In 2020, Xue Ling was a recent graduate of Parsons School of Design, living in downtown Manhattan and running a cafe with concrete walls and glossy, Instagram-ready pastries in the shape of fruits. It wasn’t her first experience in the restaurant world. Ling’s family had moved from Shenyang, a c ity of 9 million people northeast of Beijing, when she was in high school, and several years later her parents opened Northwest Chinese Food in College Park. Hua Wang, Ling’s mother, picked the location near the University of Maryland in part to cater to Chinese students hankering for knife-cut noodles, spicy cold salads, and Xi’an-style pork “burgers.” Over time, the place acquired devotees well beyond that community—Northwest has landed on this magazine’s 100 Very Best Restaurants list six times. The pandemic forced Ling to close her NYC cafe and move back to Maryland, where she helped out with the family restaurant, giving the place a cool new look without changing her mom’s traditional recipes. Last year, Ling branched out with Li Chun Cafe, a tea-centric cafe with Noguchi-style lamps and a modern pink terrazzo counter in a new mixed-use building a stone’s throw from her parents’ restaurant. Related Northwest Chinese Food #50 on 2026 100 Best Restaurants List Tea drinks here are vivid and often multilayered, with eye-catching stripes of scarlet plum juice, verdant matcha, and lemon tea dyed aquamarine with butterfly pea flower. “Li Chun” refers to the first day of spring on the Chinese calendar, and from its opening, the cafe has specialized in bing, a savory pancake traditionally eaten on that day for good luck. Li Chun’s bings, which look like deeply browned flour tortillas, can be wrapped around various proteins and dressed with condiments such as spicy sesame sauce, burned eggplant and chili oil, or northeast-style fermented cabbage. The signature bing comes with a sweet black-bean-sauce-and-slivered-vegetable medley that might remind you of scooping up moo shu pork with pancakes and plum sauce at your favorite Chinese-American restaurant. “We had this idea of evolving traditions,” Ling says. “We take the dishes we grew up with and we reimagine them for today’s lifestyle. We want to make the new Chinese food more approachable.” There are more elaborate dishes, too. A “bento” allows you to endlessly configure little compartments with a selection of tea-smoked chicken, tofu, black-bean pork, a briny bean-sprout-and-kelp salad, and various other salads and side dishes. There’s a refreshing mung-bean-noodle salad with sesame dressing and a standout Shanxi triple noodle—a soulful and satisfying tangle of chewy knife-cut noodles topped with three neat piles of braised pork, scrambled eggs with tomato, and tender potatoes in black-bean sauce. Earlier this year, a planned redevelopment forced Northwest Chinese Food to close, while Li Chun stayed open. Now the cafe alternates between the two concepts, with counter service during the day and table service at dinner. The daytime offerings center around tea and bings. After 5, you can find nearly every dish from Northwest Chinese Food: thick ribbons of noodle dressed all kinds of ways and specials like a summery bowl of cold Yunnan-style rice noodles topped with crushed tomatoes. Ling loves her cafe enough to keep the two concepts separate. But she’s been able to give her mother’s northwestern recipes a new, permanent home. Says Ling: “This is going to complete the story of Li Chun.” Li Chun Cafe, 7401 Baltimore Ave., College ParkThe post Northwest Chinese Food Is Back— Inside a Hip Cafe first appeared on Washingtonian. ...read more read less