Beyond our biggest cities, seeking out the best Chinese restaurants in America can be like looking for needles (or better yet, noodles) in a haystack, only to find yourself grasping at straws. No doubt the entire history of the Chinese immigrant experience in America can be glimpsed in the fact that the best restaurants for Chinese food are likely to be mom-and-pop affairs that don’t cater to Westerners—they’re a little like our best Mexican restaurants in that way. Whether this dim sum parlor makes unreal char siu bao or that hole-in-the-wall serves dandan noodles to make you cry, their discovery by English speakers typically happens through word of mouth, actual or virtual. That said, these 17 restaurants—some new sensations, others decades-old icons—stand out for helping to define (or redefine, as the case may be) Chinese cuisine in their communities. From dim sum restaurants in New York to high-end restaurants in downtown L.A. to a local legend in Falls Church, these are the best Chinese restaurants in America—start planning your pilgrimages now.

1. Chengdu Taste, Los Angeles, CA

After running a successful restaurant in China and working at the Panda Restaurant Group in Los Angeles, Tony Xu opened Chengdu Taste in 2013. The San Gabriel Valley—and the rest of L.A.—quickly took notice, and the lines haven’t let up since (a second location opened up in Rosemead). Fiery Szechuan dishes fill tables with intoxicating smells and an overarching red hue that indicates an intimidating level of spice. Start slowly, perhaps with cold mung bean noodles slathered in chili paste, then move to more grandiose items: boiled fish in green pepper sauce, stir-fried pig’s intestines, lamb on toothpicks with cumin. A green peppercorn here and there will have your mouth feeling numb at times, but the flavors at Chengdu Taste are all intense, wonderful and worth the wait.

2. Xi’an Famous Foods, New York City, NY

Chinese-food fanatics rejoiced when this Flushing chainlet began its move into Manhattan. As at its Queens counterparts, the Manhattan shops offer the cuisine of Xi’an, an ancient city in North Central China that was once a vital part of the Silk Road trade routes. The cumin-spiked “lamb burgers,” tangy liang pi cold noodles and warm tofu submerged in crimson chili oil are all must-haves.

3. Fat Rice, Chicago, IL

Owners Abraham Conlon and Adrienne Lo (formerly the duo behind Chicago supper club X-Marx) are cooking the food of Macau, a former Portuguese colony along the South China Sea. As such, their menu is heavy with influences both Portuguese (bacalhau, salt cod) and Chinese (pot stickers, Szechuan peppercorns), not to mention any other forays toward which Conlon, the chef, is guided. If this convergence sounds like “fusion,” what’s remarkable is it certainly doesn’t taste like it: The food—especially the paella-like wonder that is the signature “fat rice” and the comforting crock of tofu, pork belly—is vibrant, personal and natural.

4. Yank Sing, San Francisco, CA

The aromas coming from the steamed and fried dumplings at Yank Sing are so tantalizing, you’ll likely gobble them down before finding out what’s in them. Exceptionally fresh and flavorful dim sum is undoubtedly what keeps this longtime restaurant thriving in an unlikely corner of a massive office complex. Ordering is half the fun at this trolly-service dim sum institution: Just point at what looks good as the waiters roll their carts past your table. Favorites include shanghai dumplings with pork, scallion, ginger and a shot of hot broth, stuffed crab claws, and goldfish dumplings filled with crunchy shrimp and bamboo shoot tips.

5. Din Tai Fung, Los Angeles, CA and Seattle, WA

There is a go-to restaurant for every kind of Chinese dish in Los Angeles—Beijing’s xiangbing (meat pies), Peking duck, cold noodles—and Seattle is no slump either, but for xiao long bao (soup dumplings) in both cities, we go to Din Tai Fung. Now with three locations in L.A., two in Seattle and one in Orange County, the Taiwanese dumpling house is a favorite among both tourists and locals for slurping down pork dumplings (pork and shrimp is another popular option) for lunch or dinner. At the Glendale location in L.A., a slice of truffle can be added on top of your dumplings—not entirely traditional, sure, but we’re not complaining.

6. Grand Sichuan, New York City, NY

Xiaotu “John” Zhang may not rank among New York’s superstar restaurateurs, but his expanding Chinese chain has a cult following nonetheless. Zhang brought real-deal Szechuan food to Chelsea when he opened a branch there in 1998. His menu passionately describes the history and cooking process behind each dish, providing diners a comprehensive primer on the feast to come. Start with a sinus-clearing bowl of dandan noodles, loaded with dried peppercorns, or opt for the addictive gui zhou chicken, which combines dry-fried hot chilies and tongue-tingling Szechuan peppercorns, without a drop of gloopy sauce. If you’re looking for something milder, order a basket of eight succulent pork soup dumplings. Just don’t be afraid to experiment: Gems abound on the menu, and you have nothing to lose but your fear of fire.

7. Facing East, Bellevue, WA

A David to the Goliath of chains like Din Tai Fung and Boiling Point that keep sprouting up around Seattle, Facing East derives its staying power from owner Yu-ling Wong’s deeply personal approach to the food of her homeland, street eats in particular. Noting that, per Taiwan’s complicated political history, its cooks have incorporated “a lot of different cuisines” (Fujian above all, with “a little bit of Japanese influence”), Wong brings her own modern sensibilities to bear on the classics, whether exchanging caul with tofu sheets or using beet juice for coloring. As a result, staple comforts shine lighter and brighter, from the cracklingly crispy Tainan shrimp rolls and soulful pork-belly stew over rice to specials like bamboo shoots with salty egg yolk and garlic or shaved ice with fresh mango in season—not to mention the legendary pork “burger,” an overstuffed bao sprinkled with peanuts and herbs.

8. Dim Sum Garden, Philadelphia, PA

Philadelphia’s home to a number of superb contenders, but it’s hard to top one with a backstory like this Chinatown magnet has: the owners can trace their ancestry back to one of the chefs who invented the universal objects of foodie worship that are xiao long bao—and they’ve got the recipe to prove it. What’s more, says Sally Da, her mother-partner Shizhou has been cooking “the entire line of Shanghai-style dim sum” for more than 30 years. So it’s not just those intricate, elastic little dough pouches, bursting with soup at the touch of a tooth, that earned Dim Sum Garden such loyalty it moved to a bigger (but no less thronged) space in 2013; dumplings and cakes of all kinds—flat, fat, steamed, fried, savory, sweet—play substantial roles along with myriad variations on the snappy house noodles.

9. Lao Sze Chuan, Chicago, IL

Tony Hu uses plenty of Szechuan pepper, dried chilies, garlic and ginger to create flavors that are incredibly addictive. Our favorites are Chengdu dumplings, crispy Chinese eggplant with ground pork, twice-cooked pork, mapo tofu, Szechuan prawns and “chef’s special” dry chili chicken. There are venues throughout the city and suburbs and trust us, whichever you pick, you won’t be disappointed.

10. Peking Gourmet Inn, Falls Church, VA

If Peking Gourmet Inn looks like your grandfather’s Chinese restaurant—painted lanterns, red vinyl booths, jacketed waiters and all—that’s because it could have been: after all, it’s been around since the late 1970s, when Deborah Lee and Bobby Tsui’s own Shandong-born grandfather opened it with only eight tables. It’s expanded greatly over the decades, but Peking duck remains at the center of it all, ceremoniously dismantled tableside for a feast of dark, rich meat and crackling, glistening golden skin accompanied by unusually delicate pancakes, housemade hoisin sauce, and green onions grown on the family farm—which also supplies the beloved garlic sprouts. Beyond that, look to the lamb dishes and the lightly batter-fried but heavily garlicky jeo-yen shrimp.

11. Gene’s Chinese Flatbread Café, Boston and Woburn, MA

Gene Wu calls the food of Shaanxi province “very simple, not fancy at all. It’s all based on freshness.” Of course, nothing requires consummate skill and an unwavering work ethic quite like simple dishes dependent on fresh ingredients. And Wu’s actions speak louder than his words as he shuttles between the pair of modest shops he, his wife, and his cousin run in Boston’s Downtown Crossing and the northern suburbs to make the buns for textbook, sloppy joe-like rou jia mo; the dough for the wide, springy, clingy noodles they’ll pull to order the way the third-generation restaurateur’s family did back home; and, well, not much else. Unlike the vast majority of its peers, Gene’s Chinese Flatbread Café serves just a few dishes. Perhaps the best-loved are the noodles with lamb (in soup or not), redolent of garlic, cumin and herbs, but the spicy chilled versions with wheat gluten or tea eggs enjoy near-equal acclaim. (Granted, there will always be a place in our hearts for Cantonese seafood institution Peach Farm, just a few blocks away.)

12. House of Eggroll, Chandler, AZ

Perfectly reflecting Arizona’s Asian-population boom, a former mediocre takeout joint in the Phoenix suburbs has morphed into the ultimate hidden gem without so much as a name change. Count Le Cordon Bleu-trained chef Helen Yung, owner of one of the country’s best ice-cream shops, among House of Eggroll’s avid fans. “It reminds me of Xi’an Famous Foods before it expanded all over [New York City],” she explains, citing the menu’s “diversity, authenticity, and quality of execution” well beyond biang biang and liang pi noodles. Take pao mo, a staple soup filled with “fall-apart-tender pieces of marbled lamb” and cubes of flatbread that soak up the broth to “burst with flavor”; the “addictive” hot-and-sour soup with pork dumplings; and unusually spicy Shaanxi-style barbecue.

13. Cooking Girl, Houston, TX

For Houston’s hotheads, spicy Sichuan cuisine all comes down to two restaurants: Mala Sichuan Bistro and this sizzling upstart. Yunan Yang and her sister Lily Luo derive their equally thoughtful and heartfelt brand of cooking from their mother—who “came from a very big family” in Chongqing, where she learned “a lot of secret recipes from the family cook”—as well as from Yang’s own background in cancer research, which reveals itself in her emphasis on wholesome ingredients, from organic meats and veggies to digestive aids like the dried plum powder she sprinkles on fried sweet potatoes and, of course, imported numbing peppercorns. The effects run from pure exhilaration, as with the fried beef cubes and hot-sauce boiled fish brimming with chilies, to soothing relief in the form of meltingly tender, sweet-salty “soft bacon” or scrambled, fried tomatoes and eggs, accompanied by a fresh green-bean smoothie.

14. Gu’s Dumplings, Atlanta, GA

Yiquan Gu has always kept his eye on the prize. Whether wordlessly washing dishes for six months to convince a master chef in his native Chengdu that he was serious about his culinary education or closing his wildly popular namesake bistro in favor of a counter stall in Inman Park’s Krog Street Market, where he could focus on a streamlined repertoire rather than overhead distractions, his dedication to the art of Sichuan cuisine has been singular. And the proof is in the pudding—or rather the pork-stuffed, boiled jewels that give Gu’s Dumplings its name, tossed with tangy sauce from an ancient, and secret, recipe. It’s also in the mouth-tingling dry-fried eggplant and the savory-sweet, sesame-tinged cold noodles. Heck, it’s even in the po’ boy he makes with the chicken nuggets he stir-fries with broccoli and cilantro just for kicks.

15. Sichuanese Cuisine Restaurant, Plano, TX and Seattle, WA

What launched in Seattle as a pioneering mom-and-pop hot-pot hut over 20 years ago is now a four-branch fleet across two states, managed by Hsiao Sung Kao and Yuen Ping Cheng’s cadre of relatives. Though they vary slightly, the menus are huge, so it’s up to you to focus on the regional specialties that give Sichuanese Cuisine Restaurant its blunt name: aside from the ma la huo guo, you’re here for water-boiled beef or fish, Chongqing-style chicken, dry-fried string beans and stir-fried pork kidney (or, to use the transliterated name, “fire-exploded kidney flowers”), all of which may leave you a bit beaten and bruised—but blissfully so.

16. Chef Ma’s Chinese Gourmet Restaurant, St. Louis, MO

As dining destinations ago, Chef Ma’s Chinese Gourmet Restaurant (2336 Woodson Dr) is likely to confound the mainstream eater—which is to say it’s the epitome of a chowhound magnet. For one thing, it’s located in a former Taco Bell; for another, the Hong Kong-born namesake’s specialties are nowhere to be found on the English-language menu. But if you’re willing to put yourself in his friendly hands, you’ll be treated to a feast defying all expectations. First and foremost is the exemplary Hainanese chicken—boiled, bone-in, skin-on, accompanied by broth-cooked rice and a contrastingly pungent sauce—along with seafood dishes like the uncommon golden-yolk pumpkin shrimp.

17. Little Village Noodle House, Honolulu, HI

The history of the world’s cuisines, like the history of the world itself, is one of cross-cultural transformation—which is to say that, made with integrity, Chinese-American cuisine is a legitimate tradition in its own right. That might be especially true in Hawaii, where Chinese immigrants began integrating into the Polynesian culture a couple of centuries before the heyday of Trader Vic’s. Case in point: Little Village Noodle House, the culmination of Kenneth and Jennifer Chan’s decades-long impact on the Oahu dining scene after arriving from Guangdong province in the mid-1970s. The enormous menu spans regions, but if there’s a (slightly kitschy) place to indulge your cravings for the stuff you grew up with—honey-walnut shrimp, orange chicken, fried rice and all—this is it. Plus: flaming pork chops.