Beefcake worthy of Magnum

In this super chic restaurant, Art Deco meets Shanghai nights," says the bumf, though in my experience, when people say Art Deco they mean they've installed lots of mirrors with scratches all over them. It's a lovely space, though. Dark, mellow and thickly becarpeted, it's the kind of place you might imagine Thirties Mafia bosses going to shoot one another over symbolic bird's nest soup.

This is a dim sum joint, though nothing about the atmosphere, the pace or indeed the menu would give you any clue about that. It's all fashionably cryptic with choices divided by animal genus. There is a Classic Chinese section at the back featuring the ubiquitous feet that nobody ever orders.

My companion - I want to give him a funny name, describing his hair (scant) or core characteristic (hungry), but let's just call him my boyfriend. He wanted, reasonably enough, to know the size of the dishes so that we might work out how many dim sum to order.

"Well, it depends," said the waitress. "What does it depend on?" "It depends on what they are." "How many could two people eat?" "Well, it depends" "How big are they on average?" (He's very patient - his mother is a primary school teacher.)

In the end, in no particular order, we had: classic fried beef cake (just to see if they could magic up Tom Selleck), classic steamed scallops in black bean, pak choi, asparagus, Singapore vermicelli, fried prawns with spicy salt and pepper, and suckling pig.

The beef cake was a classic, and yes, it was fried. I guess if you wanted to avoid bad puns about Eighties studs, you would have called these patties; they weren't assertively Chinese.

They weren't really assertively anything, in fact, they just let the beef speak for itself, and it said "Man alive! I am delicious! I had a really happy, organic life. I'm almost as good as one of those Japanese beefs that gets massaged with sake and serenaded by 1,000 cow virgins." Really good, in other words.

The rice arrived all on its ownio, and was indeed classic. Steamy. Sat there for a bit, looking pure. Was joined by some equally pure, unadorned asparagus. It was delicious, but it was also like being in Tenko, for a second.

Then the pak choi arrived and dirtied everything up a bit with its oyster sauce, which truthfully was a little slimy but I think that's just its way. The prawns were excellent, but if you want to be picky, and distinguish between some excellent ingredients and an excellent cook, you must order the suckling pig.

Choose carefully. There's a pig on the menu for £150. They probably won't tell you how big that is, either, but the word "whole" is a dead giveaway. Anyway, back to this piggy miracle.

The skin was an explosion of salty crunch. It was delicate and just beyond delicious. I very nearly fell out of love with that unwieldy, three-inch English creation that is crackling, though I think I'm over it now. The flesh was so intensely porky, I wondered if what I've been eating all my life was even pork.

Pudding-wise, my boyfriend had exotic fruit, which ranged from delicious versions of the everyday (some melon, an orange), through so-so versions of the semi-exotic (dragon fruit, passion fruit), to an absolutely ghastly piece of the unpronounceable. (I genuinely can't pronounce it, nor spell it; it has the pippy consistency of the passion fruit, only the pips are green, with the outer-flesh of an orange, only redder. You might spot it at a Chinese supermarket. You must avoid it at all costs.)