What with London’s continuing love affair with dim sum, bargain hunters won’t be able to help themselves from making a beeline for this restaurant.

The Venue
Laquered, shining, cheap and, erm, cheap, Ping Pong provides a polished environment and standard food at McOffal-beating prices. Subsequently it’s usually packed.

The Atmosphere
Twosomes sit at bars and groups at tables – the best perch being the one cut away to overlook the vast downstairs. Tables can only be booked for eight or more but if there's a wait you can always have a seat at the bar. The service can leave something to be desired but then what do you expect? It would be nice if it were otherwise, but the rule of capitalist life is that savers can’t be choosers.

The Food
It’s best to stick with the dumplings (the baked puffs lack in content, leading to a bland and uninspired dish, the fried dishes so oil-saturated that they’re near-inedible) and the sticky rice wrapped in lotus leaves: flavour-rich and utterly moreish.

But back to the dumplings. Ingredients include delicacies such as scallops, snow crab, king prawns and Chinese wolfberries. And if you still have room, take your pick from a chocolate bun (sized to share between two), seasonal fresh fruit or your choice of ice cream and sorbet flavours from a selection including Cinnamon Spice, Grand Mandarin sorbet and Elderflower sorbet.

The Drink
The iced teas are delicious, particularly the grape and apple, and the cocktails are excellent value too. It would be downright bad manners to leave without sampling the Ping Pong (Martini Bianco, white wine and lychee juice). Other tempting concoctions include the Lychee and bitter cocktail (Limoncello, bitter, lychee juice and lemon) and the Pineapple and Caramel Martini, a blend of Tuaca liqueur, caramel liqueur, ginger, black pepper and pineapple juice.

The Last Word
What Ping Pong lacks in flourishes it makes up for in flavour and you'll be hard pressed to disagree with their tagline: little steamed parcels of deliciousness. This is dim sum capable of reviving even the hungriest and weariest of Londoners without leaving a sizeable dent in your wallet.

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