Royal Palace Seafood Restaurant

A couple of years in, what’s remarkable about Royal Palace is how quickly the conversation has moved on from mourning Golden Century to celebrating a new Chinatown standby. Every day of the week families and friends across generations come to drink tea over yum cha, to choose live seafood from the wall of tanks, to gather over lazy susans filled edge to edge with plates. This is no nostalgia trip, either. Dumplings from the trolley are sweet and plump, the cheung fun slippery, the prawn-stuffed wu gok shatteringly crisp. Come nightfall, things from the tanks reign, be it mud crab sauced liberally with ginger and shallot or (yep) pipis in XO sauce – good? Yes. The same? Not quite. Where Royal Palace excels, though, is around the edges. The room is swish, waiters are on it (Peking duck service is just the beginning), the room is buzzing. The makings of a new institution? It might already be there.