Sautéed foie gras with ginger and mango at Vong. Halibut with a coating of crisped rice in a lime and watermelon curry at Tabla. Kabocha cheesecake with a coconut and almond-flour crust at Sono. Some of New York’s top chefs have long incorporated the flavors and cooking techniques of diverse cuisines into their repertoires, but the past decade has seen Asian cuisines come to the fore as chefs conceive increasingly venturesome offerings.

French chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten, who once worked at the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok, opened Vong in 1992, blending French and Thai tastes. Nobuyuki Matsuhisa caused a stir with the 1994 opening of Nobu, where the much-heralded Japanese cuisine is interspersed with Peruvian touches.

“I wrack my brain working on new dishes,” says Linda Rodriguez, executive chef of the restaurant Bond Street, which opened its doors in 1998. She created a Japanese menu inflected with “a little Thai, a little Malaysian, a little Filipino.” Her ponzu sauce, a Japanese soy-citrus sauce, might include the bay leaves and peppercorns more typical of a Philippine adobo. “I try to experiment a lot, without undermining what’s essentially Japanese . . . You have to know what marries.”

Squab with kaffir lime leaf paste. Filet mignon with red miso. Such are the marriages rendered by chef Tadashi Ono, who had worked at the French restaurant and New York institution La Caravelle for several years and who opened Sono in 1999, combining French techniques with a Japanese appreciation for the properties of individual ingredients. He folds tofu and soybeans into crab cakes and seasons them with ginger and soy sauce. He poaches lobster with a bouillon of lobster stock and chrysanthemum leaves and petals. “In the Japanese way, contrasting flavors make you recognize what lobster really tastes like,” he explains. “And the sharp flavor of the leaves kicks through the taste of the lobster.”

When restaurateur Danny Meyer opened Tabla in 1998, he tapped Floyd Cardoz of Lespinasse as executive chef. At Lespinasse, Mr. Cardoz had received the tutelage of chef Gray Kunz, renowned for his complex Asian-influenced innovations. Mr. Cardoz refers to his own cooking as “American food, Indian spices.” To a city of gastronomes, the menu at Tabla offers dishes like lobster soup with pink lentils, Magret (duck) and potato samosa, and eggplant-stuffed Vidalia onion with a cumin-and-black-pepper curry. “New Yorkers are adventurous, and they are tough critics,” Mr. Cardoz says. “But if you are good at what you do, then you want tough critics.”