America’s First Chinese Fine-Dining Shortlist Runs Straight Through Chinatown

On Waverly Place in San Francisco’s Chinatown, Mister Jiu’s still hangs those gold lotus chandeliers over round tables, with an ink-wash mural glowing along the back wall. Chef-owner Brandon Jew has kept a Michelin star here for years, sending out Liberty Farm duck with peanut-butter hoisin in a room built for banquet tables and a long night.

This month that kind of room got its own national shortlist. The Chinese Restaurant Awards, founded in Vancouver in 2008 to celebrate Chinese dining, posted its first United States Top 20 on September 8. The final Elite 12 arrives September 23 at the Fairmont Pacific Rim in Vancouver. Restaurants do not apply. A panel of U.S. Taste Advisors nominates and votes. Eight of the twenty seats sit in San Francisco alone. New York and Brooklyn fill five more. The rest reach Temple City, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Cambridge, New Orleans, and Long Island City.

The shortlist mixes tasting counters with dumpling shops and dim sum rooms, which is useful. Chinese destination dining in America has never been one format. In Temple City, Bistro Na’s still fills an imperial Manchu dining room in a strip-mall courtyard, the same place that held a Michelin star before losing it in 2022. At the ROW DTLA, Jon Yao’s Kato keeps a Taiwanese-inspired tasting menu after a James Beard Best Chef win and a second Michelin star. On Commercial Street, Four Kings packs a loud Cantonese room that currently sits at number one on the San Francisco Chronicle’s Top 100.

Those are different nights out. They share a booking habit: people plan for them.

In Hell’s Kitchen, Yingtao holds New York’s only Michelin star for a Chinese restaurant. Owner Bolun Yao built the tasting menu around his grandmother’s cooking and a free hand across regions. Executive chef Emily Yuen came in after years in French and Japanese fine dining, and she talks about the job in plain terms. Plenty of diners still hear “Chinese food” and picture the cheap bag by the door. Her kitchen answers with flavors that taste familiar, finished for a small contemporary counter.

Bon Appétit spent a day on that line in late August, following prep from a Chinatown market run through a packed service. The cameras treated a Michelin-starred Chinese kitchen as ordinary work.

In San Francisco’s Mission District, the waitlist has gotten harder to game. Fù Huì Huá is an eight-seat counter from father-and-son cooks William Ge and Tao Ge. MacKenzie Chung Fegan named it the Chronicle’s best new Bay Area restaurant of 2025. The meal leans on Huaiyang training and time spent cooking in Japan, then runs prepaid to about sixty-four diners a week. Bots and reservation resellers scrambled the Friday releases so badly that the Ges quit first-come booking. Starting September 11, seats go out by lottery to people on Tock’s Notify list, with priority for guests who have not visited recently.

An eight-seat Chinese tasting menu that needs a lottery already books the way destination rooms do.

Mister Jiu’s made that feel local years ago, folding Bay Area produce into Chinatown banquet cooking without sanding off the neighborhood. After a stretch as tasting-menu only, the restaurant has opened the room again: à la carte for smaller tables, a duck-centered banquet for bigger ones, the Liberty Farm bird back as something you reserve ahead instead of tacking on.

The Awards will cut the Top 20 to twelve on September 23. Until then the shortlist is already a useful guide. Chinese food in America still means the bag on the counter. It also means the room with the lotus lights, and the duck you book before you book the babysitter.