| Hunan Slurp | Hunan rice noodles (mi fen) | Daily | 12–2pm, 5–9pm | $$$ |
| Joe’s Shanghai | Soup dumplings $15.95–$17.95 for eight | Daily | 11am–11pm | $$$ |
| Nan Xiang Xiao Long Bao | Xiao long bao; mala beef version new in 2026 | Daily | 8am–late | $$$ |
| Shu Jiao Fu Zhou | Dumplings and peanut noodles, absurdly cheap | Daily | counter | $$$ |
| Dun Huang | Hand-pulled Lanzhou beef noodle soup | Daily | 11am–10pm | $$$ |
| Szechuan Mountain House | Boiled fish, dry pots, ma po tofu | Daily | 11am–11pm/12am | $$$ |
| White Bear | #6 — ten wontons in chili oil | Daily | 10am–7pm | $$$ |
| East Harbor Seafood Palace | Cart dim sum daily; ~$60 for 12 plates for four | Daily | carts 9am–2pm | $$$ |
| Yun Nan Flavour Garden | Crossing-the-bridge rice noodles | Daily | 9am–9pm | $$$ |
Map: where these 18 spots are
Chinatown and the Lower East Side cluster tight; Flushing and Sunset Park are the trip, and both are worth it.
Pins are numbered to match the table above – tap any pin for the detail and directions.
Best Peking duck in NYC
Three rooms, three very different prices for the same bird. Also see our best Chinatown restaurants guide.
Peking Duck House
The verdict: the best duck-per-dollar in Manhattan, and the price gap between its own two branches is the single most useful fact on this page. The whole Peking duck is $79 at 28 Mott Street and $88 for the identical bird at the Midtown East branch. Same restaurant, same duck, nine dollars for the postcode. There are prix fixes too — $51 per person built around a whole duck with a four-person minimum, or $59 per person with a two-person minimum. The honest caveat: the dining room is dated and the service is brisk to the point of blunt. You are booking a duck, not an evening. It does take reservations, which is still unusual down here.
Decoy
The duck arrives with house-made pickles, Decoy chips, shots of duck consomme, house pancakes and both hoisin and cranberry — and it costs $115 a head before you have ordered a drink. Only whole ducks are served, so this is a two-person minimum in practice; parties of eight and up can book a five-course version at $150. The honest verdict: this is the most expensive duck on the list by a distance and you are paying for the room and the service, not for more bird. Go here instead if the duck is the point rather than the date: Peking Duck House will carve you a whole one for $79.
Hwa Yuan Szechuan
The 1960s Hwa Yuan is the restaurant credited with introducing New York to cold sesame noodles, and the sesame noodles are still the order that connects you to that. The duck comes in courses in a two-floor room built for big round tables. The honest caveat, and it is specific: multiple diners this spring have flagged the check — a separate charge of roughly $25 for the second duck course, and suggested tips calculated on the post-tax total. The restaurant does not publish duck prices on its own site, so ask what the full service costs before you order it. Two different listings give conflicting closing times, so call before booking anything late.
hwayuannyc.com · See our best Chinatown restaurants
Cantonese classics and dim sum
The old institutions, the banquet halls and the roast-meat counters. More in our best seafood restaurants in NYC.
Wu’s Wonton King
The local move: bring your own wine, book eight people, and phone ahead for the whole roast suckling pig. That combination is the entire reason this room exists and why it keeps showing up on BYOB lists. Beer and wine are sold on site too if you turn up empty-handed. For a walk-in two-top the move is the roast duck and the family-style wonton soup. The honest caveat: this is a banquet room, not a date spot. Two people ordering two dishes will feel like they missed the point, and the restaurant’s own pages list two different sets of opening hours — call.
wuswontonking.com · See our BYOB restaurants in NYC
Great N.Y. Noodletown
Read this before you plan a night around it: the 4am legend is dead. Noodletown’s own posted hours now close at 10pm Sunday to Thursday and 11pm Friday and Saturday. Every guide still calling it a post-midnight Chinatown institution is copying a decade-old article. What is still true: salt-baked shrimp and barbecued roast pork are as good as they have ever been, soft-shell crab is worth chasing in season, it is cash only by the restaurant’s own statement, and there are no reservations. The local move: come at 9pm rather than 1am, order the salt-baked shrimp and the char siu over rice, bring bills.
greatnewyorknoodletown.com · See our best late-night food in NYC
Congee Village
House-made congee is the reason, and the lobster porridge is the table order — the clay-pot rice is the other one. There is a full bar, which on the Lower East Side means this room absorbs birthdays and large groups better than anywhere else in walking distance, and it takes reservations. The honest caveat: despite the bar, there is no happy hour and no drink specials here. The value is plate-for-plate rather than a discounted window — for that, the Lower East Side happy hour guide is a block away in either direction. There is a second, quieter branch in Flushing.
Golden Unicorn
The honest caveat is the whole recommendation: the pushcarts came back after the pandemic, but they run weekends and holidays only. Turn up on a Wednesday and dim sum here is a menu, not a parade. If you want the trolleys, that means Saturday or Sunday, which is also when the ticket line downstairs is longest — you take a number and wait to be called, no reservations. Three floors, elevator access, genuinely wheelchair accessible, which is rarer in Chinatown than it should be. BYOB is permitted with a service fee they do not publish, so ask first.
goldenunicornrestaurant.com · Full profile on Happy Hour NYC
Sichuan and Hunan
Where the weekday lunch windows are, and where the real heat lives. See also best hot pot in NYC.
Cafe China On now
The first Chinese restaurant in New York to win a Michelin star, held from 2013 through 2019 — and it does not hold one now, which is the kind of thing other guides quietly leave off. The cooking is still the argument: ma po tofu $19, dan dan noodles $12, Chungking spicy chicken $25. The local move: the weekday lunch, 11:30am to 3pm, puts bento boxes at $15 to $18 with rice, a side and a dim sum item — the cheapest way into serious Sichuan cooking in Midtown. The honest caveat: the star is gone, and it is a Midtown room at Midtown prices after 3pm.
cafechina.nyc · See our best lunch in NYC
Birds of a Feather On now
The discount is real and you can check it yourself: ma po tofu is $14 on the lunch menu and $20 at dinner, and every lunch entree comes with free white rice. The window runs Monday to Friday noon to 4:30pm, and from 11am at weekends. Same owners as Cafe China, same kitchen discipline, in a Williamsburg room that photographs better than it needs to. Order the tea smoked duck at $25. The honest caveat: after 4:30pm this is a Williamsburg restaurant at Williamsburg prices — dan dan noodles $14, Chungking chicken $28, walnut shrimp $38. The lunch window is where the value actually lives.
Hunan Slurp
Hunan cooking is not Sichuan cooking, and this is one of very few places in Manhattan that lets you taste the difference: hotter, sourer, far less of the numbing peppercorn. The rice noodles in bone broth are the dish the place is named for, and the dish to order. The honest caveat catches people out constantly: the kitchen shuts between 2pm and 5pm every day. Turn up at 3pm and you are eating somewhere else. Reservations are taken online or by phone, and the room is small enough that on a Friday you will want one.
hunanslurp.com · See our East Village happy hours
Soup dumplings, wontons and hand-pulled noodles
The carb section. Deeper on this in our best dumplings in NYC guide.
Joe’s Shanghai
Eight crab-and-pork soup dumplings for $17.95, or $15.95 for plain pork, at communal round tables you will be sharing with strangers. The honest caveat is the bill, not the food: it is cash only — there are ATMs at the entrance for a reason — and diners consistently report an automatic 18% service charge added to the check. Between the two, the total lands meaningfully above what the menu implies, so bring more cash than you planned. The local move: the Chinatown flagship at 46 Bowery is the one; the Midtown sibling on East 48th is a different room with a different feel.
Nan Xiang Xiao Long Bao
The soup dumplings that made Flushing a destination, now in a slick suite inside One Fulton Square rather than the 2006 storefront people remember. Pork is the baseline; crab-and-pork and truffle are the upsells, and a spicy mala beef version landed in January. The local move: it opens at 8am and it is walk-in only — a 10:30am arrival gets you seated instantly, while lunch and dinner both carry a real wait. The honest caveat: this is a ten-location East Coast operation now, not a neighbourhood secret. The dumplings hold up. The romance does not.
Shu Jiao Fu Zhou
Fujianese, not Shanghainese, and that distinction is the whole point: Fuzhou-style dumplings, wheat noodles in peanut sauce, fish-ball soup. It is cash only, there is almost nowhere to sit, and there is no website and no reservations. On price: the numbers that circulate — $3.50 for a plate of pork and chive dumplings, $3 for peanut noodles — come from a 2022 review and have almost certainly moved. Treat it as still-absurdly-cheap rather than as today’s number. The honest caveat: the current address is 295 Grand Street. An older Eldridge Street address is still floating around on aggregator sites and it will send you to the wrong block.
See our best dumplings in NYC
Flushing and Sunset Park: worth the trip
The reason people who care about Chinese food leave Manhattan. Pair with Flushing happy hours.
Dun Huang
Lanzhou style, from Gansu in the northwest: hand-pulled wheat noodles dropped to order into a clear broth the kitchen says carries more than twenty spices, and you choose the width. Also worth the table: da pan ji, the monstrous plate chicken, and braised lamb shoulder. There is an all-you-can-eat noodle dinner for two advertised at $48 or $58 with appetizers and dessert. The honest caveat: it is a small chain with multiple NYC branches, not a Sunset Park secret. The noodles are still pulled in front of you, but you are not discovering anything.
dhnoodles.com · See our best Asian restaurants in NYC
Szechuan Mountain House
The Flushing original opened in 2016 and the group now has rooms in the East Village, Los Angeles and Boston, which is either reassuring or a warning depending on your temperament. The local move: order the boiled fish in chili broth and a dry pot and ignore the more theatrical presentations, which are there for the camera. It is in the same One Fulton Square building as Nan Xiang — suite G03 rather than 104 — so a dumpling-then-Sichuan double is a thirty-second walk. Bookable on Resy for both the Flushing and Manhattan rooms, which most of this section is not.
White Bear
You order by number here, and the number is 6: ten pork wontons under chili oil, scallion and pickled vegetable. Almost everyone orders it and almost nothing else, and they are right to. It is a few minutes’ walk from the 7 train at Main Street. The honest caveat, twice over: cash only, and it shuts at 7pm, which is early by Flushing standards. This is a lunch or an early-dinner stop, and there is effectively nowhere to sit — a bare counter with a couple of stools. Plan to eat standing up or walking.
See our best cheap eats in NYC
East Harbor Seafood Palace
One of the last real pushcart rooms left in New York, and unlike Golden Unicorn it runs the trolleys daily rather than only at weekends. A banquet-scale space with white tablecloths and a wedding-hall footprint, in Sunset Park. Roughly $60 buys twelve dim sum plates for four people. The honest caveat, and it decides the trip: dim sum service winds down around 2pm. Arrive at 1:30 on a Sunday and the carts are picking over what is left. This is a before-noon plan or it is not worth the ride. Weekdays are calm; weekends are when the carts are fullest and the wait is longest.
guide.michelin.com · See our best seafood restaurants in NYC
Yun Nan Flavour Garden
Yunnan cooking, which means rice noodles rather than wheat and a menu that barely overlaps with anything you have eaten at a Cantonese-American counter. The order is crossing-the-bridge noodles: raw beef or lamb, vegetables and rice noodles dropped into boiling chicken broth at your table. Rice cakes, broth-less noodles and dumplings in sweet-and-sour broth are the follow-ups. The owners are from Kunming. The honest caveat: cash only, no website, no reservations, and it closes at 9pm. Bring bills and do not build a late dinner around it.
See our best cheap eats in NYC
Chinese food in NYC: FAQ
Where is the best Peking duck in NYC?
Peking Duck House in Chinatown, at $79 for a whole duck carved tableside – and notably $88 for the identical bird at its own Midtown East branch. Decoy in the West Village serves a whole-duck prix fixe at $115 per person, which buys a nicer room rather than more duck. Hwa Yuan serves its duck in courses but publishes no price.
Do I need to order Peking duck in advance in NYC?
Less often than the internet claims. Peking Duck House sells whole duck a la carte with no stated pre-order requirement; only its $530 to $680 banquet menus need advance notice. Decoy serves whole ducks only and recommends a reservation. The dish that genuinely needs a phone call ahead is the whole roast suckling pig at Wu’s Wonton King.
Which NYC Chinese restaurants are cash only?
Great N.Y. Noodletown states it on its own site, and Joe’s Shanghai, Shu Jiao Fu Zhou, White Bear in Flushing and Yun Nan Flavour Garden in Sunset Park are all cash only too. Joe’s Shanghai also adds an automatic 18% service charge, so budget above the menu price.
Is Flushing better than Manhattan Chinatown?
For regional cooking, yes – Flushing and Sunset Park are deeper, cheaper and more current, and that is where the Sichuan, Yunnan, Lanzhou and Fujianese specialists are. Manhattan Chinatown still holds the great Cantonese institutions, the banquet rooms and the Peking duck. The trade-off is hours: the outer-borough counters close early, several by 7pm.
Where can I get cart dim sum in NYC?
East Harbor Seafood Palace in Sunset Park still pushes carts daily, though service winds down around 2pm. Golden Unicorn in Chinatown brought its carts back but runs them on weekends and holidays only, with a numbered-ticket walk-in system. Jing Fong’s Upper West Side room closed permanently in March 2026; the Chinatown room survives.
Last updated: August 2026. Prices and hours change – confirm with the venue before you go. Spot something out of date? Let us know.
