Casa Imperial Restaurant

Neighbourhood: Richmond Hill · Address: 9390 Bayview Ave, Richmond Hill, ON · Hours: Mon–Fri 11am–10pm | Sat–Sun 9am–10pm · Price Range: $$ · Phone: (905) 881-8788

Why Visit

Casa Imperial offers true Cantonese banquet dining on a grand scale, with a menu that rivals what you’d find in Hong Kong. If you’re after flawless dim sum and a place to impress, this is where special occasions get next-level treatment.

What Makes It Unique

Their massive, chandelier-filled dining hall is rare in the GTA and the kitchen is staffed by chefs trained in classic Hong Kong fine dining. Unlike most suburban Chinese restaurants, they specialize in top-tier wedding banquets and hard-to-find seasonal Cantonese dishes.

Casa Imperial in Richmond Hill is one of those places people in the GTA bring up in a very specific tone — the tone you use when you’re talking about a restaurant that’s not trying to be trendy, not trying to impress tourists with gimmicks, and definitely not trying to be a quick weeknight convenience. It’s a Cantonese banquet house in the old Hong Kong sense of the word: big tables, polished service, serious kitchen work, and a room that seems built around the idea that food is meant to be shared, discussed, and remembered. If you’re coming here for a casual solo dinner, you can, but that’s not really the main point. Casa Imperial is where families come for birthdays, wedding banquets, baby celebrations, lunar new year meals, and those “we should really do something proper this time” dinners that end up involving ten people and several dishes bigger than your table.

The first thing you notice is the scale. This isn’t one of those cramped dining rooms where every chair scrape feels personal. Casa Imperial has the feel of a banquet hall that happens to be a restaurant, with a big, orderly dining room, lots of round tables, lazy Susans spinning under plates of seafood and carving platters, and a steady flow of people moving in and out with the confidence of regulars. At lunch, especially on weekends, the room gets loud fast. Dim sum carts or servers move between tables with trays, aunties call for tea top-ups, families scan the room for whatever’s still hot, and the whole place has that efficient, slightly chaotic energy that seasoned dim sum diners actually like. At dinner, the pace changes. The lighting feels a bit more formal, the tables are set with more intention, and the atmosphere shifts toward banquet mode — less browsing, more ordering with purpose.

What Casa Imperial does better than a lot of places in the GTA is the old-school Cantonese banquet stuff that can be hard to find done properly outside Hong Kong. The Peking duck is the obvious example. It has to be ordered in advance, and that matters because they’re doing the real thing here, not just pulling a bird out when somebody at the next table asks for it. The duck comes in two parts, which is exactly how it should. First is the skin presentation: crisp, lacquered, carved at the table or just beside it, served with thin pancakes, hoisin, cucumber, and scallion. If it’s good, you’ll hear the skin before you even taste it — that light crackle when the knife goes through it means the roasting and air-drying were done right. The second service uses the rest of the bird in a sensible way, usually as duck fried rice or duck noodle soup, so nothing feels wasteful or tacked on. That second course matters because it shows the kitchen isn’t just chasing a dramatic centerpiece; they’re doing the full duck properly from start to finish.

The dim sum service is another reason people keep coming back. On weekend mornings, Casa Imperial fills up early with families who know the drill. You don’t really wander in at 11:30 expecting a peaceful table and a fully relaxed pace; that’s not the game here. The room starts moving around 9am, and the early hours are your best bet if you want the widest selection and the least painful wait. The classics are all here: har gow with translucent skins that hold together without turning gummy, siu mai that don’t fall apart when picked up, char siu bao in both steamed and baked versions, cheung fun with shrimp, beef, or fried dough, and sticky rice wrapped in lotus leaf that feels especially suited to this kitchen’s style. There’s something reassuring about a place where the dim sum isn’t trying to reinvent itself. The point is consistency, texture, and speed, and Casa Imperial usually gets those things right.

This is also the kind of restaurant where other tables tell you a lot about the place. You’ll see huge family groups ordering as if they’ve done this hundreds of times, which they probably have. You’ll see business lunches with a more formal, slightly quieter feel. You’ll see wedding-related meals where the table order is very deliberate and the dishes keep arriving in waves. And you’ll see a steady stream of people who clearly came for one specific item — the duck, the seafood, the abalone, the banquet soups — and were happy to build the rest of the meal around it. That’s a good sign. It means the kitchen has enough reputation in different circles to pull in people with very different expectations, and still keep them satisfied.

If you’re doing dinner rather than dim sum, Casa Imperial makes the most sense when you order like a group that’s there to celebrate something, even if the occasion is just “we finally all found a time that works.” The seafood dishes are a big part of the appeal. Fresh steamed fish is a standard order for a reason, and here it’s the kind of dish that benefits from being treated simply, with the fish quality and steaming technique doing the work. Whole fish presentations are common, and they look right on a round table where everyone can reach in and take a piece. Abalone and dried seafood soups are the more premium side of the menu, the dishes that mark a meal as being more formal and more expensive than your average Chinese dinner. If you’ve grown up around this food, you’ll recognize the rhythm immediately: a soup course to start, something whole and celebratory in the middle, starches and vegetables to round things out, and dessert if the table still has room.

The restaurant’s biggest strength is that it understands banquet dining as a social event, not just a list of dishes. That sounds obvious, but a lot of places miss it. Casa Imperial gets that the table matters almost as much as the food. The pacing is designed for long meals with lots of conversation. The dishes are meant to be shared family-style. The staff generally knows what’s going on with large bookings, and the room is equipped for it in a way many smaller restaurants aren’t. If you’re planning a wedding banquet, milestone birthday, anniversary dinner, or a big family reunion, this is the sort of place people in York Region mention first because they know it can handle the logistics without everything feeling improvised.

The neighbourhood context matters too. Richmond Hill and the Bayview corridor have become one of the GTA’s most reliable areas for this kind of Chinese dining, especially for people coming from Markham, North York, Scarborough, and even farther west who don’t mind the drive if the meal is worth it. Casa Imperial fits that landscape perfectly. It’s not on a flashy strip with nightlife energy, and it doesn’t depend on foot traffic or passing curiosity. People come here on purpose. The area around it has the practical, car-friendly feel that suits banquet dining: easy enough to get to if you’re planning ahead, parking that’s usually more manageable than downtown Toronto, and enough nearby commercial activity that it feels like part of a larger dining corridor rather than a one-off destination.

Compared with competitors, Casa Imperial leans more heavily into formal Cantonese banquet cooking than places that split their identity between dim sum, fusion plates, and general Chinese takeout. That’s part of why it has such a strong reputation with older diners and families who care about the details. It’s not trying to be playful, and it’s not trying to chase every trend. You come here for the things that require technique and coordination: duck done properly, seafood handled with confidence, banquet dishes served at scale, and dim sum that tastes like the kitchen has muscle memory. There are restaurants that feel more polished in a modern design sense, and there are places that are cheaper, but Casa Imperial is the kind of room people trust when they don’t want to gamble on a major family meal.

The honest reality is that it can be busy enough to test your patience, especially on Sunday mornings and during peak banquet hours. Dim sum fills up quickly, and if you show up late you may end up waiting longer than you expected or finding the best items already gone. Dinner can also be slow if there are large parties in the room or if you’re ordering one of the advance-request dishes. That’s not a flaw so much as a sign that the restaurant is doing what it’s known for. The best strategy is simple: book ahead if you can, especially for groups; order the duck in advance if that’s part of the plan; and don’t arrive hungry and impatient if you’re coming at the busiest times. For dim sum, go early, ideally right when service starts or close to it. For dinner, go with enough people to order a proper spread, because that’s when the kitchen’s strengths really show.

If you know what you’re walking into, Casa Imperial is extremely rewarding. It’s formal without being stiff, busy without feeling careless, and serious about the food in a way that’s increasingly rare. The room has that satisfying, slightly ceremonial feeling you want from a place where major family meals happen. And if you get the Peking duck right — ordered ahead, shared properly, eaten while it’s still hot and crackling — you’ll understand why people in this part of the GTA keep returning here year after year.