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House of Nanking
House of Nanking opened in 1988 in San Francisco's Chinatown, founded by Peter Fang, and the small, unassuming restaurant became known for a genuinely idiosyncratic house style — a spicy, garlicky approach to Shanghainese-influenced dishes that diverged noticeably from the more standard Cantonese-American food found at many neighboring Chinatown restaurants. The restaurant built a reputation for a somewhat unusual dining format in which servers frequently recommended or directly chose dishes for tables rather than relying purely on customers ordering off the printed menu, an approach some diners found charmingly direct and others found presumptuous, but one that became part of the restaurant's specific identity. House of Nanking drew celebrity visitors and extensive media coverage over the decades specifically because of that combination of bold, personal cooking style and its cramped, no-frills dining room, a contrast that became part of the restaurant's broader appeal as an authentic-feeling alternative to more polished Chinese restaurants elsewhere in the city. House of Nanking's combination of Peter Fang's distinctive, spicy Shanghainese-influenced cooking and its unusual server-directed ordering format has made it one of the most singularly personality-driven Chinese restaurants anywhere in the country.
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Nom Wah Tea Parlor
Nom Wah Tea Parlor opened in 1920 in Manhattan's Chinatown, making it the oldest continuously operating dim sum restaurant in the entire city, and it's held that same Doyers Street location — on one of the neighborhood's oldest and most crooked streets — for over a century. The restaurant was purchased in 2010 by Wilson Tang, a nephew of the previous longtime owner, who took over specifically to preserve the restaurant's traditional dim sum format — small plates ordered individually from a menu rather than the rolling cart system many other dim sum restaurants use — while gradually modernizing operations without changing the food itself. Nom Wah's egg rolls and shrimp dumplings have become specifically celebrated individual dishes, drawing both longtime Chinatown regulars and a newer generation of diners introduced to the restaurant through extensive food media and documentary coverage of Tang's ownership transition and preservation effort. Nom Wah Tea Parlor's combination of over a century of continuous operation on the same historic street and its deliberate, family-driven preservation of traditional individually ordered dim sum has made it one of the most historically significant Chinese restaurants in the entire country.
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