Ping Pong in Soho

Service is a key component of enjoying an evening out. A good waiter will make your evening buoyant through passing on his or her knowledge about the menu, food in general and possibly a little spiritual guidance.

A bad waiter will leave you questioning why you spent good money to be verbally spat on. So how do you get the service that you want when most restaurants are incredibly pushed for time? At Ping Pong, the chain of dim sum restaurants, they have come up with a plan.

On the top of their menu, there are different options for the type of service that you require. They allow you to be kept stocked up on drinks, to be out by a certain time or to be made a fuss of in the event of a celebration. It’s certainly a welcome innovation and one that many restaurants would do well to follow.

Given that Ping Pong specialises in dim sum, my companion and I gathered together a selection of the steam dumplings. Our choice consisted of green chive dumplings featuring king prawns and chives, seafood dumplings, which contained king prawns, crab and scallops, all in a carrot pastry.

We also picked the spicy hot chicken dumpling and the chicken and cashew nut dumplings in wheat pastry. Overall, these were pretty decent although the pastry on a few was a little dry, causing them to stick to the roof of my mouth. However, the flavours were very striking, especially the spicy chicken.

We then followed this up with a couple of fried spring rolls. We went for the mixed vegetable roll with sweet and sour sauce and the Vietnamese rice paper prawn roll with fish sauce, lettuce and mint. These were by no means outstanding but the combinations tended to work well, especially in the Vietnamese rice paper prawn roll.

We each finished off with a Chinese chocolate brownie and blood orange sorbet. To the question, how does a Chinese chocolate brownie differ from a regular chocolate brownie, I could not give any kind of authoritative answer but it certainly was as luxurious as any western brownie and combined well with the rather zesty sorbet.

My companion and I did not tick any particular box for the service but we generally found those attending us very well informed and helpful. Ping Pong delivers decent food at very affordable prices. It’s not necessarily a place to come out for a meal but is certainly somewhere you and a group of friends could be assured of a good time.

Ping Pong
45 Great Marlborough Street
Soho
W1F 7JL