Tong Shun Ju Roast Duck Restaurant Link CentralWalk 同順居北京烤鴨店 领展中心城店 (Shenzhen, CHINA) ★★★☆☆

For a second night in a roll, I got to celebrate my birthday but only this time around, I have the whole gang celebrating with me. I decided to go for another Peking duck dinner tonight and it was one of the top roasted duck restaurants in Shenzhen, Tong Shun Ju Roast Duck Restaurant Link CentralWalk (同順居北京烤鴨店 领展中心城店).

Like Jingwei Zhang Roast Duck Restaurant (京味張烤鴨店) which we visited last week, Tong Shun Ju also hails from Beijing and specializes in traditional Beijing cuisine.

From the semi-open kitchen, we could see all the marinated ducks hanging from the oven.

I really like the classic décor here with a modern touch creating an elegant and timeless space for dining.

View from the mezzanine floor overlooking the main dining area on the ground level.

VIP rooms are literally free of charge except for the additional 10% service charge so I called a couple of days in advance to make sure that we had the additional privacy for tonight's dinner. 

Enough exploration on the venue here; time to bring our server in to place our orders.

Roast duck with fruit wood (老北京果木烤鴨) (¥138) – Having tried two of the other top ranked roast duck restaurants in Shenzhen recently, expectations were sky high coming into this meal. Could this beat the previous two versions of Peking duck that we had the pleasure of trying the last two weeks?

We were about to find out.......

Compared to Jingwei Zhang Roast Duck Restaurant (京味張烤鴨店) and Duck de King (金鴨季), this was by far the less delicious roast duck out of the three we have tried this month. The duck skin was reasonably crispy and there was some smokiness from the fruit wood but the aroma emanated largely from its enticing fragrance rather than its taste. The other disappointment came from the chun bing (春饼) which was a bit dense and chewy. All in all, the dish was decent but nowhere near great (or even good) in my opinion.

Boiled beef omasum with sesame paste (京城爆肚) (¥78) – Very hard and chewy. Didn't finish.

Braised streaky pork in brown sauce (張飛把子肉) (¥28) – No one could resist fatty belly drizzled in a sweet and sour brown sauce. At least I couldn't.

Sea cucumber hot and sour soup (海參酸辣湯) (¥28) – I didn't get to try this myself but it was reportedly OK by Jelloman.

Spinach sauce bean curd with sauce (松波豆腐) (¥46) – One of the "plus" dish tonight. The green color came from dipping the bean curd tofu into a homemade spinach sauce which was relatively light and refreshing. 

Stir-fried mixed vegetables with olive oil (山泉橄欖油浸時蔬) (¥38) – This along with the tofu provided two really nice vegetarian dish with light flavors to offset the richness of the remaining dishes.

Four dim sum in Palace (宮廷四點) (¥58) – I found this English name directly from their English food menu.

Apparently, these were some of the sweet treats from an imperial meal of Qing dynasty. From left to right, kidney bean roll (芸豆卷), pea cake (豌豆黃), glutinous rice roll (艾窩窩) and soybean flour cake (驢打滾). Hongkongers should be no stranger to the soybean flour cake (or rolling donkeys in Chinese) and these bite-sized servings of the sweet nibbles made with steamed glutinous rice layered with brown sugar and then covered with soy bean flour were again the most popular choice for everyone tonight.

Juicy beef pie (爆汁門丁肉餅) (¥16) – We almost forgot about these juicy beef puffs made with minced Australian wagyu beef which took a while to arrive. I wasn't sure if that was the juice or broth coming spraying straight out from my first bite and it was bursting with flavors. That's for sure.

I was truly blessed having not one but two birthday celebrations this year. Very thankful for the lovely treat and since we finished early, perhaps we could squeeze in some sweet soup just before we head back to Hong Kong via the super-efficient rapid train.

Food Rating: 5.1/10

Price: ¥¥¥

Address: Shop LF1024, L1F, 3 Fuhua Road 1st, Futian, Shenzhen, China

深圳市福田区福华一路3号领展中心城 L1F层 LF1024铺

Closest Metro Station: Convention & Exhibition Center station (會展中心)

Tel: +86 (755) 83230100

Opening Hours: 10:00am - 10:00pm daily

Map: https://j.map.baidu.com/29/vo