Yauatcha, 15-17 Broadwick Street, London W1 (020 7494 8888). Meal for two, including wine and service, £80

I don't care how good the dim sum are. I don't care that each of the steamed dumplings is a minor miracle; that the venison puffs are so buttery they all but evaporate on the tongue; that the salt and pepper quails have a crisp skin of unbearable moreishness. I don't care about any of it. I never want to fight this hard for my dinner again.

OK, I'm overstating things. Obviously I do care. I perform this job because I care way too much, and the opening of a dedicated dim sum restaurant from Alan Yau, the owner of Hakkasan, Britain's only Michelin-starred Chinese restaurant, is the kind of thing I am paid to care about. But getting fed at Yauatcha is a total hassle and that is exactly what dim sum isn't meant to be. Dim sum is casual food. It's street food at the table, not performance art.

The problems begin with the booking. Yauatcha is already a success, so it's reasonable they can offer me only a 9.30pm booking five days hence. What isn't reasonable is the 90 minutes I'm allotted at the table. Ninety minutes? That isn't a leisurely dinner; it's a work-out down the gym. It's a football match. If it weren't for the 90 minutes thing, Yauatcha would probably be quite calming: it is a modernist dream of frosted glass panels and neon back lighting. Upstairs, on the ground floor, is a tearoom, where they serve delicate cakes and too many kinds of tea. The tearoom was pretty empty, but the moodily lit basement restaurant was a writhing, squirming pit of humanity crushed so close together they could probably identify each other's deodorant brands.

My companion and I arrived early, because I didn't want to lose a minute. To their credit, we were led downwards as the second hand slipped past the appointed hour, away from the main dining room, and in to possibly the worst dining space in London: a corridor back behind a staircase. It is so narrow waiters can only pass through in single file, and come only when they have a purpose, so you can't just catch an eye. Time was ticking away - tick-tock, tick-tock. Ten minutes disappeared without menus and I had to lunge at a waiter to get one. We managed to order wine, but once they poured a glass each, they took the bottle. And then, 15 minutes before our time slot finished, when we were considering ordering another plateful, they told us we couldn't. Time's up. Bye bye.

So yes, when it arrives, the food is marvellous. I loved the dark green spinach cube with crunchy prawns and water chestnut, and the har gau - scallop and prawn with fish eggs. The pan-fried bean curd roll with prawn and yellow chive is the only good use for bean curd I've ever come across. The Chinese chive dumplings possess a real oniony burst. Pricing at between £3.50 and £5 for the dumplings, although steep, seems reasonable for the quality. But I'm not sure it's worth the stress. I imagined sneaking off to Yauatcha for lunch. Even allowing for the great food, though, I'm not sure I can be fagged. I just hate doing anything by the clock, especially dim sum.