A few months ago, one of Queensway’s serial restaurateurs was sitting in one of his restaurants and telling me his woes. The Immigration officers had cut a swathe through Chinatown, unearthing illegal workers from the basements of Gerrard Street and Lisle Street, and had now turned their attention to the duck-and-dim-sum emporia of Queensway. Who’s down there now? I asked, pointing to the kitchen. Poles and Brazilians, he told me, miserably.
Things have settled down now, so I hear. Only the Chinese can cook Chinese restaurant food and, happily, the temporary wobble is over, so the kitchens of Queensway are once more staffed by Chinese. They are legal this time, though, and prices seem to have risen a notch to pay for it.
There is no better place to assess the health of Queensway than at lunch at Royal China. It has been famous for its dim sum for decades, and the queues seem to get longer every weekend: you would be wise to arrive at midday Monday to Saturday, or 11am on Sundays.
The trick with dim sum is to order a mixture of steamed, fried and deep-fried stuff. Siu mai and har kau – little, open wonton-wrapper pillars stuffed with pork and prawn, and delicate, scalloped, rice-flour prawn dumplings, respectively – are both steamed, and both excellent.
Other steamed dishes include cheung fun – long, slippery tubes of rice flour filled with barbecued pork, beef or prawns. A recent “special” cheung fun featured duck, spring onion and hoi sin, with some thin, crunchy pastry, all wrapped in the squidgy rice-flour pasta. Novel, and actually very toothsome.
Fried dishes that always impress are the stodgy but delicately flavoured fried pastes, and the paper-wrapped prawns. Glutinous rice in lotus leaf is not as heavy as it sounds, the rice augmented with a piquant assortment of mushroom, wind-dried sausage and salted duck egg, but you might still like a plate of greens to offset the dumplings: gai lan (Chinese broccoli) with hoisin is a good choice.
Pay heed to the daily changing specials (the “fish in bamboo pith” I tried last time showed off the Chinese obsession with texture admirably) and drink tea (try the green tea or puer tea, not the jasmine, for a change) or Tsingtao beer. And get there early, or get there late: just don’t be on time. Everyone else is.
Dim sum and tea, around £15 a head