Randomness Guide to London Menu

Chinese restaurant a couple of doors down from Surrey Quays Station.

Royal Palace is one of those slightly frustrating Chinese restaurants that have two menus; one enormously long one with all the usual Anglicised staples, and another one written in Chinese that you'll only get offered if you ask for it (or perhaps if you look sufficiently Chinese). The Chinese menu includes what were described to us as Sichuan and Northern Chinese specialties.

Inside, the decor is quite basic, with plastic tablecloths and a flatscreen telly in the corner, though they have put a few pictures on the walls to cheer the place up a bit. It's actually a reasonably-sized space, though, and could probably seat 30 or more.

Kake and doop visited on a Wednesday evening in April 2009. There were a fair few other people in, mostly on the younger side, and everyone except us was speaking Chinese. The flatscreen was showing some kind of talk show with the sound on (in Chinese).

Neither of us reads Chinese well enough to decipher a menu, but our waitress was kind enough to help us order from the Chinese menu. We suspect she may have gone for the "safer" options, but we still ended up with some reasonably tasty food.

Our first dish was chicken cut into small pieces but still on the bone, cooked with dried red chillies, fresh herbs, and soy sauce. Despite being described to us as "spicy" it wasn't really; it was pretty flavourful for chicken, though. We also had a dish of braised greens with tiny enoki mushrooms; this again was perfectly pleasant. We accompanied this with boiled rice and a portion of boiled handmade dumplings, both of which were fine.

Along with a bottle of wine between the two of us, our bill came to £20/head.

Accessibility: A couple of shallow steps up to get in from the somewhat uneven pavement. It's all on one level once you're in.

See also:

• dimsum.co.uk comment
• Chowhound thread
• Another Chowhound thread