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I'd probably put Vancouver first overall in North America. These rankings are always subjective, but quite a few chefs and food writers also end up putting Vancouver on top of the list, so, it's not entirely arbitrary, either.
This is an improvement over the past decade, though. Part of this is because the number of Chinese restaurants around Vancouver keeps increasing, and due to the competition, many of these restaurants have worked hard to carve out their own niches and specialties, which deepens the available variety.
However, one thing to note is that many of the smaller or lesser-known Chinese restaurants in places like Richmond are really only set up for Chinese diners. They don't necessarily get a lot of "outsider" or tourist traffic (which many of the larger/better-known places do), and feel no need to hire English-speaking staff or print English-language menus.
IMO you can find better chinese food elsewhere in queens (and ny in general).
i was gonna debate with jman over the place of sf vs ny on the list...but now i'm hungry.
Lol well your input is welcome. I don't have any idea when I'll be in NYC again, but I always like to know ahead of time what the hot spots are that I need to check out. My experience with NYC's Chinese has been limited to a handful of places so I really need to explore it further. But this thread was speaking on personal experience, and from mine it was good but not great. Always down to be shown something new tho.
If you get back to this and got any heavy-hitters to list please do.
I'd probably put Vancouver first overall in North America. These rankings are always subjective, but quite a few chefs and food writers also end up putting Vancouver on top of the list, so, it's not entirely arbitrary, either.
This is an improvement over the past decade, though. Part of this is because the number of Chinese restaurants around Vancouver keeps increasing, and due to the competition, many of these restaurants have worked hard to carve out their own niches and specialties, which deepens the available variety.
However, one thing to note is that many of the smaller or lesser-known Chinese restaurants in places like Richmond are really only set up for Chinese diners. They don't necessarily get a lot of "outsider" or tourist traffic (which many of the larger/better-known places do), and feel no need to hire English-speaking staff or print English-language menus.
So... be prepared for that.
Yeah same out here in SF. Some of the places here have staffs that can't speak a lick of English and their clientele is entirely Chinese. This one crusty ass Shanghainese spot in San Bruno is like that. They have really good xlb but you can't communicate with them to figure out the rest of the whiteboard menu (all in Chinese), there is no take out menu, and the place stinks like chou tofu. Sometimes the lack of English speaking and international clientele is a good sign, but sometimes it isn't.
Most of the truly authentic places have like 90% Chinese clientele b/c most folks (unless they're foodies) would be scared off by things like goose intestine with explosive chili powder or numbing spicey pork kidney flowers, let alone the REALLY unusual stuff. And I agree; the best places are smaller/lesser-known from my experience as well.
I really am looking forward to hitting up Vancouver and seeing what it has to offer. If I averaged out the opinions that I have heard of where the best Chinese food can be found it seems to be a 3-way tie between Vancouver, SF Bay, and LA/SGV. I do often hear about Toronto and NYC and some people rank them at the top, but the majority I have heard from or read would put them below the other three. Either way, those are pretty widely considered the top 5 in North America.
How do you rank cities by food? It's not really the CITY that creates the food, but individual chefs. Let's be honest: some of the ethnic groups in this country are spread out enough (i.e. Mexican, Chinese, Indian, Italian, etc.) that almost any city has at least ONE decent chef that would beat out the hundreds of really mediocre and bad chefs in some of the city listed.
Spot on with this comment.
Quote:
The irony about the top 5 list in the above: number 4 (literally, Chinese people are 1/4 of the metro area, and 1/3 the population of the city of Vancouver) and 5 (1/12 Bay Area residents are of Chinese ancestry, while 1/5 people in SF are Chinese) are really known for their Chinese populations (as in, they make up a HUGE chunk of the city's population and are embedded in their cities history) while the top 3 aren't, yet counter-intuitively, the top 3 have better Chinese food.
I think the Greater Toronto Area has at least as much Chinese representation as the SF Bay Area, though SF proper has greater Chinese representation than Toronto proper.
I fully agree that Flushing is just OK from my experience, and I haven't been to Toronto and Vancouver so I can't comment from experience on those. But I would say that based on personal experience and all the feedback I have gotten over the years that you do have the top 5 cities correct in your list, just not the order IMO.
I would rank SF at the top, but like 90-95% of all Chinese meals I have had have been out here so I'm not the most qualified to speak on the other cities. But from all that I have read and heard (which is quite a lot) it seems that most people would rank SF at the top of that list with LA and Vancouver being its biggest competitors. I have had a few meal and snacks in Flushing and they were mediocre compared to SF/the Bay Area and LA but better than what I've had in VA, DC, MD (DC has much better Vietnamese food than Chinese IMO) and elsewhere.
SF and the Bay Area have so much Chinese food in abundance that it is easy to come across mediocre places if you do not do your research. Same with LA/San Gabriel Valley and probably the rest of the others. Some of the best areas to get more authentic Chinese are SF's Richmond District, Millbrae, San Mateo, Albany, Oakland, and Cupertino, but there are gems scattered all throughout the entire Bay Area. There are really too many to list here right now, but a few examples are:
Old Mandarin Islamic Restaurant (SF - Sunset Dist) for Beijing/Northern Islamic (no pork to be found, just lamb)
China Village (Albany) for Sichuan
Spices 1-4 (SF - Clement St/Oakland/Foster City) for Taiwanese/Sichuan
Zen Peninsula (Millbrae) for dim sum
Yank Sing (SF - Financial District) for fancy/really unusual dim sum
The Noodle Shop/Mao's Family Dishes (San Mateo) for Mandarin Hunan
Gourmet Village (Millbrae) for Macau-style dishes and jook
Shanghai Dumpling Shop (Millbrae) and Little Shanghai (San Mateo) for Shanghainese (most meat dishes are pork)
Yu Raku (San Mateo) for "Chuka Ryori" (Japanese-style Chinese)
Sun Tung (SF - Sunset District) for Shandong
Everyday Beijing (San Mateo) for Northern/Beijing
Cantonese is all over the place here, and there are really way too many to list here for all categories. There are too many heavy hitters to list just between SF and San Mateo alone, let alone the rest of the Bay Area. I'm not sure what you tried out here or if you were advised on what to have where (like what any specific place specialized in), but there are amazing options in the SF Bay Area.
Excellent post. The breadth and quality from Cupertino to Oakland to the Peninsula to The Richmond and Sunset District in The City is mind-boggling (and you really need a Chinese friend to help you navigate the menu and translate in many places). I seriously doubt there's anywhere in North American that can touch it.
I will rate them as the following according to personal experience
1) Toronto (Markham-Richmond Hills)
2) Los Angeles (Monterey Park, San Gabriel, Alhambra)
3) New York (Flushing)
4) Vancouver (Richmond)
5) San Francisco
Rating is based on real authentic non-China town Chinese restaurants, which means no general tao chicken, lemon chicken (or lemon anything), sweat and sour beef or heavy oyster sauce on pretty much everything.
Do you agree?
You mention the Flushing section of Queens in New York City (which is actually home to at least as many Koreans as Chinese), but not Chinatown itself? Right away I find your list to be very suspect.
You mention the Flushing section of Queens in New York City (which is actually home to at least as many Koreans as Chinese), but not Chinatown itself? Right away I find your list to be very suspect.
That's exactly my point.
I have eaten in Chinatown restaurants in numerous North American cities, and they are almost equally bad.
I believe Toronto and LA have best Chinese restaurants (years of personal experience), but not Chinatown. There is not one single Chinese restaurant in Chinatown in either of these cities I can describe as "OK" or "not bad". They are just bad. 95% of those are run by second or third generation Cantonese speaking Chinese who are stuck with their old and obsolete cooking style which almost purely caters to western diners who cannot handle real Chinese food. Let me put it this one, none of these Chinatown restaurants can survive a month if they are in Shanghai or Beijing, purely because the cooking is very coarse and the food is bad.
Honestly, for a westerner, if he never ordered "fish filet in hot oil pot with chilli", "Pork intestine in toufu soup", or feels slightest uncomfortable eating chicken feet or pig tails, he is not in a position to judge Chinese food, and should better stick with his "orange chicken" or "beef and broccoli in oyster sauce" type of western style Chinatown food.
I highly praise Chinese food in Toronto. But living only 15 minutes walking distance from Chinatown, I almost never eat there. I wouldn't go even if everything is half its price. The same for Chinatowns in other cities.
Yeah same out here in SF. Some of the places here have staffs that can't speak a lick of English and their clientele is entirely Chinese. This one crusty ass Shanghainese spot in San Bruno is like that. They have really good xlb but you can't communicate with them to figure out the rest of the whiteboard menu (all in Chinese), there is no take out menu, and the place stinks like chou tofu. Sometimes the lack of English speaking and international clientele is a good sign, but sometimes it isn't.
Most of the truly authentic places have like 90% Chinese clientele b/c most folks (unless they're foodies) would be scared off by things like goose intestine with explosive chili powder or numbing spicey pork kidney flowers, let alone the REALLY unusual stuff. And I agree; the best places are smaller/lesser-known from my experience as well.
I really am looking forward to hitting up Vancouver and seeing what it has to offer. If I averaged out the opinions that I have heard of where the best Chinese food can be found it seems to be a 3-way tie between Vancouver, SF Bay, and LA/SGV. I do often hear about Toronto and NYC and some people rank them at the top, but the majority I have heard from or read would put them below the other three. Either way, those are pretty widely considered the top 5 in North America.
"Chinese population" doesn't really matter that much as you think. that depends on the composition of those Chinese people.
If the vast Chinese population is predominantly second or third generation of Cantonese speaking Chinese, they are unlikely to produce high quality authentic Chinese food, as they tend to adhere to their tradition of making 1980's highly Americanized Chinese food. No one will eat those in 2011 modern Chinese cities.
On the other hand, if there is a large number of new Chinese immigrants (from mainland Chinese, not just Hong Kong), the restaurants tend to be better as they bring the latest cooking and more authentic food.
A rule of thumb is, if a restaurant area is predominantly Cantonese speaking (the chef, the waiters), the food tends to be westernized - not that I have anything against Cantonese, but the truth is they immigrated to North American much earlier than Mandarin speakers, and they hardly innovate their cooking style. After years of operation, the food is westernized (general tao chicken is American food, not Chinese food for example). I ranked San Fran and Vancouver lower despite their high Chinese population precisely because of this.
A real authentic Chinese restaurants, like someone mentioned, usually caters to mostly Chinese clienteles. They won't even make something like orange chicken or sour and sweet shrimp balls because that's not Chinese food to start with. And if it is on the menu, Chinese customers will doubt the authenticity of the food there in general (I would)
Some restaurants attempt to please both Chinese and Americans, and therefore have two sets of menus. Some of the food is only in English, because Chinese customers will never order it, and some is only in Chinese because Americans will never know what it is not to mention order it.
Another rule of thumb of good Chinese restaurants is to look at its menu. In 2010's, no good and competitive Chinese restaurants in Shanghai will provide customers a one or two page menu with only words. The menu are getting thick sometimes weigh half a pound (no kidding), some with leather bound covers, with tons of photos (of dishes) in it. When you see that, you have the comfort of being in an authentic Chinese restaurants.
You mention the Flushing section of Queens in New York City (which is actually home to at least as many Koreans as Chinese), but not Chinatown itself? Right away I find your list to be very suspect.
you obviously don't know much about chinese food in nyc.
it's common knowledge in nyc's asian community that flushing is THE place for the best chinese food (of various regional specialties) in the city and region as a whole. really, flushing has the best chinese on the entire east coast and the nation's third best after the san francisco bay area and the los angeles area (debatable which is #1 and #2, but both are clearly ahead of flushing's chinese food scene IMO).
sunset park, brooklyn; elmhurst, queens; and bensonhurst, brooklyn also have far better chinese food than manhattan's chinatown, which is generally pretty lousy across the board.
just because there are a lot of chinese people walking around doesn't necessarily mean the eateries there are good. sometimes this is the case, and sometimes not. manhattan's chinatown is an example of the latter.
a lot of manhattan chinatown's eateries are worn old places serving uninspired americanized chinese food using so-so ingredients. generally speaking, the best eateries in the neighborhood are just ok, the bulk of the eateries are average or subpar, and the worst places are awful. and there are many awful places in the neighborhood.
and for what it's worth, yes, flushing (really the murray hill subsection of flushing rather than main street) does have a lot of koreans, and in turn the best korean food in the u.s. outside of los angeles.
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