If you have an affinity for Hong Kong-style cafes (cha chaan teng) and dishes like the Western-inspired red-sauce baked spaghetti, HK Home Kitchen is the place to visit. Everything seems like it’s priced a few dollars lower than it ought to be, but the best deals on the menu are the giant platters of thin, crispy chow mein, topped with heaps of vegetables, meat, and seafood.

The East Bay has been in need of a high-quality jiaozi, or boiled dumpling, spot, so it’s no surprise that this El Cerrito restaurant has been a hit since day one. Cold appetizers like sliced pig ears are great, and scallion pancakes are crisp and wonderfully oily. But the only move here is to order as many of the restaurant’s compact, two-bite dumplings as you might reasonably expect to eat. Fillings are varied and include delightful combinations you’d be hard-pressed to find elsewhere — zucchini, egg, and shrimp, for example. And the fact that most of the dumplings are also available frozen has been a real boon during the pandemic. For now, the restaurant is doing takeout only.

As its name suggests, Noodles Fresh specializes in Chinese noodles. The restaurant’s main point of distinction is that it doesn’t have any one regional focus, but instead seeks to introduce diners to a wide array of highly specific regional noodle dishes: Guilin rice noodles, Taiwanese beef noodle soup, and Yunnan “over the bridge” noodles. In particular, it’s one of the only Bay Area restaurants where you’ll find Jiangxi-style rice noodles — toothsome and delicious, especially when served stir-fried with flank steak, peppers, and a fiery chile sauce. The restaurant has a second location in downtown Berkeley.

It’s tough to find dishes from the Hunan region in the East Bay, but this Albany restaurant has filled that void beautifully with its menu full of regional specialties like Chairman Mao stewed pork hock. In addition to the characteristically fiery dishes that Hunan is known for, Wojia also delves into the region’s smoky flavors — try the “special fried rice” with smoked pork or the smoky grilled pork chop dusted with cumin and crispy garlic. The savory fried glutinous rice balls are an immediate showstopper.

After many years operating as a pop-up, this Taiwanese-inspired restaurant has put down roots in Emeryville. The vibe is always good, plus there’s draft beer and a rotating menu featuring elongated potsticker, and other Taiwanese dishes like street-style grilled tofu. The restaurant incorporates many seasonal, locally grown Asian vegetables and herbs. A recently-added multicourse tasting menu, which tends to sell out quickly, shows off chef Tony Tung’s cooking chops and Taiwanese cuisine.

The menu is unreasonably long at this Chinatown classic for Cantonese comfort food, so stick to the best stuff: congee (with doughnuts, of course), wonton noodle soup, rice noodle rolls, roast pork, and roast duck.

More than 20 herbs go into the namesake dish at the Bay Area’s first Guilin-style restaurant, which serves variations on the same staple: slippery rice noodles, peanuts, scallions, garlic, pickled long beans, egg, a soy-herb sauce, and your choice of meat. The indecisive can also order a sampler of five mini bowls.

This scrappy, no-frills neighborhood lunch spot is the very definition of “better than it needs to be,” with a short menu of inexpensive rice plates made with fresh ingredients and a whole lot of skill with the wok. It’s probably best known for its Wednesday-only fried chicken special, which routinely draws such a big crowd that requires a little bit of advance planning to order. Another standout is the shrimp over egg (or its variant, the “David Special” — if you know, you know), which — like everything on the menu — goes great with the absurdly delicious house-made black bean hot sauce.

The sister location to the much-acclaimed Daly City dim sum house, Koi Palace is the closest thing the East Bay has to the kind of upscale, modernized, destination dim sum more typically associated with the Peninsula — and, prior to the pandemic, it had the enormous weekend crowds to show for it. Now, the dim sum menu is available for takeout, with both frozen and freshly cooked options. Standards like rice rolls and har gow are done with style and more precise execution here, and, when available, the crispy-skinned roast pig is worth a special trip.

This vegetarian Chinese spot is helmed by a former Daimo chef with serious Cantonese cooking chops, so all the usual mock-meat preparations are a cut above. Dishes like the eggplant with vegan fish steak, the salt-and-pepper pumpkin, and the pan-fried tofu skin are as good as anything you’ll find at any of the area’s omnivore-oriented Chinese restaurants.

Bay Area diners have gotten so xiao long bao–obsessed that you’ll now find the soup dumplings at dim sum parlors and all kinds of other Chinese restaurants that have no affiliation with the Shanghai region from which they originate. Din Ding isn’t strictly a Shanghainese restaurant either, but it qualifies as a specialist: The handmade XLB here have delicate wrappers that bulge and jiggle from the juices contained within. It’s no wonder, then, that dumpling lovers from miles away make the pilgrimage, especially on the weekend.

This is one of the only places to get a customizable bowl of “mala” soup with noodles, a Sichuan street-style of hotpot, priced at $15 per pound — which, to be fair, can quickly get pricey. But the food is on point. The malatang comes in a dry bowl with no soup with housemade broths. The a la cart menu is also not to be missed, with an Instagram-worthy presentation. Just note that if you get the malatang to go, it’s not customizable.