Where it lives in the city
New York holds the largest Chinese community outside Asia — over 600,000 people in the city, and more again across the wider metropolitan area — and it has three Chinatowns rather than one. They are not interchangeable. Manhattan’s is the historic Cantonese and Taishanese core, and the one every visitor is sent to. Sunset Park in Brooklyn is largely Fuzhounese. Flushing in Queens is the largest of the three and the most Mandarin-speaking, and it is where the regional cooking concentrates — Sichuan, Shanghainese, Dongbei — frequently in basement food courts and mall arcades rather than street-level dining rooms with English signage. The practical consequence for a visitor: if you have one meal to spend and want something other than the Cantonese canon, the subway ride to Flushing is the trip worth making, and the food courts reward wandering more than researching a single address in advance.
Michelin picks
No chinese restaurants on the current Michelin Bib Gourmand list — that list is short and changes slowly, not a sign there's nothing good out there.
Near Midtown, right now
Live from OpenStreetMap, filtered to venues tagged chinese within about a mile of Times Square — thin coverage outside that radius, and tagging is crowd-sourced, so treat this as a starting point.