The Best Sichuan Restaurants In NYC - New York - The Infatuation (2025)

Suggest Sichuan food for dinner, and our lips start buzzing with anticipation at the prospect of dishes laden with more peppercorns than a ball pit. The numbing spice is a big part of why we love this Chinese cuisine, and the city's best Sichuan restaurants do an exceptional job of balancing the electric heat with sweet, sour, and salty flavors. And yes, many of those restaurants are in Flushing. But there are plenty of spots in Manhattan and Brooklyn that hold their own—including some that specialize in things like fish stew or dry pot. Here are some of our favorites:

The Spots

For a setting straight out of a handscroll landscape, head to Sichuan Mountain House. There’s a large cavernous location in Flushing and a smaller outpost in the East Village, but at both, you’ll be greeted with koi ponds, bamboo booths, and tongue-tingling Sichuan peppercorns. Standards like mapo tofu and mao xue wang (tripe, ham, and duck blood curd in chili oil broth) go right for the jugular, but they also have a lot of pickled and garlic-heavy dishes to balance out the intense heat. The East Village location stays busy, and it’s tough to get a table without a reservation, but the servers move extremely fast. If you don’t want to deal with reservations at all, you can walk right into the Flushing location instead.

Alley 41 hasn’t been around nearly as long as the other Flushing spots on this list, but it’s already in our top three go-to's for Sichuan food. Their noodles are made in-house, the mapo tofu is extra funky, and they’ve figured out the ideal cumin-to-chili ratio in their sizzling cumin beef. And it’s very easy to walk-in, even with a small group. A good date night option, it’s a narrow spot with upscale decor: glass and metal screens, industrial chandeliers, and tulip globes.

The casual restaurant specializes in spicy dry pot, which you can customize with your choice of vegetables, meats, noodles, and spice level. You could eat here three times in the same week, with three very different people, without ever feeling like you’ve done it all before. Málà Project opened their first location in the East Village in 2015, and have since opened three more restaurants and a jazz lounge. At the original, long, brick-walled space, you’ll see a lot of dates splitting bottles of wine and chatting over Chinese music from the ’80s.

Located on the second floor of the New World Mall in Flushing, DaXi is an ideal destination for a lavish group dinner. They’re all about elaborate presentations here. The juicy Tibet-style spare ribs are served in a gilded bird cage, and the house special rice with sweet cured sausage comes in a giant cast-iron crock. Our favorite dish, the seafood crispy rice soup, is the most photogenic—and delicious—of the bunch. Your server will present a big mound of crispy rice in a smoky, shrimp-flavored broth, before smashing it into bits at the table. Despite the fact that the entrance is across from a skincare store, the gold walls and cushy bird-print upholstery inside add enough formality for a casual celebration.

Fish is the main draw at this Sunset Park restaurant. Come with a group and build your meal around a whole grilled tilapia, lates, or grouper. It’s served on a big sizzling tabletop grill, swimming in a broth packed with chili peppers, and you can add vegetables as well as adjust the spice level to your liking. We’d also recommend the crispy whole fish, poached fish slices in chili oil, Chongqing sour fish stew, or a paper-wrapped fish that steams in its own juices with mounds of mashed garlic. There’s plenty of room, and it’s never hard to get a table here.

Little Pepper has been a Queens mainstay for almost two decades, first in downtown Flushing and later moving to College Point Boulevard. Head here for one of the finest, and spiciest, bowls of cold sesame noodles in the city, and mapo tofu, if you prefer a thinner sauce. No matter what you get, pair it with an order of their signature scallion rice. It’s cooked with so many scallions that the rice is bright green. Little Pepper looks like your everyday, casual Chinese restaurant, but they have so many loyal fans, they’ve started selling their own merch.

Hwa Yuan is a reboot of a restaurant from the ’80s, but unlike the last Ninja Turtles movie, this is a rebirth we’re extremely down with. It takes up two huge floors, has very large round tables, and serves Chinatown’s best Peking duck. They also have really good sesame noodles, soup dumplings, steamed fish, crispy beef, and mapo tofu. A bit more upscale than its neighbors, Hwa Yuan is also pricier, but it's absolutely worth it for the excellent food.

Hupo in Long Island City serves Sichuan food that compares with some of the best dishes in Flushing and Lower Manhattan. Full of hanging lanterns and wooden lattices, the welcoming restaurant is our go-to spot in the area for cumin lamb, mala dry pots, and mapo tofu topped with a handful of ground Sichuan peppercorn. Stop by with a date or a group for casual dinner and drinks—there’s a full bar, and with two dinings rooms, it’s easy to get a table.

If you walked into Antidote without prior knowledge, you might not guess they serve Sichuan food. There are no hanging lanterns or red dragons and, like many restaurants on the Williamsburg waterfront, it looks more like a concrete bunker with plants sprouting up inside of it. But this one serves fresh baskets of dim sum, pungent, pickled fish stew, and tea-smoked duck with crispy skin that tastes like candy. It’s a solid date spot, especially when they have live music in the center of the serene space.

If you want more of a casual neighborhood night with Sichuan food in Williamsburg, head to Birds of a Feather. The bright, roomy space looks like a store that would sell yoga mats, with some big windows up front and a communal table in the middle. It’s probably the least spicy Sichuan spot on this list—even the dishes labeled with three peppers tend to be relatively mild—but they make up for it with some stellar pickled dishes and dim sum. If you have a spicy-weary friend who wants to try Sichuan for the first time, this is the spot to take them.

Sure, you can get yourself a quality bowl of mapo tofu at a lot of the places on this list. But have you ever had yours with a lobster tail on top? Shan is one of the few Sichuan options in Cobble Hill, and they make it count. Lobster mapo, black pepper wagyu, black truffle soup dumplings can all take date night up a notch. Try and sit at one of the tables across from the bar, where you can get a view of the glowing Siguniang Mountains mural behind the bartender.

If you’re craving mala flavors on the UES, head to Hui on East 70th Street. Go straight to Hui’s specials, for mushroom black pepper beef and dry pepper chicken reimagined with sweet pineapple to balance out the spice. The bar up front is ideal for a solo meal, and the back is deceptively spacious (for the UES) with room for groups. Get your group chat together and opt for the whole fish with chopped chilies and plenty of sauce to coat all over your rice and noodles.

Spicy Moon in the East Village serves vegan Sichuan food like dan dan noodles (with the option to add Beyond beef), vegetable wontons in chili oil, and mapo tofu that's so good you’ll wonder if the dish is better without meat. It’s a top-notch takeout option, but we also like coming here before a night out. The red darkroom lighting makes feasting on pepper sauce eggplant and dry pot with tofu feel like an intimate dinner party. They also have another location in the West Village.

Han Dynasty’s food is exactly as good as the hype around this East Village restaurant suggests. As much as we’ve enjoyed everything we’ve had here, we typically order the same three things on repeat: the dan dan noodles, garlic-heavy wontons, and dry pot fish that arrives in a small, sizzling wok. This location gets very busy, and it’s walk-in only, but the food comes out quickly. There are also locations in Downtown Brooklyn, LIC, and the UWS.

Café China—from the same people behind Birds of a Feather—was a Midtown staple back when it was at its original location on 37th Street. In a new location just a five minute walk away, they still serve the same crowd-pleasing Sichuan food in a dining room with checkered floors and chandeliers. Sample from the extensive dim sum menu, followed by supersized portions of spicy beef, peppercorn-covered fish, and fatty short ribs with sweet soy sauce broth. A lot of restaurants work well for groups, but it's especially true for Café China. We consider it a requirement to come here with at least three other people.