It’s all very well being a restaurant critic. From behind a computer screen, armed with my various Larousses of international gastronomy, 15 years of food guide back editions, review copies of every recipe book published in the past ten years (pristine, ignored, utterly unthumbed), the full range of internet resources (including the modern hack’s go-to website, Wrongopedia), and a telephone for phoning people who actually know about food, I can talk or write a damn good game.

But actually knowing about a cuisine, really knowing, deep in your gut, in the ancient treasure trove of your well-fed belly, that’s something else. It is something humbling, something great, something which, when shared, is perhaps the greatest gift in the world.

And last night I was fortunate enough to be fed the best Chinese meal I have eaten in years and years, better than anything I’ve ever found in London, in a relatively modest restaurant in Oxford, thanks to the insistence of a family that really, really knows.

I have written about the Irish-Malaysian Reilly clan of North London, Oxford and Kuala Lumpur before. Specifically about big Sean Reilly and his younger twin brothers James and Eiran, the mainstays of the Captain Scott cricket team made famous by Marcus Berkmann’s 1995 book Rain Men and, more recently, by the late Harry Thompson in his bestselling Penguins Stopped Play. It was with them that I toured the cricket grounds, bars and restaurants of Malaysia in 1999, cutting a swath through the cricket teams of the Far East by day (even defeating the Malaysian national side) and through the backstreet noodle dives and top-class lobster joints of KL by night.

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Cricket – mankind’s most civilised and civilising invention – was always as much about lunch and tea as about the passages of play in-between, but on that tour we made it about dinner, too. About charcoal-flashed char kway teow exploding with chilli and crispy lard chips, consumed off dirty plastic plates in rat-infested alleys so unhygienic the swine flu virus could not survive there; about garlic-and-chilli lobsters the size of your wife, satay chicken-eating competitions, curried fish and peanuts by the sea and long, golden beers so cold the beads of perspiration on the bottle were too thick to roll down the glass.

Since Harry died, in 2005, I had not played for the Scotties. Time has taken its toll on my abilities, such as they ever were, and with Sean now running the show I imagined his network of beefy Australian batsmen, wily Asian spinners and fat South African quicks would no longer find room for the old-fashioned, bookish, dithering sort of player I represent.

But Sean kept asking if I fancied the odd game until finally, this year, he called to say that his wife was pregnant and this was his last year running the team, and what about one last one, for old times’ sake.

And so I drove up to Oxford, to meet up once again with the Reilly boys and one or two of the others from long ago days, and some new faces I had not seen: a couple of beefy Australian lads, a pair of wily Asian spinners…

We batted first (to give a couple of our men time to show up) and at second wicket down, with trouble on the cards, Sean strode out like W. G., all 16 or 17 stone of him, with his mighty Newbery bat, planted himself on the front foot and started slapping sixes into the dainty gardens behind the bowler’s arm, rattling to 80-odd in no time.

He’d put me in relatively high at number seven (which meant if things were tight in the second innings he could get away with not giving me a bowl) and so I got to bat with him for a while, biffing 26 runs of my own (you do not hear much about quarter centuries in the big league, but I remember all of mine) and meeting with Sean in the middle each time one of us whopped a boundary, to punch sweaty knuckles in the dry heat under the high, blue and white sky.

We set the Mallards (as our opposition were called) 230 in 35 overs, which they chased gamely but fell just short of, bowled out for 193 with six overs to go. I even held a couple of catches (it’s the ones on the ground I cannot reach any more). And afterwards, in the shower, James said, “Are you coming for a Chinese down by the station?”

“A restaurant meal in Oxford? I don’t think so,” I said. “I’ve got to get home.”

“I think you should, G,” he said. “It’s special. Shanghai, Sichuan, the lot. These boys can really cook.”

When I was dry and dressed I went out to where Sean was throwing catches for his dog and asked if he was going for the meal.

“Oh yes,” he said. “I’m going. It’s a serious joint. James [who lives in Oxford] used to go on about the amazing dim sum and standard Cantonese stuff, but then we went with Mum and Dad last week and they asked the owner to just feed us what he thought we should eat, and so we left it to him and it was just blinding. Like in KL. Would I lie to you about food, Gilesy?”

He wouldn’t. Not with electrodes on his balls. Not about a good Chinese. And Sojo was, indeed, quite electric.

James had phoned ahead to say his gang would be eight-strong and arriving at 7.45, and so within minutes of our arrival, along with the ice-cold Tsingtao beers, came a platter of warm, fatty, crisp-skinned roast duck and belly pork, and pink, sweet, slightly drier char-siu with roasted peanuts.

Then came an oval dish of Shanghai braised sweet soy pork hock: a central blade of shoulder bone, with firm meat and piles of the gorgeous, gelatinous cartilage and connective tissue of slow-cooked trotter. The flavours were so dense, sweet and savoury, with such depth to the complex spicing, that I could hardly believe we were tucked behind the ice-rink in poxy old smarty-pants Oxford, where they generally know about every damned thing under the sun apart from food.

Then, from Sichuan, came beef with glass noodles in a broth that was red with spice and warmth and then left that cool, spooky mouthfeel of Sichuan pepper that, once tried, you cannot get enough of. Covering previous layers of not quite finished meats in my bowl with a layer of rice (at Sean’s insistence) to protect the integrity of flavours, there came deep-fried prawns, dark and crunchy and spiced again with Sichuan pepper, and then more prawns, coated in the Shanghainese style with salted yolk of duck’s eggs, a rich, deep yellow glaze that performs the function of mayonnaise without, of course, the oiliness.

And then a fish, a whole sea bass, steamed, and covered with minced soy bean, minced pork and fresh chillies and some gan shao French beans, umani’d up with minced pork.

The owner, Shuman Tse, used to own the Opium Den back in the day, where I went on dates and for food that reminded me of home (ah, the beef in oyster sauce of old North London). He moved that to somewhere else in town and called it Café Opium, and opened this place six years ago. But word has been slow to get around: it looks so modern and elegant, with cool, dark wood, low lighting and no daffy Orientalist touches, that people are barely able to grasp that it’s a Chinese restaurant at all.

“People come in and ask, ‘If you’re Chinese, why don’t you have curry and chips?’ ” says Mr Tse’s Malaysian wife, Teresa. “Or they go to the old place across the street,” says Mr Tse. “Because it looks more like a Chinese restaurant.”

Sojo, on the other hand, really is a Chinese restaurant. It has a wide and dazzling menu and great skill in execution. Ji Hong Li, the head chef, came from a famous restaurant in Shanghai and so brings all the skills of that region as well as formidable skill with the Sichuan cuisine which, Teresa tells me, is the crazy mad fashion in Shanghai just now, and in the big Chinese cities generally.

I’ll admit I was buoyed up with the cricket, the cold beer, the love of old friends, and my eternal, undying passion for this kind of food, but if Sojo isn’t up there, in its own special way, with the best two or three oriental restaurants in England, then I’m a Chinaman.

Sojo

8-9 Hythe Bridge Street, Oxford (01865 202888)

Repertoire: 9

Cooking: 9

Given its location: 10

Score: 9.33

Price: most mains are around £7-£8, starters are £5-£6 – it’s a damn steal.

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