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• Shanghai Lil Restaurant
• Shen Yang
• Yen Ching

Shanghai Lil's chef Yu Mei Lee.

Shen Yang

Yen Ching

What Chinese people eat in China and what American people eat in Chinese restaurants are very different," said Robert Ting, who runs Yen Ching on Michigan Road. (His sister heads the family's other Yen Ching restaurant on East Washington Street.)

"We eat jellyfish and cuttlefish and other weird stuff that no one here will eat."

It's a fair enough assessment of a culture raised on little but luxury cuts, but ironic given the proliferation of Chinese restaurants around the city.

In Indianapolis, it's easier to find a spot serving kung pao chicken than one dishing out chicken and noodles. And sweet and sour pork makes it onto more menus than the pinnacle of Hoosier cuisine, the pork tenderloin sandwich.

Almost 200 Chinese restaurants operate around the city, and debates over which are most worth visiting heat up quickly. Here's a handful of the ones that regularly are named favorites by fans of the fare.

Shanghai Lil

In Shanghai Lil's dramatic dining room, art from Beijing and Shanghai adorns dark red walls. Tiny pendant lamps highlight art on the table, adroitly prepared dishes crafted by Taiwanese chef Yu Mei Lee.

Lee opened Shanghai Lil with her sister-in-law, Vivian Chi (together they also run Mikado) in 2004 to address the dearth of fine-dining Chinese restaurants in town. They did so with panache, creating a dining room as elegant and exquisite as the food served within it.

The restaurant's menu calls upon the long tradition of Chinese cooking, and the execution of each dish is sparklingly pure and crisp with subtle flavors.

Lee serves Taiwanese basil-ginger chicken in a clay pot -- crisp pieces of chicken, whole cloves of roasted garlic, sliced roasted ginger and basil leaves mingle within a sweet sauce of wine, soy sauce and sugar. Hot braised flounder launches a slow procession of flavor across the tongue -- ginger, garlic, chili paste, rice wine.

The popular pineapple walnut shrimp, served in a hollowed-out half pineapple, has much less history: "That's a new recipe," Lee tells me. "Only 15 years old."

Whatever your meal, Lee urges that you punctuate it with a pot of tea.

"Chinese people have a very long life because tea is so good for you," she said. She offers seven varieties of high-quality tea, oolong and Chinese flower tea. "When you finish a meal, you should always have tea. It cleans your mouth, cleans your stomach and makes you feel sweet."

Shen Yang

One of very few restaurants in town that serve dim sum, Shen Yang has made the small-dish service a trademark, offering it during all its business hours.

Order dim sum from a menu during the week, but take part in the more festive service on the weekends, when servers roam the dining room behind carts loaded with small steamer baskets of dumplings, pork barbecue-filled buns, spare ribs, seafood and more.

"It's a happy occasion," said Vicky Ko, a spokesperson and part-time manager for the restaurant. "You get all your friends and family together and try a lot of flavors."

The small restaurant has several large tables for holding whatever dim sum-hungry group might wander in for the experience.

Among the more popular are the sticky rice, large packets of rice filled with minced meat, mushrooms and sausage wrapped in lotus leaves; shrimp dumplings; and ginger-pork dumplings.

Owner Grace Chen's husband is from southern China and learned to cook there. He cooks the dim sum, as well as the restaurant's full menu of southern and northern entrees, soups, and noodle dishes.

Yen Ching

"When we first opened in 1980, people were always saying to us, 'This is not real Chinese food,'" said Robert Ting, owner of Yen Ching.

Raising his arms in exasperation, he explained that the restaurant makes everything from scratch every day, using Northern Chinese and Szechuan styles.

"We're not pumping out sauce from a container, but making it step by step," he said, dropping his arms. "We started a Sunday buffet to introduce people to these dishes."

Hot and sour soup quickly drew a reputation and remains a much-talked-about offering from Yen Ching. Heat is another calling card: "We're pretty good at spicy food," Ting said.

The Michigan Road restaurant, open since 1997, is large and, if not exactly chic, is sleek with its grey and black color scheme and spacious L-shaped dining room with minimalist decor.

Ting has been adding to his menu throughout the nearly three decades Yen Ching has been in business, but feel free to test the chefs: "We do a lot of dishes that aren't on the menu. People from Hong Kong come in and ask for their favorites."

Sichuan

A longstanding restaurant with a fairly new owner (Xiurong Feng and her husband, Zhao Hang, took over three years ago), Sichuan is a small strip mall restaurant with a loyal carryout business.

Feng describes the food as "spicy, fresh and traditional," but that last part is only partly applicable to the menu that leaves out little from the standard American-Chinese canon (you won't be out of luck if you're looking for General Tso's chicken). Many of these dishes make it onto the buffet line-up: "It's about half traditional and half American, but almost all spicy, during the week," she said. "On weekends, it's 100 percent traditional."

Because Hang also has experience in Thai cooking, there's a list of Thai noodle dishes, curries and soups, but the Chinese menu is hard to stray from. Dishes like the hot Chongqing dry chili chicken (fried, rife with hot red chilis) and the more subtly seasoned salt and pepper shrimp mingle with more-exotic Mala beef tendon and jelly-fish with scallion oil.

Traci Cumbay / Star correspondent