Koi Palace
Daly City, CA 94015-2613
Phone: (650) 992-9000
- Price:
- $$$
- Cross Street:
- Hickey Boulevard
- Hours:
- Mon-Fri 11am-2:30pm, Sat 10am-3pm, Sun 9am-3pm, Daily 5pm-9:30pm
Editorial Review for Koi Palace – by Scott Hocker
The Scene
Walk through the moon-gate entranceway to see a series of tanks filled with seafood and display cases featuring luxury ingredients like shark's fins and dried abalones. The dining room, with koi pond and Day-Glo jade-green decor, bustles with Chinese families celebrating a special occasion or enjoying a low-key meal.
The Food
There are a few meandering servers carrying steamer baskets during dim sum service, but opt for the checklist approach, where everything is made to order and the flaky pork-filled taro puffs, spicy glutinous rice rolls with XO sauce, and shrimp-stuffed eggplant don't have time to get cold. At dinner, gamy roasted squab boasts crispy skin and tender flesh; wafer-thin slices of briny-sweet geoduck sashimi sit on a bed of ice; and fresh seafood, like Dungeness crab steamed with rice wine, garlic and scallions, is handled with a light touch.
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Insider Tips
The ExtrasParties of up to 400 people can be accommodated for banquets.
What to DrinkThough the wine list focuses on chardonnays and cabernets that don't mesh well with Cantonese cooking, there is also a wide range of rice wines available.
User Reviews for Koi Palace
06/14/2008 Posted by foodielover
The restaurant is huge and you definitely need reservations for dinner. The food is comprised of expensive and good if not high quality ingredients but is it reasonable to spend $388 for a banquet table that serves 10? I didn't feel the food was worth the price. Only 3 memorable items: the appetizer which consisted of shrimp on top of a eggplant square, battered & fried, shark fin/birdnest soup where you actually see a lot of shark fin and they give you a huge bowl of it (a lot), and sliced cantaloupe with a mango jello piece where all good. Another platter of roast duck (which was good) served with seaweed, ?cuttlefish, and beans/vegt was so-so. The white chop chicken was cooked just right but bland as were most of the other dishes. The steamed prawns were presented in a circle and pretty good. I think our guests were not used to the exotic taste of fish stomach (with vegts). I grew up eating Chinese food, but I'll take tripe over fish (it was huge) stomach any day. The steamed rock cod was cooked just right but I don't like rock cod that much (again, a very large, meaty fish). Unfortunately, most of the waiters do not speak nor understand English. They have to go get a higher ranking waiter to translate. It was so loud on a Friday nite around 7:30 PM that I couldn't hear what our friends across the table were saying until the crowds thinned out and went home. It's not a place to have a nice quiet dinner but obviously quite popular. You have to be aggressive and flag down the wait staff if you want anything. YOu can probably do better at some of the peninsula restaurants (HK Flower Lounge) for the same price.
Pros: Exotic, expensive ingredients
Cons: Poor service, extremely noisy, crowded, over-priced
02/18/2008 Posted by KoiPalaceSucks
The food is okay, definitely not worth the money... especially when they charge you $72 for buying the raw fish, then charge you an extra $18 to cook it. Who would buy just the fish alone and not have them cook it with vegetables or tofu? Furthermore, we got there right at 6:30PM for our reservation, and then find out that they had "lost" our reservation. Rather than trying to seat us with effort, they said "we can't do anything about it, it's not our fault and this is just how our process is." What kind of service is that? They later found that someone had transferred the list of reservations to the books incorrectly, and found that three other parties had the same issue as us. We were finally seated by 8:00PM and no compensation or apology was given to us. At least management was willing to listen to what we had to say, but still. After finding that it was Koi Palace's fault, the stupid hostess still persisted in saying that this was the process and that she was going to seat us next. After saying that 3 or 4 times and seating others, it ticked us off.
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