Riverside Cantonese, Cardiff Chinese restaurant review

Every year, on New Year’s Day, we go out for a Chinese feast with a big group of friends in Cardiff.

It’s a great opportunity to catch up with mates, nurse a hangover, and most importantly eat a huge amount of delicious food. With the inevitable anti-climax of New Year’s Eve, I always look forward to it more than the night before.

In previous years we've been to Yang's, Happy Gathering, Bo Zan and Good World.

This year was the turn of Riverside Cantonese, a Cardiff institution which relocated to a new home on Leckwith Road in 2017. We’d only ever visited their previous venue on Tudor Street, which was a little tatty around the edges, and so we thought it was high time we checked out their new location.

In light of another Cardiff Chinese institution recently receiving a zero-hygiene rating, it's worth noting how bright and clean Riverside Cantonese looks. And, there's big windows that look onto the kitchen from the dining room, so you can see exactly what's going on. 

Riverside Cantonese’s menu features familiar Cantonese classics as well as more interesting dishes such as Szechuan monkfish skewers, pork with aubergines in chilli and black bean, and stuffed duckling. There’s also dim sum on offer at lunchtimes.

We ordered a bunch of crowd-pleasing dishes and multiple rounds of ice cold Tsingtao beer, all of which arrived swiftly throughout the meal.

A generous whole crispy duck (£43.80) delivered on its promise of crisp and tender meat stuffed into pancakes with sweet hoisin and cleansing cucumber. It was supplemented by the less familiar addition of lightly pickled mooli and carrot; it certainly provided balance to the richness of the duck but wasn’t quite my bag.

A big plate of excellent grease-free prawn toast (£7.80) had plenty of sweet crustacean and toasty sesame.

Fresh as you like lettuce wraps (£7.80) were enjoyable piled high with minced pork and crisp vermicelli, but I thought the sweet and savoury sauce could have delivered a bigger punch of flavour.

Last up, very good barbecue ribs (£7.80) had plenty of flesh on the bone and were pleasingly sticky and zingy.

For mains, a tangle of crispy chilli beef (£10.80) was the most impressive; the tender beef was lightly-battered and the sweet and spicy sauce avoided any gloopiness. We polished off one portion and swiftly ordered another.

Fillet steak (£14.80) in satay sauce was another highlight. Big hunks of meat and crisp veggies were coated in a sauce with a good richness of peanut and hit of spice.

Szechuan king prawns (£11.80) were all thriller and no filler – the plump and sweet crustaceans were bathed in a light sauce with a good thrum of chilli.

Crispy squid (£10.80) looked a little pallid, but the batter was crisp and the flesh tender, with an unexpectedly potent chilli heat.

Kung po pork (£9.80) was probably my least favourite dish, owing to the presence of rather bland water chestnuts, but the addition of cucumber provided a nice contrast to the dish’s heat.

On the carb front, Singapore vermicelli (£8.80) was a very good example with a good curry warmth and plentiful tender meat.

Egg fried rice (£4.80) had an unmistakably savouriness from the wok.

For dessert, banana fritters (£6.50) didn’t have the crispest batter, but they weren’t greasy at all and the fruit was deliciously soft and sweet. A scoop of thick vanilla ice cream and drizzle of caramel completed the very enjoyable dessert.

We had a delicious New Year’s Day feast at Riverside Cantonese with excellent service. I've got a lot of time for an old skool Chinese meal and Riverside Cantonese very much hit the spot. Our friends unanimously agreed that they'd be keen to go back next year; I’ll take that as high praise indeed.

The Details:

Address - Riverside Cantonese Restaurant, Leckwith Road, Cardiff CF11 6HN

Web - https://riversidecantonese.com/

Telephone - 029 2037 2163