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Ever since the venerable Golden Century closed in 2021, there’s been a great big hole in Chinatown and the wider Sydney dining landscape. Its closure signalled the end of a long, proud line of Cantonese seafood restaurants lined with fish tanks and overrun with dim sum trolleys; of round banquet tables so broad you couldn’t reach the soy sauce bottle; and of menus so long they would stretch from here to China.

It signalled the end, too, of generations of families coming together for celebrations that perpetuated their culture and heritage, keeping it alive for generations to come.

For all those reasons, and about 8888 more, it’s great to be able to welcome the Royal Palace to Chinatown. Seating 400 diners over two levels, it’s the new public-facing restaurant from Ms Sun Wei, who founded the private-room Royal Pavilion in Sussex Street in 2017.

While Golden Century’s Eric, Linda and Billy Wong are busy at their Star and Darling Quarter restaurants, Royal Palace’s ever-present restaurant manager, John Poh, and many of the staff will be familiar to long-time Chinatown devotees.

But first, let’s shout from the rooftops. The tanks are back! The tanks are back! Those dark, sadly shuttered windows are glowing again with tanks of lobster, crab and coral trout. Even better, Golden Century’s two dining levels have been refitted and refurbished; polished, painted and table-clothed. It’s looking spiffy.

I’ve inadvertently stumbled across a soft opening period before the official launch, so instead of testing the kitchen too strongly, I keep the order modest. Prawn scrambled eggs are light and fluffy and studded with almost translucent steamed prawns ($48), and gai laan ($29) is bright green and crunchy. Poached free-range chicken ($40) is neatly chopped and the colour of rice wine. It feels unnecessarily chilled, but this is comfort food that presses the buttons of nostalgia for so many.

Next stop, yum cha, where the focus on seafood plays out across a terrific variety of dim sum, delivered by trolleys and trays every day of the week. Needless to say, the space is packed wall-to-wall with diners who look as if they have been there for years. Har gau prawn dumplings, siu mai, and cheung fun rice roll: all good. Pai gwut – chunky, sweet pork studded with black beans – very good. Durian puffs, fun. Pork and century egg congee, great, the rice broken down into something gentle and creamy.

The ground-floor dining room opens next, and I’m back for the extra-large, plumped-up, steamed oysters with ginger and spring onion ($14 each), and the dish most synonymous with this site: pipis in XO sauce. The waiter goes to the bank of 24 tanks, deftly scoops out half a kilogram of pipis, shakes off the water, weighs them, and brings them over.

Market price is $138 a kilogram, so my half-kilo is $69. It doesn’t look like a lot, so I add fried vermicelli ($25) as well. When it all comes back in one big dish, the shells just steamed open, and the sauce coating the wedges of crisp fried noodles, it’s more than enough.

The warm kick of chilli, crunch of spring onion, complexity of the dark, rich, sauce and all 21 pipis (yes, I counted them) combine in a very celebratory way, and the noodles loosen and soften into a dish in their own right. A follow-up ma po tofu ($48) has a good chilli bite and balance of tofu to pork, although the pork feels over-tenderised.

By the end of August, Royal Palace will be trading until 3am from Thursdays to Saturdays, with the congee menu kicking in after 10pm. There’s still some refining to be done, but the bones are there. Tables need to be angled so that your legs don’t make bruising contact with the steel bars underneath, perhaps, but I wouldn’t change much else. It’s making a lot of people very happy just by being here.