Royale Eatery is the Long Street institution that taught Cape Town what a burger could be when you took it seriously. Two floors, Royale Eatery on the ground level for walk-ins, Royale Kitchen upstairs for booked dinners, and a menu of more than fifty gourmet burgers that has been refined, never reinvented, since 2003.
What to Expect from the Kitchen
The patties are ground in-house from grass-fed beef, the buns are baked locally each morning, and the toppings extend from the obvious (smoked Cheddar, blue cheese, caramelised onion) to the genuinely inventive, the Double Blue Royale, with two patties, blue cheese, fig preserve and rocket, is the burger you order to understand the room. Vegan and vegetarian eaters are not an afterthought: a half-dozen plant-based builds run on the menu year-round and arrive without the apologetic energy of most steakhouse burger sections.
Sides matter here too. The hand-cut chips are double-fried; the onion rings are battered to order; the cocktail list ('the Royale-with-Cheese' if you've seen the film) is more accomplished than any 'burger joint' has a right to be.
Practical Info
Who It's For
Royale suits the solo diner at the bar with a magazine, the first-date couple who want food more interesting than pizza without committing to white tablecloths, and the small birthday group who'd rather laugh through a forty-minute wait for the upstairs room than spend three times the money for a comparable meal in De Waterkant. The chairs are vintage cinema seats, the walls are art-school posters, and the music is loud enough to flatter a good conversation.
How to Book and What to Expect
The ground floor is walk-ins only and the queue is real on Friday and Saturday nights, arrive before 18:30 or after 21:30 to skip it. Royale Kitchen upstairs takes bookings for dinner from 19:00; phone +27 21 422 4536 or email [email protected]. Expect to spend R120 to R180 per main with sides and a drink. Dress code is whatever you walked in wearing.