They include Justin Yu and Karen Man at Oxheart in Houston, Shirley Chung at Twenty Eight in Irvine, Calif., Brandon Jew of the eagerly awaited Mister Jiu’s in San Francisco, and Sheridan Su of Fat Choy in Las Vegas. In New York, Mission Chinese Food and RedFarm both have a similar spirit and exciting food.

There is also a junior class of specialists, like Hannah and Marian Cheng of Mimi Cheng’s Dumplings in the East Village, where the dumplings are made from sustainable meat and served with farm-to-table vegetable sides from their Taiwanese mother’s recipes; the Boba Guys, who use organic milk and house-made syrup in their bubble tea; and Debbie Mullin of Wei Kitchen in Seattle, who makes small-batch shallot and chile oils.

Mr. Su is a refugee from fine-dining kitchens on the Las Vegas Strip who started a solo career making bao in a corner of a strip-mall hair salon. His newest venture, Flock & Fowl, is devoted to the classic southern Chinese dish called Hainanese chicken rice, but with upgraded ingredients and innovations like congee topped with fried (free-range) chicken, a poached (organic) egg and (house-made) pickles.

Most of these chefs have never been to China and have no Chinese culinary training, so they are learning as they go, synthesizing the values of the kitchens they know (organic, seasonal, soigné) with Chinese elements they do not. “No one would give me even the lowest kitchen job in Beijing,” said Cara Stadler, 28, who grew up in Massachusetts and moved to China with substantial experience in the kitchens of the chefs Guy Savoy and Gordon Ramsay. Instead, she started the city’s first underground supper club. “Going to the markets every day forced me to really learn about Chinese produce,” she said.

Ms. Stadler is now the chef and owner of Tao Yuan in Brunswick, Me., where the shellfish are plentiful and exquisite. Next week, for the Lunar New Year, she will be making plump scallop won tons — and then drying the bivalves’ side muscles to simmer into a homemade XO sauce, a fiery, funky, hugely popular condiment from Hong Kong.

Chinese ingredients by themselves are a vast field of study — dried mushrooms, cured meats, salted fish and bean pastes are only the beginning. Most of these chefs grew up without them: Instead, they ate a combination of American snacks, global fast food and the kind of meals a Chinese mother living in Dayton, Ohio, or Avon, Conn., might produce on a Tuesday night in the 1980s: beef stir-fried with romaine lettuce (in the absence of gai lan or bok choy) or fried rice studded with pepperoni instead of sweet lap cheong.