Kearny Mesa Cantonese banquet-style restaurant — dim sum carts on weekends, live seafood tanks, and the kind of family-sized Cantonese dinner format SD's Chinese community has anchored for years. The ...
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2
Din Tai Fung — UTC
Taiwanese / Dumplings · La Jolla / UTC
The Taiwanese soup-dumpling global institution's Westfield UTC location — 18-fold xiao long bao, a visible dumpling-making kitchen, and the kind of wait that tells you everything. SD's destination dum...
87
3
China Max
Chinese / Cantonese · Kearny Mesa
The Convoy Street Cantonese room that San Diego's Chinese families book for the actual milestones — weddings, banquets, reunions large enough to need the round tables. Live tanks at the back, Peking d...
86
4
Dumpling Inn
Chinese / Shanghainese · Kearny Mesa
Kearny Mesa's no-frills Shanghainese dumpling house — soup dumplings, hand-pulled noodles, and a tiny dining room off Convoy Ct that has been SD's Shanghai-style reference for years. A Convoy hidden-i...
86
5
Spicy City
Chinese / Sichuan · Mira Mesa
Mira Mesa's Sichuan-specialty dining room — numbing-and-hot preparations, a dry-fried chicken the regional community benchmarks against Chengdu, and a strip-mall format that quietly made Mira Mesa an ...
86
6
Boxing Monk Sichuan Kitchen
Chinese / Sichuan · Point Loma
Point Loma's chef-driven Sichuan — numbing-hot mapo tofu, dan dan noodles done to Chengdu spec, and a Rosecrans St dining room that raised the ceiling on what Sichuan cooking looks like outside of Con...
85
7
Sam Woo BBQ
Chinese / Cantonese / BBQ · Kearny Mesa
Convoy's Sam Woo BBQ — the multi-state Cantonese-BBQ brand's SD location, with roast duck and char siu hanging in the window, and a format that the SD Cantonese community has protected as one of the d...
84
8
Chin's Szechwan Cuisine
Chinese / Sichuan · Kearny Mesa
Convoy's Chin's Szechwan since 1987 — the Chin family's multi-location Chinese-American-meets-Sichuan dining room, with generations of SD regulars treating the Convoy St location as the family-table d...
83
9
Feast
Chinese · Hillcrest · Hillcrest Chinese restaurant — Peking duck program
Feast on Robinson Ave gives Hillcrest a proper Chinese room anchored by a whole Peking duck program — the kind of dish that requires advanced planning and rewards it. Salt and pepper shrimp and mapo t...