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For anyone into hot pot, live seafood and lacquered pigeons, Beverly Hills should exert the same gravitational pull that Leichhardt’s Norton Street did for spaghetti-fanciers in the 1970s.

Several of Sydney’s best Cantonese restaurants are wedged among the kebab stores and takeaways of King Georges Road, including Yummy Seafood, Xi Xiang Feng and Golden Oceans. Beijing Roast Duck is excellent, too. Say what you will about WestConnex (fellow Balmain residents), but I’m stoked to be able to fang over to Beverly Hills from home in 20 minutes.

Those who don’t get out to the south-west suburbs very often may be thinking, “Wait, Sydney has a Beverly Hills?” Yes. (It also has a Fiddletown, but that’s another story.) The area was originally known as Dumbleton, which the residents hated, and thus it was changed to Beverly Hills in 1940 to channel some Californian glamour. Thanks to an influx of post-war immigrants, you can eat up and down the main strip every day for a year and never become bored. I’m not sure if the same can be said for Rodeo Drive.

It’s impossible to single out a “best” Cantonese restaurant in the suburb (each one does something slightly or significantly different from the next), but I will say that Beverly Hills Chinese has become my favourite.

Owner Anthony Kwok’s hospitality is some of the warmest around, and he can sell you a live lobster the size of two Tonka trucks. I only discovered the place a month ago, too, after it popped up on my Instagram feed with pictures of glossy chow mein and stories of Kwok competing in the National Veterans Table Tennis Championships. Hey, social-media algorithm, you’re alright!

Kwok and his wife, Maggie, emigrated from Hong Kong in 1981 and opened their dining room near the train station 17 years later. It’s tiny by any restaurant standards, but especially compared to the sprawling Cantonese behemoths two blocks down the road with their window displays of grumpy trout and prestige baijiu. Decorated with neon signage, a framed Charlie Brown jigsaw puzzle and good-luck trinkets, it’s the kind of bygone decor a CBD restaurant group might ironically appropriate to serve salmon roe on prawn crackers.

There are more than 100 dishes to choose from, but you’re probably going to want to start with XO pipis, because who doesn’t want to inhale a platter’s worth of tank-to-wok clams and deeply flavoured sauce soaking into crisp-fried cakes of vermicelli? Expect to pay around $75 at the current market price for a medium-sized serving, and although the XO doesn’t quite have the stealthy funk of Golden Century’s gold standard, it’s still a delicious way to spend time with a BYO bottle of pink champagne.

Salted egg yolk is something of a signature, and a ferocious amount of fried rice ($29.80) comes topped with meaty, orange nubs of the stuff. A live market-price mud crab is fried with salted egg yolk for an extra savoury blast, and will swiftly send the bill into triple-digits (worth it, though). The same buttery, golden coating also finds its way onto prawns if you want a taste sensation in the same ballpark but for just $38.80. Team them with a side of steamed Chinese vegetables ($22.80) and it’s happy days.

The “small” serving of homespun chicken soup with collagen-rich fish maw (the swim bladder) is $32.80 and can easily feed four. Steamed free-range chook ($36.80) is spangled with sesame seeds across its mustard-yellow skin, the deep-flavoured meat terrifically juicy beneath.

“Who doesn’t want to inhale a platter’s worth of tank-to-wok clams and deeply flavoured sauce?”

A mighty tranche of boneless duck is smothered in taro paste and deep-fried ($36.80) to golden-brown, while batons of eggplant are steamed with what feels like a tonne of garlic and covered in soy sauce and matchsticks of preserved lap cheong sausage ($28.80). Gee, you can eat well here.

Also, pigeon. It’s a 40-minute cooking time if you want a few crispy-skinned squabs for the table, $42.80 each and not listed on the menu (or, at least, not my English one). The pigeon at nearby Xi Xiang Feng might be a little more tender and sweet, but these birds are still very good. Ditto, the ginger and spring onion lobster on a bed of e-fu noodles, $188 per kilogram at the live market price last week, and one heck of a leftovers lunch the next day.

Or you could just hit the prawn toast ($12), spring rolls ($9.80) and beef with black bean ($28.80) and still have a beaut old time in the Kwok family’s company. From the best I can tell, there’s no right or wrong way to order at Beverly Hills Chinese, only the wrong turn if you take the tunnel exit near the Riverwood Indoor Sports Centre.

This review was originally published in Good Weekend magazine