“ Unlike the proprietor of your average carryout joint down the street, Madam Zhu recruits her cooks from her string of successful restaurants in Shanghai, Sichuan, and Beijing. Everything on the dynamic, seasonally attuned menu is good (you’ll find recommended dishes on the current winter menu for “moderate cold” and “heavy snow”), but pay attention to the noodle, soup, and dumpling sections, which read like a carefully curated, Bourdain-style tour of the markets and noodle dens of modern China.”

— Adam Platt / New York Magazine

“There is skillful, contemporary Chinese food all over the menu, and color photographs to let you know what you’re in for. Most of the dishes are drawn from either Beijing, Shanghai or Chongqing. Peppers are not quite everywhere, but they are strongly represented in many dishes. So many fresh green chiles lurk in Madam Zhu’s Spicy Fish Stew that eating it is a contact sport. There is some shading to the cooking, too. I counted three distinct frying styles, and clearly need to return to finish the survey.”

— Pete Wells / New York Times

“But each time I chanced a return with trepidation, I was beguiled by some other wonderful dish: chunks of tender beef with crunchy walnuts, a spicy, verdant fish stew, tiny cold clams with garlic chives, and several times, pickled celtuce, a root vegetable that is a cross between knob celery and lettuce. And so for lovers of Chinese food with a taste for the unusual, Hao Noodle (and the tea is good, too) is worth chancing.”

— Mimi Sheraton / The Daily Beast

“Sichuan peppercorns are to Sichuanese what olive oil is to Mediterranean: quintessential and compulsory. Spicy mung-bean jelly is a summertime favorite in which slippery, tremulous slabs of mung-bean starch are steeped in a magma-like vinaigrette of peanuts, sesame seeds, chili oil, and those show-stealing peppercorns. Pair that with the classic Sichuan chicken, which has a popcorn-like crisp, chewy texture and comes in a mountain of dried chili peppers. To take a break from the heat, try any of the handmade noodles, or the play on the Cantonese tomato-beef rice, which Zhu transforms into a vegetarian-friendly tomato-rice stew, with tender Chinese pea shoots—a main event in its own right.”

— Jiayang Fan / New Yorker

“The chefs are virtuosic fryers, able to express many nuances in the simple language of crust. The coating on the fish fritters is almost as soft as cake crumbs, a pale gold tinted green by seaweed powder. It’s a subtle partner for the delicate fish inside.

Crispy shrimp sauté has a more rugged crunch, almost in fried chicken territory, with dark, thrilling slips of dried chiles clinging to it. Between the two extremes are the wonderful cubes of creamy tofu inside a crisp and ultrathin shell; they’re like mozzarella sticks refined to the nth degree.”

— Pete Wells / New York Times