Restaurant review, Hong Kong Restaurants Spread to Brooklyn and Queens.

For more than a century, Cantonese was the Chinese food New Yorkers ate, first in the four streets of Manhattan's original Chinatown, but gradually spreading to every corner of the city. In the past two decades, restaurants from other parts of China have muscled in—featuring recipes from Shanghai, Fujian, Xi'an, Chaozhou, Taiwan, Dongbei, and Sichuan. Often flaunting more complex and pungent flavors, the fare of these other regions came to squeeze out plainer Cantonese in the city's Chinatowns, while neighborhood carry-outs experienced a similar decline as Thai and pan-Asian cooking styles became more popular.

But in the past few years, Cantonese has been reborn as its more sophisticated and urbane cousin, Hong Kong cuisine. The startlingly diverse menu is rooted in an elegant take on Cantonese, emphasizing big-ticket seafood and a flavoring scheme that depends upon scallions, ginger, garlic, dried sea creatures, and a greater variety of soy sauces. While the original "H.K." restaurants were kitschy palaces, with red-eyed dragons spewing neon fire, more modest cafés such as A-Wah have appeared, recently reviewed in these pages. Like their Cantonese brethren before them, Hong Kong restaurants are now fanning out across the city, as immigrants escape crowded Chinatowns and move to more commodious and upscale neighborhoods, principally in Brooklyn and Queens.

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