Best New Restaurant 2008: Mandrarinism

It takes a lot of guts to put a completely new spin on classic mandarin cuisine, which was adapted, decades ago, into the dishes we now think of as Chinese. But Scott Lin and his wife, Lian Sun, the young owners of this new contemporary Chinese restaurant, are up to the challenge. Lin, who formerly owned the New Peking restaurant in Westport, has boldly gone where no Asian restaurateur has gone before by refusing to serve crab rangoon and by hiring a well-known American chef, Rodney Clodfelter, to turn up the creativity in familiar dishes such as orange beef (Clodfelter uses sun-dried tomatoes in his recipe), mandarin pork and slow-braised pork ribs. The result is a menu that’s both marvelously inventive and delicious. No one brings you a fortune cookie at the end of the meal, but you already will have attained good fortune by enjoying the house-made sorbets or Asian-style warm custard tarts for dessert.

Starts: Jan. 9. Daily, 2009