This Hong Kong Cafe Might Be the East Bay’s Most Affordable New Restaurant

The Target plaza off Macdonald Avenue isn’t the first place you’d think of when planning a lunch excursion in Richmond. After all, this is the domain of better-than-replacement-level fast food (i.e., Wingstop and Panda Express), not anyone’s idea of destination dining.

So it was something of a surprise when, a few weeks ago, I stepped into the plaza’s newest restaurant, Grand Cafe, and found a packed dining room. Almost all of the diners were Chinese seniors, a demographic I’ve rarely encountered on this side of town. Everyone was bent over steaming hot bowls of claypot rice and wonton noodle soup. Somehow, it seems, I’d stumbled into a proper Hong Kong–style cafe.

The kicker? Nothing on the menu was priced at more than $10.75. Several entrées, in fact, were just $7 or $8, undercutting the Panda Express next door. At a time when affordability has reached a crisis point for so many Bay Area families, Grand Cafe might just be the East Bay’s most reasonably priced new restaurant.

As it turns out, the restaurant moved to Richmond this past summer after its original South San Francisco location closed. During my first visit, I decided to try the claypot rice with spare ribs and preserved sausage ($10.75), a Cantonese classic. It came loaded with meat and tender-crisp greens, with a little dish of sweet seasoned soy sauce to pour on top, and the rice was properly crackly and crispy on the edges. It was delicious — if anything, a little less decadently oily and salty than my favorite versions, and more like something a home cook would serve.

The value, on the other hand, was hard to top. All dine-in customers get a free cup of hot tea or unsweetened soymilk, the latter of which I doctored up to my liking with sugar. My meal also came with a complimentary bowl of pork bone soup — savory and soothing, loaded with leafy greens. An order of dry-cooked beef chow fun (also $10.75) — a solid, generously portioned rendition — came with all of the same extras.

One of the tradeoffs for Grand Cafe’s bargain-basement prices is a very DIY approach to service. The dining room — sparsely decorated, apart from a lone Bruce Lee poster in the corner — is set up somewhat cafeteria-style. Food comes out on trays; utensils, condiments and to-go containers are all laid out neatly on a shelf for you to help yourself. A large wire shelving unit along the opposite wall has enough space for a couple dozen diners to bus their trays and dishes when they’re done.

Meanwhile, a sign taped to the front counter reads, “No Tips Needed,” and stresses that food might take 10 to 20 minutes to come out, since every dish is cooked to order. Over a handful of visits, I never had to wait nearly that long.

Unlike a full-on traditional Hong Kong–style cha chaan teng, Grand Cafe only offers a couple of Western-style dishes — a spaghetti with meat sauce I’ve yet to try, for instance. And my sense is that the menu, with its assortment of noodle dishes, rice plates, jook and snacky dim sum, is a bit too broad for every item to be a hit. (I’d still go to a proper dim sum house for pan-fried daikon cakes or steamed rice rolls.) And the seasoning tends to be on the mild side, which is part of the restaurant’s appeal to Chinese elders.