A room with a view: the Royal Garden restaurant in the Addington Hills, where the food was a revelation, and the staff performed a blinder
Keir Starmer sent Rachel Reeves to China. We sent KEN TOWL to have a Chinese at one of Croydon’s best-known, and notorious, beauty spots
Cobra £6.70 a pint: ‘I wouldn’t have minded so much if there had been a view’
Just opposite me in Addiscombe, near the tram stop, there is a Chinese restaurant that never has any customers.
In the 16 years that I have lived here, I think I have seen two families dine there, and one of those was me and my daughters. It was an eerie dining experience; the four of us were outnumbered by the staff. Of course, everyone has their own opinion about such places, businesses that do not seem to do much business, and it is always more fun to speculate about organised crime and money laundering than to settle on any more mundane explanation.
My guess about another food outlet, the Royal Garden, up in the Addington Hills, is that the reasons for its perennial emptiness are as mundane as you can get. It simply doesn’t shout loud enough. It almost appears to be hiding.
Certainly, if you approach it along the London Loop footpath from the nearby Coombe Lane tram stop, you could easily walk past what appears to be an unlit and emphatically closed building that does not appear to have received any love and affection for several decades.
Worse, it sits behind a long and solid-looking hedge that further obscures the view of anyone sufficiently interested to look. You have to walk into the car park, which is full of the cars of dog-walkers in the daytime and, allegedly, doggers in the night time. You have to go round the side before you see the sign that says Royal Garden Restaurant Bar and, if you are inclined to go up to the door and try it, you will almost certainly be surprised to find that it is unlocked.
Upon entry, you are met by the bizarre sight of two human adult-sized teddy bears.
Almost completely hidden: the Royal Garden restaurant, close to the Addington Hills viewing point, takes some finding
They are slumped on a sofa as if in a food coma after too many steamed pork dumplings. My old work and sometimes eating colleague, Simon and I were ushered past them to a bear-free table in the conservatory, where the rain beat a gentle tattoo as we settled in to find that we were not the only customers. Our presence had doubled the clientele.
That’s not counting the man outside, sitting under an awning, hunched over a pint of Cobra, as his three bored cockapoos looked on. I am starting to believe that 50% of all dogs, these days, are cockapoos.
And the Cobra? £6.70, which, for Croydon, is surely a bit steep. As steep as the Addington Hills themselves. Maybe you pay more to drink beer at altitude? Simon, on a diet, opted for a Coke (£3.90).
I wouldn’t have minded so much if there had been a view. Simon asked the waiting staff if they could turn off the heater which, fixed directly above our table, was blasting us intermittently with volleys of hot air. They did so.
Then Simon said it would be nice if they could open up the blinds that obscured the windows. No, they said, we can’t open the blinds because it will be too cold, and now that we have turned the heater off…
It seemed a pity. The Royal Garden Restaurant Bar sits in arguably the most beautiful spot in the borough of Croydon and it has a conservatory, you would think, in order to take advantage of this fact. Yet all of the glass had to be kept covered.
But the proof of the pudding, as it were, was in the food. We shared a Royal hors d’oeuvres which, at £21, was enough for two. It was a good, varied starter, a couple of tender pork ribs, chicken skewers with a sticky satay dip, that sugar-fried cabbage that poses as seaweed, some little breaded bullets of chicken that went well with the chilli sauce, some almost empty mini-spring rolls and four unnecessary lumps of cucumber.
The whole thing was dredged with wafer-thin slices of fresh red and green chilli and made an enjoyable and substantial start to the meal.
Not a bad start: Royal hors d’oeuvres
We chose a dish each to share after that.
I went for the duck with black bean sauce and Simon chose the beef with honey and black pepper. The beef, Simon said, was “fantastic”. I tried some; it was good.
The duck, on the other hand, was a revelation. Large gobbets of lean flesh – there must have been a whole duck breast – in a deeply savoury and unctuous sauce. It glistened on the plate. It looked exactly like it might look in a publicity photograph.
In fact, it looked so good I forgot to take a photograph of it until it had almost gone.
Photo finish: the duck dish was so good, Ken Towl forgot to take a picture until it was almost too late
The resulting image is an artfully contrived close up that obscured a rather empty plate. In fact, we ate rather a lot. Chinese restaurants are not the best places to be on a diet. Or if you have high cholesterol, which I have recently been informed that I do. I consoled myself with the thought that black beans are supposedly high in phyto-nutrients and antioxidants, both things that, I am sure I have heard somewhere, are good for that sort of thing.
Simon’s diet did not seem to be stopping him either: “I think I’ll finish off that last bit of sauce with the egg-fried rice,” he said, and he did. All the plates were empty.
We got the bill – which came to a reasonable £62.30 – and a couple little square chocolates which are about all you can face eating at that point. One wished us Merry Christmas, the other a Happy New Year.
A bit steep: like the climb up the Addington Hills
They also brought us a couple of those little plastic envelopes with a tiny hot towel inside so that we could wipe our greasy fingers. They were just like the ones that you used to get on aeroplanes that started off really hot and then cooled down in about five seconds.
There appeared to be no service added to the bill. When we asked about this, we were told that, apparently, it was not worth the business collecting tips through payment cards because the processing company would end up with all but a few pence of the tip.
I kept my own counsel at hearing this rather disconcerting information. Simon was more forthright. “Sounds like lies to me,” he said, and, honourable as he is, managed to find enough coins in his pocket to cover a 10% tip.
The rain had eased off so we walked over to the viewing platform where you could see, oh, at least as far as central Croydon. Anything beyond was obscured behind a white-out of cloud. Simon looked down at the places where the little brass information plaques used to be and asked if the council had removed them. “No,” I said, “I think it was just thieves,” and then realised that it wouldn’t be that surprising if he were right.
It seems that the Royal Garden can survive without your custom. I mean, it has for a long time, hasn’t it? But imagine what we could do if we went there more often.
At the very least we could keep asking them to open the blinds until they throw caution to the winds and invest in a more effective and less intrusive heating system. And please, do what Simon says, and take cash so that the staff get 100% of their tips.
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Must admit that I don’t visit that often, but when I have, it’s always been pretty busy and the food good. Valentine’s Day in particular has several sittings and you have to book well in advance. Maybe weekends and special occasions are just enough to keep them going?
Welcome Friends is a cracking Chinese restaurant which does most of its business via delivery or takeaway for customers next door in Claret and Ale
I love the food here and whevever we have gone which as been 4 times its always been packed.
Shame. It is a really good restaurant. It does a roaring trade in take-aways.
You must be joking. Try booking a table for a Saturday on the same day and you’ll probably be disappointed. It’s regularly fully booked. By the way, the food is excellent as is the service.
You can’t be serious! Try turning up on spec on a Sunday lunchtime, as I did, and you will almost certainly be able to eat. “By the way”, the review alludes to the general excellence of the food and the service.
As an independent website practising proper standards of journalism, all reviews are conducted on a no-notice basis, funded by us. On the occasions when we have been invited to review an establishment, we say so
£6.70 for a pint of Cobra at a restaurant is a bargain. I was charged £6 for a 330ml can at a trendy Notting Hill place!
From the Royal Garden Owners & Management
Firstly, thank you Ken for taking the time to come and visit our restaurant, especially as you are a local resident, we are surprised you don’t know us as well as your article would read. We know and have created numerous good relationships with many of our local residents from surrounding roads and they would paint a very different picture.
Our evening trade is a thriving business through our dining in and take out service. We have a great team that work super hard who would be extremely disheartened by reading your article.
You came to Addington Hills on a wet and cold Sunday afternoon in January (one of the toughest months for the hospitality trade). We can assure you we have had a lot more than 2 families dine in with us in the past 5 years, which is how long we have been running the restaurant since the previous owners.
Our restaurant is a well known venue for lots of celebrations, being birthdays, weddings, anniversaries. Last year we hosted so many big celebrations plus our weekend evening trade is great with most Fridays and Saturdays being fully booked. Take a look at our social media where you can see what our restaurant is really like.
With regards to our human sized teddy bears, we are a business that is family friendly and the children that dine with their families love our teddy bears, they are played with endlessly and also feature in many of our customers pictures. Apologies if they are not to your liking but we love them and so do our regular and good customers.
We love our location and wouldn’t want it any other way, we are certainly not an “unloved” derelict building. A tremendous amount of hard work has gone into redesigning our restaurant. We have completely renovated our garden area, giving great seating and views in the summer time. The inside of our restaurant is decorated beautifully with blossom trees and fairy lights- recently having a wedding reception in December where they didn’t feel the need to decorate the venue as it was already “decorated perfectly”. However, we are in the middle of the woods and keeping our restaurant warm can prove difficult sometimes, so we occasionally take the decision to close the blinds to make sure our customers are more comfortable when eating and also our staff aren’t cold too on these cold, quiet January days.
As a business we decided to remove the service charge about a year ago. This was a personal choice to help our customers now that the cost of living is at an all time high. It gives them more freedom to leave a tip on their own terms, which the majority do. Rest assured, all tips are shared equally to all of our staff.
Finally, please don’t feel it necessary to urge our local community to visit us. Our local community are already the cornerstone of our business which is what keeps us going year after year. And as always we can’t thank them enough for their support and amazing custom week in week out.
We would love to welcome you this Saturday for another meal, unfortunately we are almost fully booked already.
Another demonstration of the impact of appearing on the pages of Inside Croydon.
A bit of an over reaction to what was essentially a good review – I praised the food highly – and you seem to have taken my comments about another restaurant as applying to your own. Good, though, to hear that staff do get all of the tips. I’m sure you will agree that it is despicable for restaurants to withhold tips from staff. Don’t worry about Saturday; I’ll pop by when it’s quiet. That duck was seriously good.