Herald on Sunday rating: 3/5
Address: 3-7 Shakespeare Road
Phone: (09) 488 9938
Do the words "royal" and "Chinese" belong in the same sentence? I may have nodded off through Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor - if I did, it was a more profitable use of my time than watching that insanely boring movie - but, as even the title suggests, China since the Cultural Revolution is not big on hereditary monarchy.
Maybe Royal Garden is wanting to hark back to the good old days; if so, it rather missed the boat. In a city thickly populated with both good and cheap Chinese joints, it's remarkable mainly for acting like a cheap restaurant while charging like a flash one.
It had been enthusiastically recommended, but I was as sceptical as I always am when anyone recommends an Asian place. We all have our favourites, but I defy anyone to pick their local's cooking out of a line-up of steaming bowls.
When readers tell me I must try their favourite Indian, I know how it's going to end: I'll think it's not as good as my favourite Indian. But when my son said he fancied Chinese for his birthday, I dusted off the reader's recommendation.
Booking was a fraught process because the man who answered the phone and I didn't seem to have any consonants in common. Then, when we arrived, the waitress demanded to know whether I'd reserved a round table.
I briefly considered explaining how hard it was just to get my booking recorded (under the name "Pepper") but settled for indicating that one of the round tables - named for the twirling pedestals that save plate-passing - would be preferred.
The restaurant also runs a takeaway business, whose customers arrived and left in a steady stream through another door. That would explain why, 20 minutes after arriving and having practically drowned ourselves with Chinese tea, we were still hungry.
I mentioned this to one of the waitresses, a solidly built woman who had been ignoring us, and she went through the kitchen door like a one-woman police raid. There followed a spirited exchange of bellowing which we could not understand but which was most effective because the same woman emerged almost immediately, smiling and cooing and bearing the first course of our two-course Peking duck.
Royal Garden offers this iconic dish in the one-, two- and three-course versions which is great for those who, like me, hate the traditional bones-and-broth postscript. So we enjoyed crispy-skinned meat rolled in light pancakes with spring onions and the delicious diced, stir-fried flesh with sweet bean sauce parcelled up in crisp leaves of iceberg lettuce.
In accordance with the ancient tradition governing eating out at Asian restaurants, we chose a course each. The duck was mine and better than the Professor's choice of tofu and scallops: the bean curd cubes were monstrous and gelatinous, which made them very tricky to handle with chopsticks, but the scallops, gingery and slightly spicy, were a treat.
The whole blue cod was generous in size but cod's a tasteless fish at the best of times and it could have done with some dipping sauces. And there was no faulting the small plate of vegetables, but at the price they should have come with dancing girls.
In summary, it would be a stretch to say we were treated like royalty. The word "offhand" gets nearer the mark, I think. And the food was unremarkable and pricey.
If your local is neither of these things, I suggest you stick with it.
Ambience: Just enough
Vegetarians: May struggle
Watch out for: Takeaway customers
Bottom line: Neither cheap nor cheerful
THE BILL
$163.50 for four
Whole fish: $42
Tofu scallops: $28.50
Veges: $18
Duck: $65
Rice: $6
Tea: $4
