Cities with best Chinese food (live, restaurants, vs)

[evissone]

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?

[Cowboys fan in Houston]

Sounds about right.

[Nineties Flava]

If you're just going by the large cities, maybe. Otherwise, the best authentic Chinese I've had was at a Szechuan restaurant in Fremont.

[jman650]

Originally Posted by justme02

Sounds about right.

Lol sounds about right?? With SF coming in at 5th, and beneath Flushing? Sounds about like you haven't explored these places very well.

[evissone]

Originally Posted by jman650

Lol sounds about right?? With SF coming in at 5th, and beneath Flushing? Sounds about like you haven't explored these places very well.

To be honest, I am not sure about SF's ranking. I had a few meals there and was not impressed at all. Flushing is just OK as well.
Where are authentic Chinese restaurants located in San Fran area?

[jman650]

Originally Posted by evissone

To be honest, I am not sure about SF's ranking. I had a few meals there and was not impressed at all. Flushing is just OK as well.
Where are authentic Chinese restaurants located in San Fran area?

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.

[eek]

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.

[HtownLove]

Originally Posted by evissone

I will rate them as the following according to personal experience

1) Toronto
2) Los Angeles
3) New York


Do you agree?

yeah, I have had awesome Chinese food in these.

[Lifeshadower]

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.

Food is food. It's not "unique" to a place unless the place really created it.

Even though nearly half of all Chinese Americans/Chinese Canadians live on the Western part of North America, the other 50% are pretty spread out enough that every major city of note has at least one good authentic Chinese restaurant.

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. Not really disputing it since its an opinion, but really thought that was interesting.

[Urban Luxury]

Hong kong