Hong Kong Palace — Restaurant in Millbrae

Overview: Chinese Food...family style.

Meal/Time: Dinner Sat 5/11 @ 1806 Party size: 9 Seated: 1806 Ordered: 1810 First ordered item arrived: 1815

Decor/Atmosphere:  2 floors of dining.  Looks like the banquet rooms are upstairs.

Parking: there is a small lot next to the restaurant, but if you continue down El Camino there is a dedicated larger parking lot right across the street at the corner.  It is marked for Hong Kong Palace Parking only.

Family style dining...meaning large tables available.

Service/ Front of the House: greeted and seated immediately.

Service/Serving Staff: helpful in describing and making suggestions. They came around and replaced dirty plates.

Food: we ordered Family style.

Crab & Fish maw soup $22.00 - very flavorful, but add some black pepper.

Steamed Chicken $32.00 - served cold with minced ginger and oil.

Peking Duck $48 for a whole duck- crispy skin.    Meat is tender.  I just which the skin was a bit more crispy. The buns that were served were really tiny.

Honey Walnut shrimp $22- really big shrimp.  Lightly battered.  Not overly sauced.

Salt and Pepper Lobster $66.00-  ok... flavor is very light.  Steamed then lightly floured and flash deep fried.  Lobster is chopped  up so you can pick what you want.

Oyster and Tofu clay pot $24.00- the oysters are dried oysters and not fresh.  The Tofu is really soft. Unless you are used to dried oyster the flavor can be a bit intense.

Steamed fish $55.00 - moist.   Not much flavor . They dress the fish at the table

Sautéed pea  shoots with garlic $22.00 - yummy but some pieces are on the mature side so it can be a bit tough

HK Style Peking ribs $20.00 - more like sliced pork chops.  Not boneless pieces.  Flavor is really light.

Beef short ribs with tofu $29.99- tender braised beef with steamed broccoli. The Tofu is creamy.  Very flavorful.   The sauce is light and a bit peppery.  This is the winner for tonight

Complimentary dessert- red bean soup with kelp.  Sweet and a bit fishy tasting.  Not my cup of tea.

Value: $375.15 (Tip included $67.53) total $442.68.  $49.19 per person including tip and tax.  Lots of food, not bad for banquet level food.

Restroom: Men's Room has 2 urinals and 1 toilet with 1 sink.  The automatic hand dryer was broken at the time of my visit.

The bathroom is very roomy and very clean as Chinese Restaurant Bathrooms go.

Will I come back?: sure why not......

Last time we visited we had a dispute between what we ordered and we were charged. We were 8 people party so we checked in the dim sum order sheet and I guess it is normal I won't ask around what you and you and you order so basically my point is that other than what I ordered I didn't know what the other people ordered. At the time we checked out, we checked on what we ordered to compare what they stamped according to the size of the dim sum they delivered. We found there was one extra SM dim sum difference. Before raising the question to the restaurant we asked each other at that time if we ordered anything extra not in the dim sum order sheet but we didn't. Next we told the waiter and then the waiter brought that up to the boys lady. What we were surprised the boss lady reacted quite rude saying that it happened again I don't know if she meant this happened again from particularly us or she meant this happened again in general. Long story short, we found out that SM dim sum in question was put down by one of the workers during the time and we basically didn't even know if maybe any of us ordered. We did ask the boss lady to charge it anyway before we found out. We also told her that after we understood what's wrong. What we felt bad was that she sounded like we were trying to cheat. I really don't think it should be our job to remember what to order especially we have so many people and order so many. What they should do is to ask their worker to cross check while putting down the dim sum to make sure we did order in the sheet. Pretty disappointed how they handle...

Terrible customer service - DO NOT go there especially for any special occasion or celebration. Very rude staff and the female restaurant manager's attitude was even worse than the staff. We had a party of 9, but there were 8 bowls of setting on the table. When we asked for one more bowl for the soup, the waiter didn't believe us that we had 9 people. He proceeded to point his finger and counted around the table of the 8 of us sitting there at the time and ignored the empty seat with a jacket on it (one person was away from the table at the restroom). We told him one person was at the restroom and we needed 9 bowls. He continued to argue with us and INSISTED that we only had 8 people like he didn't believe us. It took a few more tries for us to convince him that there was really a 9th person before he reluctantly went to get one more bowl for us. The dinner package came with white rice, but they never gave us the rice until we asked for it several times. We had to ask twice for them to change our dirty plates. The fish entree came out VERY LATE, AFTER we had finished eating all of the other entrees, and they were non-apologetic about it. They were actually non-apologetic for everything that went wrong for that meal. They broke the chocolate 'Happy Birthday' sign for my mother's birthday cake into many pieces and the manager accused us of breaking it and giving it to them that way. This was one of the worst dining experiences I have ever had!!! DON'T...