The two kitchens
Tap a side to tilt the whole page toward it — colour, order and emphasis all follow. Nothing is ever hidden. The bar at the top of the screen does the same thing, wherever you are. Straight to the menu.
Pine, crane,
long life
01
The three red characters on the sign are 松鶴樓 — Sōng Hè Lóu, Pine Crane Pavilion. The little green roundel beside them is a pine tree, which makes the logo a pun on the first character.
Pine and crane together are the old Chinese emblem of long life, from the phrase 松鶴延年 — pine and crane prolong the years. A restaurant that has held one corner of one suburban parking lot for over thirty years has been trading that whole time under a name that means exactly that.
Nobody has ever pointed this out, because this restaurant has never had a website, a designer, or a line of press.
Two kitchens,
one address
02Two numbered systems, running side by side, each one going the whole way from soup to a dinner for eight. The Peking side is P and a number, P04 to P108 — plus five strays that kept an S, and the PEK group dinners at the end. The Cantonese side is C, C01 to C104, plus its own CAN dinners. Both sides run the same ladder — soup, chicken, beef, seafood, rice, and a group dinner that goes up to eight people — so on most courses you are not choosing a dish, you are choosing a method.
Where the two sides disagree is the interesting part. The Peking side owns the appetizers, the noodles and the tofu. The Cantonese side owns the fried rice, the chop suey and the egg foo yung. Neither side borrows from the other.
| Course | Peking | Cantonese |
|---|---|---|
| Appetizers | 10 | none |
| Soup | 3 | 2 |
| Chicken | 10 | 7 |
| Beef | 5 | 6 |
| Pork & ribs | 5 | 4 |
| Seafood | 8 | 10 |
| Rice | 7 | 9 |
| Noodles | 8 | none |
| Tofu & vegetables | 5 | none |
| Chop suey | none | 6 |
| Egg foo yung | none | 4 |
| Group dinners | 6 | 6 |
Then there is a third, much smaller system that belongs to neither: the Chef’s Specials, lettered instead of numbered, A through R — every letter except L. L outgrew the alphabet and took a section of its own: Special Chow Mein, and six variations on it.
the gap is L — it runs its own section
What people
drive here for
03Two independent counts of what customers write — Google’s own keyword tally across 322 reviews, and a separate read of 266 written ones — put the same dish first by about three to one. The figures below are Google’s.
161 dishes,
one index
04Every number on the menu, in menu order. Tap one and the page takes you to it. A bar down the left edge marks where a new section starts.
67Peking side P, plus five S numbers and the PEK dinners
54Cantonese side C, plus the CAN dinners
24Chef’s specials letters, not numbers
16 items carry no number at all — ten sauces and six cans. Down there
a bar on the left edge starts a new section
The room,
and the parking lot
06
White linen, folded peach napkins, pale maple chairs, blue-green wainscoting, framed brush paintings, and a backlit stained-glass panel in the ceiling. It was repainted not long ago and it still, affectionately, keeps its own decade — customers say so themselves, and they say it fondly.
Outside it there is a free lot with plenty of room in it, and a school across the asphalt. Takeout is how most people here use it — it is the single most common thing said about this restaurant, and the second most common is how much food comes back in the bag.
Christmas Eve is the night the neighbourhood remembers. Six different people have written it up, and every one describes the same scene: about fifty people standing in the entrance, waiting on takeout. That is what thirty years of habit looks like arriving all at once.
“Truly, we’ve gone here for take out for 35 years.”
Google review
“The portions are absolutely HUGE, it could have fed 12 people instead of 6.”
Yelp, 2026
“Best Chinese food in town and you can’t beat the price!”
Google review
“This is a little neighborhood gem.”
TripAdvisor, 2012
Hours,
and how to order
07| Monday | 4:00 pm – 10:30 pm |
|---|---|
| Tuesday | Closed |
| Wednesday | 4:00 pm – 10:30 pm |
| Thursday | 4:00 pm – 10:30 pm |
| Friday | 4:00 pm – 10:30 pm |
| Saturday | 4:00 pm – 10:30 pm |
| Sunday | 4:00 pm – 9:30 pm |
Dinner only — the doors open at four.
Calgary, AB T3G 3K2
+1 403‑241‑1888
- Order
- hawkwoodpalace.com — pickup, $10 minimum, roughly 25 minutes, ready when you get there.
- By phone
- Call the number above to order, to ask, or to book a table — reservations are by phone.
- Dine in
- Licensed. Wheelchair accessible. High chairs. Bring a big table — there is a dinner on the menu priced for eight.
- Parking
- Free private lot, right outside the door, in Hawkwood Village Shopping Plaza.
- Rating
- 3.9★ from 322 Google reviews.