I have never written about the Ping Pong chain of dim sum restaurants before. It’s been around a few years, I think, having slid in under my radar on the back of the turn-of-the-century dim sum boom, and been notable mostly for the immense queues outside its original Great Marlborough Street outlet. I’m not a big fan of queuing for food, generally. Especially not when I suspect that people are queuing mainly because a place is cheap. I’ll wait ten minutes for a dim sum lunch at Royal China at the weekend, and I’ll fidget for three minutes in a Camden kebab line when drunk, but that’s about it.

I’ve always heard good things about Ping Pong, but almost exclusively from friends of mine in their mid-twenties – an age I remember well, when anywhere which served a meal you could keep down for less than £12 was worth multiple return visits.

But I’m a bit of a snob when it comes to dim sum (and most other things, to be fair). I’ve made dumplings in the kitchens of the Mandarin Oriental in Hong Kong, eaten them in the best places in HK, KL, NY, L and even P, and so I know the importance of newly made rice gluten dough, freshly killed prawns, and how precious each second is between the moment the bamboo steamer comes off the steam, and the moment it hits your table.

For the first minute, you can lift each dumpling from the box with your chopsticks entirely fusslessly. As the second minute ebbs away you start needing to jiggle each dumpling to shift the little perforated lining of greaseproof paper. After four minutes, you have to hold the paper down with a finger and pluck the dumpling off it like a leech from a jungle commando’s arse. Any longer than that, and you’re shaking the limp paper rag like a Seventies amateur photographer drying a Polaroid, until a dumpling finally wings off and sticks to the wall. Then you’re like a Staffordshire bull terrier shaking a Burmese cat by the neck until… Ooh, I do love a simile.

And when you do get it off, by now several minutes since the thing was cooked, the shell is going to be thick and claggy, it’s going to stick to your teeth and the walls of your mouth and positively defy chewing. And the filling is going to be lukewarm and wan. And that’s what I always suspected you would get at Ping Pong, because that is usually the way with chains.

I used to like Dim T, for example, when it first opened in Hampstead. But then it spread to Highgate and beyond, chains popping up everywhere like mushrooms in a turdfield, and the dumplings started to be made centrally and come in frozen from I don’t know where to satisfy this voracious dumpling empire, and were good only for throwing at the wall to see if they stuck (which they do), and so I don’t go there any more. And certainly wasn’t planning to see if Ping Pong were marginally better.

But then I noticed that they had built a Ping Pong in Hampstead, on the site of what used to be ZeNW3, and I knew that I had no option now but to give it a try. Poor old Zen. I loved Zen, even when it was rubbish. Which it usually was. Rubbish and extremely expensive. But quality and value are not everything. History is important, too.

ZeNW3 opened in 1987, the year I turned 18 and gained my gastronomic majority, and was a revelation. Its bright, white, two-tiered glitz (which won it the Evening Standard Best Restaurant Design award in its year of opening) was a beacon of fun in dowdy old Hampstead, which had never before, and has never since, had a restaurant worth making a special trip for. And it became an early backdrop for my adult life.

It was the first Chinese restaurant I went to without my parents. It was the place I went with my girlfriend and ten friends after her father’s funeral, when we were 20 and using death as an excuse for drinking for the first time. It was also the first place in which someone came up to me and said, “Are you Giles Coren, the restaurant critic?” and expressed a desire to sleep with me. Also the last. And anyway I didn’t like the way he did his hair.

From Kentish Town, it was always the nearest posh, bit-like-being-in-town restaurant and so it was there for all those times – dates, mates after work, drunken afternoons – when the usual discussion about where we could go within a mile that was sort of all right and not too expensive would end with, “F*** it, let’s go to Zen.”

The food standards wavered horribly: sometimes terrific, sometimes shabby beyond belief, and the bill for two was never less than £78. But I went for other reasons. For the bright, white, crisp linen, the views of the High Street, the little shredded pickles on the table to get your taste buds going, for the glamour and rattle of new money and old Jews. And for the water feature running down the main stairs that was said to bring luck, but down which, it was whispered, an old man had fallen in the first year, and broken his neck.

Which was maybe why Zen’s luck ran out. That and the food, which started to fail so badly that they started doing sushi (quite terrible sushi) to try to lure people in on the old “Chinese, Japanese, it’s all the same” principle.

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