Best Chinese Food in Ann Arbor: Who Is Actually Open When You Arrive

Tuesday is the day Ann Arbor stops cooking Chinese food.

That is not a figure of speech. There are eleven Chinese restaurants operating in the Ann Arbor area, and five of them are closed all day Tuesday. Three more close their kitchens in the middle of the afternoon. Add those together and at four o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon, six of the eleven are dark.

No aggregator tells you this, because no aggregator looks at the eleven grids side by side. We did, on 2 October 2026, and the pattern is the single most useful thing anybody can tell you about eating Chinese food in this town.

So this guide is organised around the question you are actually asking, which is not “which is best” but “which is best and open right now.”

The Tuesday problem

Here are the five closed every Tuesday, with no exceptions published:

• TK WU, 510 E Liberty St, downtown
• Evergreen Downtown, 208 W Liberty St, downtown
• Yee Siang Dumplings, 4837 Washtenaw Ave
• Hot Pot Chen, 2255 W Stadium Blvd
• Dagu Rice Noodle, 3765 Carpenter Rd, Ypsilanti

Look at the first two. Both of downtown Ann Arbor’s Chinese restaurants are on Liberty Street, four blocks apart, and both of them are closed on the same day. If you are downtown on a Tuesday wanting Chinese food, there is nothing walkable. You are getting in a car.

The three with a mid-afternoon break are a different trap, because they are open on Tuesday and still shut when you turn up:

• BaoBao Asian Eatery serves 11am to 2:30pm, then closes until 4:30pm. A two-hour gap, the widest of any Chinese kitchen in the county.
• Dagu Rice Noodle serves 11am to 3pm, then closes until 5pm. Two hours again, and it is already closed all Tuesday on top of that.
• Lan City Noodle Bar serves 11am to 3pm and reopens at 3:30pm. Only half an hour, but it is a locked door if you hit it.

Who is open at 4pm on a Tuesday

The honest answer is five places, and here they are.

Three of those five are on Plymouth Road, which brings us to the second thing worth knowing.

There are two Evergreens and only one is open on Tuesday

Evergreen Restaurant Group runs two rooms in Ann Arbor and they do not keep the same week.

Evergreen Restaurant at 2771 Plymouth Rd is open seven days, 11am to 9:30pm Sunday through Thursday and to 10pm Friday and Saturday. Evergreen Downtown at 208 W Liberty St is closed Tuesdays, and opens later on the days it does open, at 11:30am, running to 10pm and to 10:30pm on Friday and Saturday.

Same name, same group, same menu lineage, opposite behaviour on the day most likely to catch you out. If it is Tuesday and you want Evergreen, drive to Plymouth Road. This is the kind of thing a street address alone will not tell you, and it is why we list the two separately.

Plymouth Road is the Chinese food corridor

If you only remember one thing about the geography, remember this. The densest run of Chinese kitchens in Washtenaw County is a one-mile stretch of Plymouth Road in the northeast corner of Ann Arbor, and it holds three of the eleven:

• 1753 Plymouth Rd – Lucky Kitchen
• 1771 Plymouth Rd, Suite 104 – Palace Tang
• 2771 Plymouth Rd – Evergreen Restaurant

Lucky Kitchen and Palace Tang are in the same mini-mall. You can stand in one parking lot and see both front doors.

That is not an accident. Plymouth Road runs along the edge of North Campus, where a large share of the University of Michigan’s Chinese graduate student population lives and works, and the restaurants followed the customers. It is also why the cooking out there skews more regional and less Americanised than what you find downtown.

Downtown, by contrast, has exactly two, both on Liberty, and both shut on Tuesday. The campus block has one. The rest are spread along Washtenaw Avenue, Carpenter Road and the west side, which means most of this list is a drive.

The restaurants

Palace Tang – the highest rated, and the only one open late

Palace Tang 唐宫, 1771 Plymouth Rd Suite 104, (734) 369-8886.

This is the best-reviewed Chinese restaurant in the county by a clear margin, holding 4.8 stars across 913 reviews, and it is the only one in this guide that serves past 10pm on a weeknight. It is open 11am to 11pm, every single day, with no break and no closed weekday. In a category defined by inconvenient hours, Palace Tang is the outlier that just stays open.

It is a hot pot house. You pick between one and four broths and cook raw meat, seafood, vegetables, noodles and dumplings at your own table, with a self-serve condiments bar for building your own dipping sauce. Owner Eric Zhao opened it in May 2024 in a former Panera space and imported thirty hot pot tables to do it. He moved to New York five years before that and to Ann Arbor in 2020, and told the Ann Arbor Observer his aim plainly: “I just want to bring Chinese traditional food here.”

Two notes. Hot pot is a slow, long, sociable meal, so do not go when you are in a hurry. And Palace Tang publishes no website of its own, so the phone is the only direct line.

Open daily 11am to 11pm. Verified 2 October 2026. The only Chinese kitchen in the area serving past 10pm seven nights a week.

Evergreen Restaurant, Plymouth Road – the one that does every region

Evergreen Restaurant, 2771 Plymouth Rd, (734) 769-2748.

Open since 1992 and the most-reviewed Chinese restaurant in the area, with 1,033 reviews on the board. The kitchen refuses to pick a lane: the menu moves across Mandarin, Sichuan, Hunan, Shanghai and Taiwanese cooking, which is unusual for a single room and is the reason it works equally for a student who wants hot oil and a family that wants something mild.

There is a bar, the dining room takes a group without a reservation, and it caters. It is open all seven days, which on Plymouth Road puts it alongside Lucky Kitchen and Palace Tang as the reliable block.

Open 11am to 9:30pm Sunday through Thursday, to 10pm Friday and Saturday. Verified 2 October 2026.

Lucky Kitchen – dumplings, cheap, open to 10pm every day

Lucky Kitchen, 1753 Plymouth Rd, (734) 747-9968.

A few doors from Palace Tang in the same mini-mall. The dumpling list runs long, the Sichuan side of the menu carries real heat, and the prices are at the bottom of the range for the corridor, which is why there is usually a graduate-student table or three.

Its real distinction is the calendar. Lucky Kitchen serves straight through to 10pm seven days a week, with no mid-afternoon break and no closed weekday. Only Palace Tang stays open later. Monday through Saturday it opens at 11am, Sunday at noon.

Open 11am to 10pm Monday through Saturday, noon to 10pm Sunday. Verified 2 October 2026.

King Shing – the south side default

King Shing, 2865 Carpenter Rd, (734) 971-8999.

The highest review count of anything Chinese on the Carpenter and Washtenaw side of town, 688 reviews at 4.4 stars, which is the signature of a place that has been somebody’s regular order for years. Prices are at the low end.

Open seven days with no closed weekday and no mid-afternoon break: 11am to 9:45pm Monday through Saturday, noon to 9:45pm Sunday. Carpenter Road puts it within a short drive of Pittsfield Township, the Washtenaw Avenue retail strip and the west side of Ypsilanti.

Open 11am to 9:45pm Monday through Saturday, noon to 9:45pm Sunday. Verified 2 October 2026.

Dagu Rice Noodle – the one dish nobody else in the county cooks

Dagu Rice Noodle, 3765 Carpenter Rd, Ypsilanti, (734) 602-8986.

Dagu is built on Yunnan crossing-the-bridge rice noodle soup, where a bowl of extremely hot broth arrives with the raw ingredients alongside and you cook them yourself at the table. It is the only kitchen in the Ann Arbor area doing that as its main business, and at 4.7 stars it is the highest-rated Chinese restaurant in the county after Palace Tang.

Then the hours. It is closed Tuesdays, and on the six days it opens it closes from 3pm to 5pm. Lunch is 11am to 3pm, dinner is 5pm to 9pm. A 4pm arrival on any day of the week finds a locked door. Of everything in this guide, Dagu is the one most likely to waste your drive, and the most worth a second attempt.

Open 11am to 3pm and 5pm to 9pm, closed Tuesday. Verified 2 October 2026.

BaoBao Asian Eatery – soup dumplings, and a two-hour gap

BaoBao Asian Eatery, 3365 Washtenaw Ave Suite E, (734) 800-6286.

BaoBao exists for xiaolongbao, the soup dumpling that carries gelatinized broth inside the filling and releases it when steamed. There are six versions on the menu, between $10.95 and $14.95, plus potstickers, appetizers and dinner plates. The room seats about 78, it is bright and modern, and the dough is made fresh daily in a prep area you can watch from your table.

It is open all seven days, Tuesday included. The problem is the break: 11am to 2:30pm, then closed until 4:30pm, every day. That is the widest mid-afternoon gap on this list.

One ordering warning. The website link on BaoBao’s Google listing points at a Toast ordering page for a Big Beaver Road address in Troy, not for Washtenaw Avenue. Order by phone if you want to be certain which kitchen is cooking your food.

Open daily 11am to 2:30pm and 4:30pm to 8:30pm. Verified 2 October 2026.

Lan City Noodle Bar – hand-pulled noodles, walkable from campus

Lan City Noodle Bar, 1235 S University Ave, (734) 263-2888.

The noodles are pulled by hand to order, which is the entire reason to go and the reason most tables are eating the beef noodle soup. It is the only Chinese kitchen in the dense South University campus block, walkable from the Diag and the dorms, priced at the low end, and open all seven days including Tuesday.

There is a changeover in the middle of the afternoon: lunch to 3pm, kitchen back at 3:30pm, dinner to 9pm. Aggregators disagree about the reopening, some printing 3:30pm and some 4pm, so call if you are aiming for that window. Google and Yelp both carry 3:30pm, which is what we have published.

Open daily 11am to 3pm and 3:30pm to 9pm. Verified 2 October 2026.

TK WU – downtown, but not on a Tuesday

TK WU Ann Arbor, 510 E Liberty St, (734) 747-6662.

One of only two Chinese restaurants in downtown Ann Arbor, on East Liberty and genuinely walkable from the campus edge, Main Street and the theaters. The menu is the familiar American-Chinese canon done properly: sesame chicken, Mongolian beef, salt and pepper pork chop, beef with wide rice noodles, and a beef noodle soup worth ordering. Prices are at the low end. It holds 698 reviews.

Closed Tuesdays. Its closing time is the one genuine disagreement left in this guide, and it is worth a paragraph. The restaurant’s own site publishes 11:30am to 9pm Sunday through Thursday and to 9:30pm Friday and Saturday, twice over – once in the page you read, and again in the machine-readable schema block the site serves to search engines. Its Google profile publishes 11:30am to 10pm and 10:30pm. That is a full hour of disagreement between a restaurant and its own Business Profile, and the aggregators split along the same line, each one mirroring whichever of the two it copied from.

We publish the earlier pair, because it is what the restaurant says twice on its own site, and because the cost of being wrong runs one way: turn up at 9:15pm on the later grid and you are standing at a locked door. If you want a table after 9pm, call (734) 747-6662 first.

Closed Tuesday. Open 11:30am to 9pm Sunday through Thursday, to 9:30pm Friday and Saturday, per the restaurant’s own site. Its Google profile claims an hour later. Verified 2 October 2026.

Evergreen Downtown – the other downtown room

Evergreen Downtown, 208 W Liberty St, (734) 929-5460.

The group’s downtown room, four blocks west of TK WU on the same street, and the more modern of the two Evergreens in look and menu framing. It opens later than its Plymouth Road sibling, at 11:30am, and runs to 10pm, or 10:30pm on Friday and Saturday.

Closed Tuesdays. Which, with TK WU also closed, is what empties downtown.

Closed Tuesday. Open 11:30am to 10pm, to 10:30pm Friday and Saturday. Verified 2 October 2026.

Yee Siang Dumplings – a dozen dumplings, three ways each

Yee Siang Dumplings, 4837 Washtenaw Ave, (734) 340-5919.

About a dozen kinds of dumpling, and you can have any of them pan-fried, boiled or steamed. Most kitchens pick one method and leave it there, so being handed the choice is the point of coming. The noodles deserve the same attention and there is Szechuan beef for anyone who wants heat alongside. Prices are low, and it carries 719 reviews, the second-highest count in this guide.

It sits out on the stretch of Washtenaw Avenue that straddles the Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti line, so it is a drive rather than a walk. Closed Tuesdays, and open until 10pm on Friday and Saturday, which makes it one of the few late doors on this list.

That 10pm took some digging, because Google publishes 9:30pm for every day it is open and misses the weekend extension entirely. The restaurant’s current site, yeesiangannarbor.com, publishes the day-by-day grid with Friday and Saturday running to 10pm, and it is a live, maintained site carrying this year’s copyright and its own ordering system. Worth knowing if you searched for this place before: the older annarboryeesiang.com address no longer resolves, so if that is the bookmark you kept, the grid behind it is gone.

Closed Tuesday. Open 11am to 9:30pm, to 10pm Friday and Saturday. Verified 2 October 2026.

Hot Pot Chen – the west side option

Hot Pot Chen, 2255 W Stadium Blvd, (734) 668-8389.

The only Chinese kitchen on the west side, away from both the campus cluster and the Plymouth Road run, which makes it the default for anyone living out past the stadium. Despite the name it works as a full Chinese menu rather than a hot pot specialist. Prices are low and it holds 401 reviews.

The hours took three passes to pin down, and the answer is a good lesson in which part of a restaurant’s website to trust. Its locations page prints a flat “11:00 am – 10:00 pm” with no day-by-day grid and no mention of a Tuesday closure, which is what you would read if you only read the website. Its Google listing and its Yelp page both say closed Tuesday.

The tiebreaker sits on the restaurant’s own domain. Its online-ordering system publishes a real day-by-day grid for both pickup and delivery, and in that grid Tuesday is empty – no hours at all – while the other six days run 11am to 9pm, and to 9:30pm on Friday and Saturday. That is the restaurant’s own booking system refusing Tuesday orders, which is about as direct as this evidence gets. The flat banner on the locations page is marketing copy, not a schedule.

So: closed Tuesday, confirmed. The half-hour gap between the ordering cutoffs and the Google grid is the normal thing, where online orders stop shortly before the dining room does.

Closed Tuesday. Open 11am to 9:30pm, to 10pm Friday and Saturday, with online orders cutting off half an hour earlier. Verified 2 October 2026.

The one Google says is closed, and why we think it is open

One Bowl Asian Cuisine at 1220 S University Ave is worth explaining, because Google will tell you it is shut and we do not think that is right.

Google marks it CLOSED_TEMPORARILY and publishes no opening hours for it at all. That is a stronger signal than it sounds, because a business profile normally keeps its grid through a short closure. It is also the only signal pointing that way.

Everything else says the kitchen is running. Its own site, onebowla2.com, publishes 11am to 8:40pm daily. Its Yelp page, updated August 2026, shows it open. And its own online-ordering storefront, the one linked from its own homepage, is live at the right address – Ann Arbor Plaza, 1220 S University Ave, suite 110 – with the full menu priced out, the same 11am to 8:40pm window, no closure notice anywhere on it, and dishes tagged as the store’s most-ordered items, which is a ranking that only exists if orders are being placed. A storefront taking money is harder evidence than a status flag nobody has refreshed.

So we have kept the listing up and corrected its hours to the 11am to 8:40pm the restaurant itself publishes. That 8:40pm is not a typo on our part – it is the oddly precise time One Bowl prints on both of its own surfaces, and it may be the online-order cutoff doing double duty as the posted closing time. Either way, do not plan on 9pm.

It is pan-Asian rather than Chinese, with a menu built on pho, ramen and curries, so it sits at the edge of this guide regardless and we have not ranked it with the eleven. If you are going specifically for the Chinese side of that menu, call (734) 747-7006 first – partly for the hours, partly because Google’s flag has to have come from somewhere.

What to order, by what you came for

• Hot pot at your own table – Palace Tang, 1771 Plymouth Rd. Open to 11pm daily.
• Soup dumplings – BaoBao, six kinds of xiaolongbao, $10.95 to $14.95.
• Dumplings pan-fried, boiled or steamed – Yee Siang, about a dozen fillings.
• Hand-pulled noodles – Lan City, and the beef noodle soup is the order.
• Yunnan rice noodle soup – Dagu, the only kitchen in the county doing it.
• Sichuan heat – Lucky Kitchen or Evergreen on Plymouth Road.
• American-Chinese classics done properly – TK WU downtown, or King Shing on Carpenter.
• Walking distance from central campus – Lan City on South University is the only real answer.
• Cheapest tables – Lucky Kitchen, Yee Siang, Hot Pot Chen, King Shing, Lan City and TK WU all sit in the inexpensive band.

How to not waste the drive

Three rules, all of them earned from the grids above.

Check the day before the restaurant. Tuesday eliminates five of eleven, including both downtown rooms. Every other day of the week, nine or ten of the eleven are open.

Avoid arriving between 3pm and 4:30pm. BaoBao, Dagu and Lan City are all in a break somewhere inside that window, and Dagu’s runs to 5pm. The safe mid-afternoon choices are Palace Tang, Lucky Kitchen, King Shing and Evergreen on Plymouth Road, all of which serve continuously.

After 10pm on a weeknight, there is one answer. Palace Tang runs to 11pm every day and is the only Chinese kitchen in the area open that late Sunday through Thursday. Friday and Saturday give you one more: Evergreen Downtown pushes to 10:30pm. Everything else on this list has closed by 10pm at the latest, and 10pm means the door, not last orders – Lucky Kitchen, and on weekends Yee Siang, Hot Pot Chen and Evergreen on Plymouth Road, are all locking up at the hour they publish.

Where else to look

For the wider picture, our guide to the best restaurants in Ann Arbor covers every cuisine, and downtown Ann Arbor restaurants covers what is walkable when both Liberty Street rooms are closed.

Within Asian cooking specifically, we have separate guides to the best Korean restaurants in Ann Arbor, the best Thai restaurants, the best Vietnamese food and the best sushi. If budget is the constraint, cheap eats for students overlaps heavily with the inexpensive band above, and late night eats is where to go when Palace Tang has closed too.

All eleven hours grids in this guide were pulled on 2 October 2026 and cross-checked against each restaurant’s own website where one exists. Where a restaurant and its Google listing disagree, we have said so and told you which we published. Restaurant hours change without notice, and the two downtown rooms and Dagu are the ones we would call ahead for.