When it comes to the best Chinese food around, all roads lead to Rockville.

Drive along Rockville Pike and you’ll run into strip mall enclaves with restaurants showcasing the culinary traditions of Sichuan and Hunan almost as frequently as you’ll see pizza and burger joints.

Rockville has been called a new Chinatown for decades because of an influx of immigrants who arrived in the D.C. metropolitan region around the 1970s as China normalized relations with the U.S. and other nations.

But in recent years, this collection of mostly family-owned businesses has expanded to include a wide array of locals and transplants bringing dishes from across Asia.

Veteran restaurants remain, such as the tingling delight found at Sichuan Jin River or the region’s finest soup dumplings at Bob’s Shanghai 66 and Shanghai Taste. But burgeoning chains and newcomers are sprouting up — Yu Noodles, for example, which cooks up zesty Chongqing noodles in various locations across Maryland.

One of the city’s mainstays, A&J Restaurant, hasn’t strayed from its mission to bring the flavors of northern China to the United States. The Tang family, celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, strives to serve dishes that feel authentic to what they ate in their native Shandong province.

“It was a learning curve for both sides, for us and for customers,” said Elaine Tang, A&J’s matriarch. “But the thing is, the taste of the food, we don’t compromise with that because we want to present the true, authentic Northern Chinese food.”

In 1996, the family felt confident that the small chain would stand out in Montgomery County. They offered up bold flavors for Western palettes in bite size, dim sum dishes such as snappy pig ears and crispy, fiery cucumbers. Back then their customer base was almost exclusively other Chinese immigrants. Then diners of all backgrounds discovered them.

The growth coincided with a geographic shift in the heart of Chinese and other Asian communities from downtown Washington’s Chinatown to suburbs such as Rockville, where more than 21% of its population identify as Asian, according to the 2020 census.

These immigrants have roots in China, but also Taiwan and Hong Kong. Like the Tang family, many were forced to migrate to these islands following the Chinese Civil War. The Tangs say they relish the evolving and competitive Pan Asian market in which they cook.

“The varieties makes Rockville more interesting,” Tang said. “It’s not really just narrowed down to being a new Chinatown.”

ISO green onions

John Lin helped lay the groundwork for the community that made A&J‘s success possible. Lin, 70, who chairs Rockville’s Asian Pacific American Task Force, immigrated to the United States in 1977 from Taiwan — where he was friendly with A&J’s patriarch, Jye Tang — to attend the University of Maryland.

Lin, who started working in commercial real estate in the early 1980s, credits the opening of Maxim Supermarket — later Meixin Supermarket — for the surge of Asian immigrants in Rockville. (It eventually made way for the Chase bank that sits at 460 Hungerford Drive.)

“When I was in Maryland in the late ’70s, we can’t find green onions or any Asian food and there’s only a little Chinatown in downtown just for beef noodle soup,” said Lin, who lives in Gaithersburg. “We were so happy when there was an Asian grocery in Rockville. That kind of helped everyone feel comfortable.”

The boom continued as Lin rented out more properties in Rockville to Asian business owners in the 1990s, including the Tangs, and founded his own real estate company, CapStar. These entrepreneurs gravitated to the area because of its potential clientele — immigrants who worked at nearby federal institutions such as the National Institutes of Health, Lin said, or those who moved to Montgomery County for its highly rated public schools.

Elaine and Jye Tang followed that road. She worked for the World Bank. He’s an architect. They started their family in Northern Virginia but said they knew Rockville would be a great location to bring their home-cooking to because they lived in the Maryland city during the late 1970s.

Next wave

The spirit of the Tang’s tightly owned and operated family business can be found just down Rockville Pike in a younger entrepreneur who wanted to elevate his family’s recipes.

Kevin Hsieh grew up in Gaithersburg eating meals prepared by his grandmother and father, a Taiwanese native who has cooked at restaurants across the region, including Far East in Rockville. Hsieh didn’t cook much himself until he turned 25. Fueled by boredom with his office job and spite from a cousin’s disparagement of his culinary skills, Hsieh fully committed to learning his family’s native cuisine.

Now 30, Hsieh opened up his Bao Bei storefront in August after spending more than two years selling his eats for takeout and delivery at a nearby commissary kitchen. The eatery has earned acclaim for its signature baos, pillowy buns stuffed traditionally with ground pork, which Hsieh’s grandmother made during his childhood.

While he didn’t grow up around many other Asian Americans in Gaithersburg, Hsieh says that he knew Rockville and Montgomery County diners would embrace his family’s baos because of the region’s diversity. He has ambitions beyond the county and state, but worries about competing with businesses with global reach and funding.

Some of the newest Chinese restaurants around Montgomery County include Nan Xiang Soup Dumplings, which started in New York and has plans to expand across the East Coast. Xi’an Famous Foods, a family-owned New York transplant, announced this month that it will open its first Maryland location in the same shopping complex as Bao Bei.

Hsieh said he’s sure there are many others like him who want to make a career of sharing their family recipes.

“Having a younger generation be inspired to open up restaurants is super-imperative for Montgomery County,“ he said.

“Ten to 15 years down the line, if every restaurant is just owned by some rich-ass Chinese person who doesn’t care about the food, then it’s going to suck.”