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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