There are no roving carts loaded with bamboo steamer baskets at the new Chinese restaurant Hutong, no menu cards to be stamped each time you take a dish of har gow or turnip cake. In fact, dim sum is only a small portion of what the menu offers at Hutong, which opened in Midtown in July. But you would do well to make it a large portion of what you order, because only one or two other restaurants in town can plausibly claim to make dim sum that rivals Hutong’s.

Where else will you find cooks who have the dexterity to make Wagyu-beef mille-feuilles whose flaky layers of pastry overlap each other by only a few millimeters, like the feathers on a songbird’s wing? Who can craft steamed buns that look just like shiitake mushrooms, which happen to be the chief ingredient in their filling? Or who knows the secret that allows the crunchy, chewy, charcoal-black mini-footballs stuffed with pork (in what is known in Sichuan as “fish-fragrant” seasoning) to sparkle as if diamond chips had been kneaded into the dough?

There is real skill in the kitchen at Hutong. You see it most clearly in the dim sum, but much of the other cooking evinces the kind of discipline, precision and technical mastery that has rarely been seen in this city over the past few decades, to the dismay of eaters who know what Chinese food is capable of.