Royal China Restaurant in Santa Rosa, CA: A Review

Evaluating Royal China Restaurant's pricing is a matter of relatives. If you're comparing it to other Chinese restaurants, the pricing seems a bit high. However, for a sit-down dinner out in a rather nice setting, it's really toward the much more reasonable end of the scale for the fairly expensive city of Santa Rosa.

You'll find the restaurant in the Rosewood Village Shopping Center, at the intersection of Piner and Marlow in northwest Santa Rosa. Hours are a bit odd - they're open every day of the week, but they close between 3 and 4:30 p.m. after which time only dinner is served.

The pre-3:00 lunch specials are the best value - you get a pretty sizable plate of food for about $8 to $9. There's a selection of about fourteen chicken dishes, eight beef dishes and four pork dishes currently priced at $7.88, five vegetarian dishes at the same price, five prawn dishes or Szechuan Crispy Calamari at $8.88, and a few more expensive dishes like Mongolian Lamb and Princess Prawns at $9.88. You get a pretty good helping of entree along with pork fried rice, chow mein or steamed rice. After 4:30, expect to pay more like $10 to $13 per head, but there's a much wider menu of options for dinner.

From my experience, you pretty much can't go wrong with any of the prawn dishes here. For lunch, any of the chicken and vegetable combinations are tasty and well cooked. One dining companion strongly recommended the Egg Fu Yung, another warned away from the fried pork, saying there was too much Fried and not enough Pork (a common problem with fried meats at Chinese restaurants, sadly.) I find the pork fried rice tasty, but it's pretty insubstantial, with only tiny shreds of roast pork and not much else. Likewise, the chow mein seems a little generic and greasy for the price being asked for it. For $1 more, you can substitute in brown rice with any order instead.

The nice interior is really what sells the place. If you want to have a nice sit-down dinner for about $15, it's hard to find a place in Santa Rosa that provides adequate cleanliness, atmosphere and food quality while also not being overcrowded, but this place manages to do it. Thus, I think the premium is worth it for a good night out with a good seafood dish here and there. I'll get take-out here in a pinch, but though the quality is a marked cut above your Panda Express steam tray level, I still tend to feel like I paid a little too much for a bit too little at the current prices. On the whole, though, it's a decent place and I'm glad it's here in a neighborhood otherwise rather barren of decent restaurants.