Much ado about nothing

I went to newish Chinatown outfit Haozhan a few weeks ago and thought it was, well, OK. Then the praise started arriving. It seems to have garnered more column inches than it has any right to, most of them peppered with quite extraordinary levels of praise. They're proudly plastered on the restaurant's windows - well, they would be. Had all these dudes been to the same restaurant I had?

We had inadvertently eaten what seems to have become a raved-about signature dish - cubes of home-made tofu topped with scallops, spinach and fish roe. I disliked it intensely, finding the combination of custardy bean curd and overcooked little scallops a celebration of bland flavours and jellied textures: Oriental invalid food. I didn't like my wasabi prawns either, clunky, breaded and fiercely deep-fried, with a harsh spume of the vicious Japanese root.

The room? Nope, sorry, despite it being a stalwart attempt at defying the Chinatown clichés. The hard surfaces - slate floors, mirrors, huge drum lampshades, glossy, poison green walls and sub-Hakkasan dark carved wood - created an atmosphere so loud and clattery that it jangled my nerves.

And the service. OK, so it's light years ahead of the typical Chinatown deal, taciturn to the point of contempt, flinging you the round-eye menu and leaving you with the impression that everyone else is eating better food than you are, probably at an establishment two doors down.

I once committed the innocent solecism of ordering 'a small bottle of hot sake' in one of these joints. Instead of the expected little china flask, the surly, language-challenged waiter produced a whole bottle, incandescent from the microwave. When I protested, he told me he couldn't return it because it was now, and I quote, 'f***ed'. Genuine translation snafu or heroic rudeness? Who knows?

Our handsome, urbane waiter at Haozhan was a considerable evolution on that early model. But instead of rudeness we got bossiness and a reluctance to serve us what we ordered. That kind of thing makes me dig my Taurean hooves right in: honey, I know what I want.

My intransigence got me firmly chastised for: a) ordering the 'wrong' soft-shell crab - chilli instead of curried - and b) yes, ordering a whole bottle of warmed sake. (In my defence, the restaurant wanders around the East, taking in Japan, Thailand and Malaysia on its travels.) 'The cold is better,' he insisted. And persisted. I'm sure it is, but, like cheap Spanish brandy, I have a taste for the low-rent stuff: bring it on.

Well, he was very, very cross. His irritation manifested itself in delivering my bottle carefully decanted into several of the aforementioned little flasks. Within minutes it was stone cold. OK, mate, you win.

So I went back. We gave the menu - complete with glossy laminated photos of the food and front-page mission statement (something along the lines of we do posh stuff like Hakkasan but we'll happily shred you up a crispy duck if we must) - a thorough goingover. In the daytime, the place is louder and more jangly than ever. Our urbane waiter is there again, but I sense that his gas has been put on something of a simmer. Perhaps serving interminable portions of aromatic crispy duck does that to a guy.

We ate flat, slithery Malaysian spiced noodles with chunks of frozen-tasting scallop. I had the curry soft-shell crab this time as a palliative to our waiter. He was right, it's very good - whispery batter, crunchy shell, sweet, melting crab laced with fierce little spikes of red chilli and the fragrance of curry leaves. Jasmine ribs - we didn't fancy the coffee ribs, nor the Marmite prawns - were sticky and pappy.