What do you order at a Cantonese restaurant in Richardson when the menu runs to twelve pages and half the best items aren’t listed in English? That’s the first question most newcomers wrestle with at Royal China, a dim sum and Cantonese kitchen on Greenville Avenue that has been quietly feeding the Chinese-American community in this corridor since the late 1990s. The answer, if you’re being practical, is to show up Sunday morning around 10:30, sit down, and let the carts come to you.
Dim sum at Royal China is a weekend-only affair, and it runs from roughly 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. The dining room is large by any measure — round tables with lazy Susans, vinyl chairs, the particular acoustic texture of a hundred conversations overlapping in Cantonese, Mandarin, and English. It is not a quiet room. It is not trying to be. The carts cycle through with har gow, siu mai, cheung fun with shrimp or beef, turnip cake pan-fried to a crisp edge, sticky rice wrapped in lotus leaves, and egg tarts still warm from the oven. If you hesitate too long, the cart moves on. This is the correct social contract.
Prices stay reasonable for the area — most dim sum dishes run $4 to $7 per plate, and two people can eat extremely well for under $35 before tip. Arrive before 11 if you want the best selection; by noon on a Sunday the room fills and certain items disappear fast. The siu mai here are dense and properly porky, the cheung fun smooth enough that the sauce pools in the folds the way it should. The egg tarts have a flaky, almost shortbread-style shell rather than the puff pastry variety, which is a Cantonese preference worth knowing about before you develop strong opinions.
Outside of weekend dim sum, the dinner menu is where Royal China does its less flashy but arguably more consistent work. The Peking duck requires a day’s advance order and arrives tableside in two courses — skin with pancakes first, meat stir-fried afterward — handled with the kind of practiced efficiency that suggests they’ve done it a few thousand times. Salt and pepper squid, mapo tofu, and the sautéed pea shoots with garlic are all worth your attention. The pea shoots alone have a following.
The service style is brisk and functional, which some people misread as cold. It isn’t. The staff is busy and attentive in the way that actually matters — your tea gets refilled, your plates get cleared, your questions get answered. Nobody is going to explain the menu like a sommelier. That’s fine. This is a neighborhood restaurant doing real volume, not a dining experience designed around you feeling special for showing up.
Royal China sits in a low-profile strip mall on Greenville near Arapaho, surrounded by other Asian businesses — which is itself a reason to make an afternoon of it. Parking is a mild adventure on weekend mornings, but the lot wraps around and you’ll find something within two minutes. Cash is accepted; cards work too. Reservations aren’t typically necessary for dim sum, though large groups should call ahead.
If Richardson has a canonical Sunday morning — the kind where you sit across from someone for two hours and work through a lazy susan’s worth of small plates — Royal China is a reasonable place to have it.
