The 10 best Chinese restaurants in Perth

Good Fortune Roast Duck House has been synonymous with crackling roast pork, reams of roast duck and enough chicken to feed an entire neighbourhood since it opened in 1999. Both Northbridge and Victoria Park locations have their signature roast ducks hanging in the window, promising crisp skin, tender meat and just enough fat to coat your choice of noodles or rice. Local tip: ask the chefs to debone a duck for you, and you’ll get the bones in a bag to take home, perfect for stock or congee. Whether you’re eating in or grabbing takeaway one thing is certain – you can never go wrong with a roast duck from Good Fortune. 

Red Chilli delivers on the tongue-numbing mala spice characteristic of Sichuan cuisine. The fried chilli chicken will have you rummaging through mountains of dried chilli for a nugget of fried chicken, only to reach for the soothing cool of any one of the cold entrees – like the cucumber salad or the wood ear mushroom salad. The shu zhu yu (Sichuan boiled fish) is a must-order, with tender filets of poached fish hidden in a vat of bright red chilli oil. 

It’s rare that a restaurant connected with a hotel deserves a mention, but Grand Orient situated in the Melbourne Hotel down Milligan Street is the exception, simply as it’s one of the rare places in Perth that serves Peking duck tableside. When you order, expect to see a cart being rolled next to your table, with a whole duck and a bamboo steamer. The servers will lift the bamboo steamer to reveal perfect rounds of thin pancakes, waiting to be filled. Watch as the server pulls out a sharp carving knife, slicing wafer-thin slices of duck and placing them expertly in the centre of each pancake, served with a wave of a hoisin sauce and spring onion. Before you know it, the bones of the duck are whisked away, leaving you with a crisp, savoury-sweet duck pancake. 

Chin’s Noodle House has been a suburban favourite in Leeming for decades, backed by head chef Chin’s 38 years’ worth of culinary experience. Special celebrations call for the Peking duck set course. You’ll start with paper-thin slices of crisp golden duck skin enveloped in a flour crepe. The second course sees the bones of the duck boiled in soup, with preserved greens adding a salty-sour note to the soup. The final course is a choice between a sang choy bao, which features stir-fried duck cradled in a fresh lettuce leaf, or shredded duck stir-fried with ginger or shredded duck with noodles. It’s a celebration of all the best portions of a roast duck that leaves nothing to waste.  

Andly Private Kitchen brings Chinese fine dining to Perth. With a seasonal menu that spans many of China’s eight major cuisines, you’ll go from Shangai’s lion’s head meatballs to lobster fitting for a Cantonese banquet to Patagonian toothfish on a bed of prawns. Thinly cut squid is painstakingly wrapped around king prawn, the sweetness soothed by a flash of chilli sauce, with the familiar mild numbing sensation of Sichuan peppercorns. The dining room is as unique as the food – an intimate space that feels like stepping into a home, thanks to the long communal table at its centre, with traditionally carved redwood tucked neatly down each side. While it comes at a steep cost (menus are fixed, starting at $100 and going all the way to $300 per person) and booking is determined through a series of text messages, it's well worth the effort. 

Hunan cuisine is synonymous with sweet and sour flavour and lip-burning spice. Unlike its Sichuan cousins, the heat of Hunan cuisine can be described as ‘dry-heat’ rather than the numbing spice of Sichuan peppercorn. From noodles with spicy dry beef to those with hot and sour chicken, heed the menu’s chilli warning as each bowl is sure to pack some heat. If you’re not in the mood for noodles, go for the iron wok dishes, including slow-cooked pork rib and hotpot chicken with tofu skin, each with enough mix of spicy sauce and vegetables to make a whole meal, with a side of rice.  

Go to Fortune Five at lunch for dim sum. Stay at Fortune Five in the evenings for a Chinese banquet, where you’ll fill yourself up on an array of fried, sauteed and steamed banquet favourites, from glistening rust-red spare ribs with Peking sauce to a bubbling clay pot of squid, mushroom and shrimp. At Fortune Five, things are done traditionally – from carts of bamboo longs carrying gently steamed har gao, to servers bringing any lobster, fish, snow crab or eel you’ve ordered for inspection before being whisked away to the kitchen. It’s well worth the queue during the weekend lunch rush. 

Wang’s Treasure House in Morley is great for your typical Chinese banquet. Think garlic kai lan (Chinese broccoli), char siu, Mongolian beef, and sizzling tofu with salted egg and mince circling a lazy susan with a clay pot or two, ready to be served in bowls of white rice. But the lines stretching down Wellington Road on Saturday around noon tell you that the real treasure is the dim sum during lunch. You can tell that the dim sum is good at Wang’s – simply look for the pink blush of prawn peeking through the translucent skin of its har gao, the beautifully wrapped parcels of pork and prawn in the siu mai, and the smoothness of the congee.  

With its long, ballroom-style dining hall on Albany Highway, Pinn’s Palace is perfect for large crowds – from extended family gatherings, Lunar New Year reunion dinners and long catch-ups with friends. While the dinner banquet leans Cantonese, you’ll still find some Malaysian Chinese favourites there, including mee goreng and Penang Hokkien char. The expansive private dining rooms offer enough space for everyone to enjoy a feed around the lazy susan, without bumping elbows or shuffling behind chairs. 

Fitzgerald Seafood Restaurant has been faithfully serving the North Perth locals for more than 30 years, with classics you’d find in any Chinese-Australian restaurant, like sweet and sour pork, and fried chicken with honey sauce. Don’t be fooled though – despite its name, Fitzgerald Seafood Restaurant does more than just seafood and Chinese-Australian classics. Look no further than the deep-fried duck with yam, where the crisp skin of the duck is layered with yam on its underside, a textural counterpoint to the tender flesh of the duck. It’s a classic dish that’s hard to find done well, making Fitzgerald Seafood Restaurant well worth the visit.