This review was first published in November 1996

What does one want on a holiday in Greece? Sun, crystal water, the singular, luminous light, ouzo, the old people who still inhabit the villages, rembetika (soulful music), dried octopus blowing in the wind, the olive trees turning over a silver leaf against an intense blue sky, a sense of time unravelling - and the thought of the Chinese meal you can have when you get back to London.

The restaurant meals of Greece - a country for which love and affection have, over the years, been firmly baked into my heart - offer as their hallmark monotony. Predictability, routine, lack of surprise: all these have their charm where food is concerned, particularly for a restaurant reviewer on holiday but after a while the culinary variety of London beckons and, for me, it is the thought of Chinese food that is the most seductive.

The handover of Hong Kong in June may prove to have positive results as far as London restaurants are concerned but, as a category, Chinese restaurants have been uneventful in recent years.

Second and third generation Chinese growing up in this country seem, perhaps understandably, not attracted to the restaurant business. Where is the Michael Chow (Mr Chow) of the Nineties?

So, in choosing a restaurant to help facilitate the difficult problem of re-entry after time away, I turned to a Chinese friend, the cookery writer and scholar Yan Kit So. Yan Kit mentioned that one of the owners of Fung Shing in Chinatown had recommended that she try some of the specialities served at LEE FOOK CHINESE RESTAURANT in Westbourne Grove and to order ahead certain dishes which are the pride of chef and partner "Ringo" Lo and his chef son John.

Ordering ahead is an accepted practice in Hong Kong where you might ring a restaurant, state your budget and discuss a few particular seasonal dishes but otherwise leave the composition of the meal to the chef. It is, if you like, the antithesis of what many of us do here; point to Menu A, a lazy gesture which does nothing to improve the standards of Chinese restaurants in this town.

The meal I describe here is not one you could find by wandering casually into Lee Fook but it is one that should be possible to obtain by ringing up and insisting that you want it and will like it. You might have to insist - an exchange with our photographer Danny Elwes which went: "Would you like your coffee white or with milk?" doesn't point to great facility with the English language - but it is worth it, both for the treat of the food and to push requirements, and thus standards, higher.

Before embarking on this course, make up a party of at least six interested souls. It might take several days or even a week's notice to ensure that you can start the dinner with sturgeon fillet cooked with fungus.The fish, which the kitchen slices horizontally into thin leaves, is bathed in a subtle, ginger-imbued sauce. Apparently freezing the fish helps the fine slicing and stepping up the quantity of ginger sidesteps the uncomfortable question of the wisdom of using frozen fish. The fungus, which might sound like a bogeyman to some, was unusual - a new variety to me - but delectable.

Our next course, grilled king prawn with premier soya sauce, is routinely offered on the menu entitled To-Day Special handed out with the supremely predictable ? la carte. Large, slender, curvaceous prawns laminated with a likeable savouriness, which in other cultures might show up in a crisp packet, made it a popular dish. Ginseng was an ingredient in the chef's special soup. It lent a somewhat metallic and medicinal quality to a broth in which lumps of beef - which had obviously given up their last breath of goodness to the cause of soup - crouched.

If, when ordering ahead, your stamina in the conversation starts to flag, let go the idea of chef's special soup. Ringo, chef and, incidentally, karate master, to whom we chatted after the meal, turned out to be particularly pleased with his braised country duck with red bean paste. A dish learned from his father, a noted chef in Hong Kong, it has almost none of the fattiness you anticipate with duck but also not too much of the eerie, fermented flavour delivered by red beancurd paste.

If, like me, you have been frequently disappointed with the mishmash of ingredients served up under the heading "monk's vegetables", it might be worthwhile going into your most persuasive mode to get the kitchen to prepare the intricate, time-consuming Shaolin monk vegetable. A picturesque mixture of ingredients which includes winter gourd, red dates, black hair moss and lotus seeds, it is a Buddhist vegetarian's dream assembly.

Two other dishes we tried are offered on the standard list of specials and should not be missed. Braised belly pork with preserved vegetables had remarkably lively slices of the fatty cut of pork which had apparently achieved that attribute by being fried twice - an odd reversal of expectation.

Minced salt fish, chicken fried rice featured the grain stir-fried with egg white (as opposed to the easier, more common egg yolk). Make sure when you order to insist on the egg-white frying.

In any event, if you try Lee Fook, at least consider the list called To-Day Special. I like the sound of fresh lobster with vermicelli and celery in hot pot; free-range chicken marinated with Chinese rose wine; Szechwan spicy chicken with sweet basil; braised scallop and seafood with winter melon; all theoretically available without forward planning.

Lee Fook Chinese Restaurant
98 Westbourne Grove, W2 5RU