I used to live in Chinatown, did I ever tell you that? I must have done. I’m getting like an old granny who, every time she opens her mouth, says: “Have I told you about the time when…?”, and then doesn’t give you room to tell her that she has. And even if she did, you’d probably be too polite to say anything. And anyway it’s easier just to let her talk, because then she’ll tire quicker and start to fall asleep and then you can go.

And anyway it wasn’t really Chinatown, it was just close. Parker Street, off the top end of Drury Lane, in the old council block behind the theatre where Cats used to be on (suspiciously close, I always thought, to all those Chinese kitchens). It was in the mid-Nineties, when I first worked on this paper (oh God, I am an old granny), and the features department, as was, didn’t pay enough for me to eat food cooked by white people, or even buy ingredients sold by white people, so I shopped in Loon Fung on Gerrard Street and ate out on the same road, and two or three of the ones off it.

I was poor, but I was miserable. Probably it was the MSG. Every meal I ate was crabmeat and sweetcorn soup, seaweed, sesame prawn toast, then half a duck scraped from underneath a lorry and served with jam and J Cloths, beef in oyster sauce, cashew nut chicken, fried rice and toffee apple chunks tasting of the onions and garlic that were fried in the same oil, probably at the same time – and all for £8.99 a head.

“Is beep still there?” said my friend Matt, as we walked down Gerrard Street the other day, for the first time in ages, towards Haozhan (although he spoke its name unbleeped because he does not have to worry about libel laws or Triad execution).

“Oh yes,” I said. “Still as popular as ever, and still offering four sorts of botulism and a Cantonese curse on the graves of your fathers for less than a fiver.”

In some ways Chinatown has changed since then. There is less organised crime, I’m told, so that many of the restaurants now make their profit from selling food and drink, and a number of the staff are paid in money. Some good places have opened there, such as ECapital and Aaura, and then either deteriorated or closed, or opened and stayed great but weren’t quite in Chinatown, like Yming and Bar Shu.

Now there’s Haozhan, which opened in the second half of last year and was universally lauded by critics whose first paragraph was about how bad Chinatown restaurants used to be (so predictable…) and whose second, and all subsequent paragraphs, hailed it as the best new Chinatown Chinese in years.

I’d been meaning to go for months. I love Chinese food above all things. I would happily forgo all other national cuisines and eat Chinese for ever. Indeed, if I lived in China, I would never leave. Even if I was allowed to.

And Haozhan is pretty good. And very different. But not nearly as good and different as the critics claimed, I’m afraid. For example, for all their minimalist elegance and pan-Asian creativity, they still appeared to be doing the old thing of hiding white customers away upstairs and putting Chinese people in the window at the front to attract Time Out readers.

And don’t for a minute think that the opening of Haozhan means that the era of the traditional grumpy Chinese waiter who will be truly happy only when he hears of your untimely death has in any way come to an end. Oh no.

“Do you use free-range chicken?” I asked politely, knowing that this was unlikely in a Chinese restaurant but thinking, at these prices and with this very modern style, they surely must.

“No!” he said with a horrified sneer, as if I’d asked if this was the place I’d heard of where you could get sex with a pig if the price was right.

Times Recommends

• How to season a wok
• Chicago Rib Shack hits back at its critics
• Gordon Ramsay: Indian barbecue