Yung Kee serves as many as 300 whole roast geese per day. The preparation follows Cantonese roasting traditions: the birds are air-dried, seasoned, and hung in open-flame ovens until the skin crisps to a deep mahogany and the fat renders through to the meat. A half bird, serving up to six people, was priced at HK$240; a two-person portion at HK$120, according to the Wikipedia source article. The skin is the point — thin, lacquered, audibly crisp in a way that the flesh beneath, which stays moist, deliberately contrasts. Roast goose is not the only offering at Yung Kee, but it has always been the identity of the restaurant, the thing that appears in every description and the reason most first-time visitors come. In 1997, four of the restaurant's dishes won awards at the Hong Kong Food Festival Culinary Awards Competition, including the platinum award for "Wild Geese Resting on Plum Trees."

Yung Kee moved to Wellington Street in 1964. Over the following years, Kam Shui-fai acquired four adjacent buildings. In 1978, the combined lot was rebuilt into what is now the Yung Kee Building — a Central high-rise that houses the restaurant across multiple floors. By 2000, the two top floors of the building became available; the company purchased them and now owns the structure outright. On the sixth floor, occupying space above the restaurant, sits the Kee Club, a private members' club founded in 2001 by entrepreneur Maria Rhomberg, who described it as "a place for people tired of discos but still too young for formal restaurants and stuffy establishment clubs." She presented the concept to Kam in Shanghai. The arrangement — a legendary restaurant below, a nightlife venue above — is a particular piece of Hong Kong vertical urbanism: each floor serving a different clientele who may never interact.

Yung Kee received one Michelin star in the inaugural 2009 Hong Kong and Macau edition of the Michelin Guide — the first time the guide had covered the city. On 1 December 2011, it was relegated to the Bib Gourmand category in the 2012 edition, a designation indicating good food at moderate prices rather than exceptional cooking. The restaurant also appeared in the Miele Guide's Asia's Top 20 Restaurants ranking from 2008 through 2012, placing as high as eighth. After founder Kam Shui-fai died in 2004, his shares passed to his children. Reports varied on the exact distribution — one account gave eldest son Kam Kin-sing and second son Ronald Kam Kwan-lai 45% each; another stated 35% each with a further 10% to the widow, Mak Sui-chun. The resulting ownership dispute became public and prolonged. The restaurant continued to operate through it, serving its roast geese to the lunch trade while lawyers argued, which is perhaps the most useful thing any institution can do in a crisis.

Wellington Street in Central is one of the few streets in Hong Kong's business district where the lunch crowd visibly changes the atmosphere of the block. Yung Kee opens its lower floors to a lunchtime trade that fills tables with suited office workers, tourists who have planned the visit, and regulars who have been coming for decades. The room is not ornate — red and gold, the photographs on the walls showing awards and celebrity visitors, the efficient passage of serving staff between crowded tables. The scale is institutional in a way that the food is not. Central is an expensive neighbourhood, and Wellington Street in particular has lost several long-running establishments to rent pressure. Yung Kee's presence here since 1964, in a building it owns, represents a particular kind of durability that most restaurants cannot achieve: the one that comes from having been successful enough, early enough, to buy your own walls.