King’s Palace Congee & Noodle Bar

King’s Palace, located at the second highest floor of Festival Walk, is a slightly more upscale version of your typical local congee and noodle joint. My mother and I have been here a few times and we find that the quality of food here is very inconsistent. Sometimes, it’s pretty good. But other times, it makes us regret making the choice to come here when there are so many other restaurants in the mall… And unfortunately, today was one of those times.
My mother and I came at a little before 2:30pm and since it was late, we managed to get a table right away. There’ve been times that we’re here at around 1pm and have to wait at least fifteen minutes. My mother ordered the roast suckling pig with wonton noodles, and I got the barbecued pork rice. The food took quite a long time to arrive — 15 minutes — and when we asked, the waiter said it was because there was only one chef left at the moment.
My mother’s roast suckling pig had more fat than meat to it, and was extremely salty. No joke — I chugged two cup of tea after I had a piece. My barbecued pork was not bad, but there were only 5 measly pieces. The rice was also so soft that it was on the verge of being soggy. There was also way too much rice for the fact that there was so little pork too.
On the bright side, all the food came out hot. Maybe it was because we came at a time that the chefs are all ending their shifts, causing the quality of food to drastically drop? I don’t think my mother and I will be back in a while — the last time we were here, the food was disappointing too.

This place does something that is so distinctively local and in a sense, down market, that I would classify it as being truly the essence of local Hong Kong cuisine: the cha siu rice with a fried egg.
To those who has no idea of what I’m talking about, this is the Hong Kong cuisine of roasted meats (siu mei) where mostly pork items are roasted, honey roasted to produce a number siu mei items. Cha Siu is the practice of marinating pork in honey sauce (plus some other spices) before roasting it, producing a succulent and tender meat that goes extremely well with rice. The fried egg is a modern adaptation to this because it just goes so well with rice, the yolk slowly percolating through the rice is just a heavenly mix.
Enough about the cha siu rice. Anything else that’s available? Yes, apart from the rice dishes you also have the wanton noodle which I have never tried because that’s like asking for ketchup at a French restaurant… its just wrong. But do feel free to go and try because i hear its actually quite nice as well.
Price wise its not the cheapest but they do give you better quality than some of the local joints and I guess they have a guarantee as to how their products were made which is an issue with some places these days.

It was just ordinary day and my friends and I were wondering where we should go for dinner. As there were so many options at the Festival Walk, it all came down to what kind of cuisine we wanted. As we were quite a big group, I preferred Chinese ones as it worked better with a bigger group and we could try as many dishes as we wanted.
There were quite a few Chinese restaurants in the mall and we ended up in King’s Palace Congee & Noodle Bar, mainly because none of us had tried that before so I supposed we could all try it out. It was rather packed as it was Friday night and the waiting time was no joke. Too bad that we did not make up our mind earlier as we almost waited for an hour to finally get a table (and we were completely famished). The moment we sat down, we could not wait to order already. As we were too hungry, we did not really read through the menu and ordered whatever that popped in my head, so fried rice… noodles… Siu Mei… we ordered all kind of food and I could almost tell that the waitress was struggling to keep track of what we ordered…
Anyway, the food arrived and I was especially impressed with the fried rice with cha siu. Normally for fried rice like this, the rice is either too oily or too dry, but the fried rice was perfect and you could taste the scrambled egg and it was definitely not too oily. With the spring onions and the veggies, it was rather refreshing; as for the cha siu, the texture was very nice and not like I was chewing rubber. The mixture of sweetness and saltiness complimented each other very well.
All in all, this place was all right and you can find whatever Chinese restaurant has to offer here.