Dim sum is ho-hum

When it comes to dim sum, I am hideously spoilt. If I want to gorge on those addictive little dumplings - and I always gorge - I take myself to Hakkasan or Yauatcha, or 'slum it' at any of the excellent Royal China group.

But, in the same week I went to Ping Pong, I had lunch at Chinatown's New World to remind myself of what dim sum used to be before Alan Yau got his hands on them and turned them into Michelin-starred designer fancies.

You don't get more unreconstructed than this joint: one of only two restaurants in town (the other is Chuen Cheng Ku) still practising the recondite art of dim sum trolley service.

It's got the lot: walls bristling with red and gold cheapo Chinoiserie, barely intelligible waiting staff and an everpresent parade of trundling trolleys piled up with Asian arcana. Fabulous! I loved it.

Shame I can't say the same for the food: shrimp rolls reheated into flabbiness; shu mai, with their gristly pork innards and wrinkly outer skin, rather revoltingly testicular.

Or cheung fun, those Chinese cannelloni-type rolls, covered with rice paste as thick and flubbery as an anti-cellulite patch. And a sticky rice in lotus leaf that split to reveal a minor abattoir of un-nameable and apparently long-dead animal parts.

So all I can say is a heartfelt thank you to Yau. And his imitators, of which Ping Pong is most certainly one, no matter what owner Kurt Zdesar might say. Zdesar has had a chequered background in catering, from McDonald's to Nobu. And Ping Pong has echoes of both: contemporary aesthetic allied to utter, hard-headed pragmatism.

There's the dramatic, dark-hued look: an upper storey for snacking and drinking, carved out so that diners can gaze on to the lower floor. A glassed-in courtyard contains an eerie pool of jet-black liquid that gently stirs as though containing strange, slumbering creatures. What look like chopsocky films are projected on to the back wall.

Lighting, however, is appalling. Both the date and I looked as though we'd been dead as long as the beasties in New World's sticky rice. A noodle puller plies his craft in a central bar: bang, bang, bang goes the dough as it's bashed against the counter.

This is fascinating the first time you catch it, tedious the third and just plain irritating by the end of the evening. But this is not a place for lingering: plus it's a clever device, disguising the fact that the food is actually prepared off-site. Near Woolwich, apparently.