Often described as a kind of soulful cousin to Cantonese food, the cuisine of China’s migratory Hakka people abounds with pickled vegetables and slow-cooked meats. This homey Outer Richmond restaurant is a great place to get hooked on these rustic, comforting flavors. Must-order dishes include salt-baked chicken, clams stir-fried with basil, and braised pork belly with shrimp paste.

On cold nights prior to the pandemic, many of the regulars who’d crowd the small, scruffy dining room at Old Mandarin Islamic would order one of the spicy Beijing-style hot pots. In general, the restaurant, which specializes in Chinese Muslim cuisine, is a great place to feast on lamb — stir-fried with cumin, braised, or boiled in a clay pot. Chili-heads will want to test their endurance against the side dish/condiment known as la si ni, or “spice you to death.”

San Francisco is gifted with an abundance of solid Shanghainese restaurants, and Shanghai House is one of the most consistently enjoyable, known for its steamers of thin-skinned, appropriately broth-laden soup dumplings. It also serves a classic Shanghainese breakfast on weekends, including one of the city’s best renditions of salty soy milk, or xian dou jiang — perhaps the only version in the city that incorporates the pungent dried baby shrimp that Chinese and Taiwanese expats crave.

This no-frills northern Chinese spot in Parkside specializes in flaky scallion- and sesame seed–flecked pancakes, often rolled up with thinly sliced beef or scrambled eggs. It’s a carb-fest here: the dumplings and hand-pulled noodles are also pretty great.

Head to this Geary Street restaurant for, as the name indicates, Sichuan cuisine including the red-tinged Chef’s Special Fish Stew that’s heated tableside and lamb chops encrusted in cumin. Those with an affection for offal can try pan-fried pig intestine, tripe in chili sauce, and spicy pig brain.

How lucky San Francisco is to have a Beijing restaurant whose whole reason for being isn’t its Peking duck? Instead, regulars at this Excelsior mainstay mostly come for the kitchen’s northern Chinese dough-based dishes: chewy hand-made noodles; big, Beijing-style crepes and pancakes; and little stir-fried flour balls.

After closing in July 2022, the longtime Pacific Heights Chinese restaurant Gourmet Carousel reopened in April 2023 under slightly new owners. At the helm: the children of original owners BoHing Ko and his wife Sai Ko who ran the restaurant for nearly four decades. The business is back for both lunch and dinner offering dishes including Hakka chicken soup, honey walnut shrimp, and Singapore-style fried rice noodles for dine-in and takeout.

Trendy Hayes Valley has not previously had a reputation for destination-worthy Chinese food, but this spot is worth a special visit for its freshly handmade, supremely soupy xiao long bao, and crispy-bottomed vegetable dumplings. The xiao long bao, in particular, are available in six different versions, including one filled with numbingly spicy broth.

The casual first-floor market restaurant in George Chen’s massive, multi-venue complex is known for customer favorites like its crisp-bottomed sheng jian bao and its Peking duck sesame pockets.

The rest of the menu offers everything from fried scallion bread and butter garlic noodles to Dongbei-style long potstickers. While you’re there, might as well stock up on housemade condiments.

Chef Brandon Jew’s ambitious Chinese-American restaurant in the heart of Chinatown continues to shine, retaining its status as the only Michelin-starred Chinatown restaurant in 2021. Though Jew has gone on to introduce a number of new projects, from spinoffs to a cookbook, Mister Jiu’s is the original favorite and now serves a prix fixe menu with the option to add-on banquet-style plates including the roast duck platter with peanut butter hoisin.

This city is dense with dumpling specialists, and it’s true, the exceptionally thin wrappers on Yank Sing’s shrimp har gow and its juicy XLB are part of what put this spot on the Michelin Guide’s map. But Yank Sing also offers very good Peking-style roasted duck and plates like salt and pepper pork and egg noodles with barbecue pork that can round out your meal with fuller entrees.