Bang Bang Oriental Foodhall, 399 Edgware Road, London
NW9 0FH. Meal for two: £25 to £45

Ah, Colindale, the Croydon of north London, only with less charisma. Oh, stop wincing. This is my home turf, the suburban sprawl famous for its research institute for infectious disease and its police training college. For John Betjeman, chronicler of these cherry-blossomed streets, of the semi-detached and quietly despairing, it had murdered the capital’s green lung. Or, as he put it in Metroland: “Dear Middlesex, dear vanished country friend, Your neighbour, London, killed you in the end.”

All the things that make me frown about Colindale are also the things I love about it. It’s a place where people live out real lives, in fingertip touching distance of the action, but separate from it. But it also gives context to Bang Bang Oriental Foodhall, which has just opened right in the middle. It occupies a shiny new silver building constructed on a garish tilt; it looks like it was designed by an architect who once glimpsed a picture of a Frank Gehry building in a magazine before the copy was snatched from their hands.

On the ground floor is a large Chinese restaurant, the Golden Dragon, lacquered and glowing. Upstairs there’s an airship hangar of a space, all slatted wood and girder, with seating for 450 at high counters and shared tables. There’s a plasma screen the size of Luxembourg, tuned to the BBC News Channel which, given the state of current affairs, is a dubious aid to the digestion. Around the edges are more than 30 kiosk-style food outlets, covering most of south-east Asia. The emphasis is on the regional cooking of China, alongside representatives from Japan, Thailand and Taiwan, among others.

This is not virgin territory for Colindale. A previous Asian food centre here also contained restaurants, but was notable for the Chinese and Japanese supermarkets serving the sizeable populations from those countries in this corner of London. Now it’s early evening and around two-thirds of the people crowding into this new edifice are Asian. A young Chinese woman sighs wearily while queuing and says to her friend, “I know half the people in here.” Many uneasy first dates will happen at Bang Bang.

The development is owned by the Royal China Group, which is reassuring. Until roughly a decade ago, when the Chinese began travelling more freely, bringing with them thrillingly punchy cooking from its various provinces, Chinese food in Britain was dying. It was dominated by over-sweetened iterations of clumsy Cantonese dishes which made you hate yourself for eating them. Royal China’s various outlets were reliable throughout that, especially for dim sum.

That’s what it offers here, at its own spot, One 68 Dim Sum. (Royal China also operates the 300-cover Golden Dragon downstairs, and leases out the other kiosks.) The system is simple. You hover over the menu at the kiosk of your choice, while people behind you tut loudly. You order in a panic. They give you a pager and then you retreat to the table to wait for it to start buzzing, while wondering whether you’ve ordered an animal’s digestive organs by mistake. Top tip: set up camp at a table as close to the middle of the room as possible, or you’ll end up walking huge distances.

Pricing is aimed at the casual dining market. I saw few dishes over £10, with many snacks around the £5 mark. Royal China’s dim sum plates are £3.95 each and, while not quite as sparkling as those at its restaurant on Baker Street, are more than creditable. Both its steamed prawn dumplings and its siu mai have that compelling seafood bite. The cloud-like char siu buns are especially good, the heavily sauced stewed pork filling bouncy with citrus and soy. There are deep-fried fish wontons in spicy sauce to make you gasp and belch and dribble, and squares of bronzed turnip cake with pork.

That’s about a third of the menu, which is extremely short compared to the novel available at its full restaurant. Indeed, all the menus here are short. That’s the point. Bang Bang Oriental is the Now That’s What I Call Music! of Asian dining. It’s the best of Chinatown, for suburbanites who can’t be fagged to get on the tube. Frankly, if I lived nearby, I’d be here all the time, my shirt stained perpetually with soy sauce.

To one side is an outpost of Chatime, renowned in Chinatown for its chilled fruit bubble teas, full of gel balls you burst against the roof of your mouth like sugary blisters. (I’d prefer an involuntary enema to drinking one ever again, but the teenagers I was with approved.) At the far end is Four Seasons, my “go to” on Gerrard Street for Cantonese roast meats, in thrilling shades of red and brown and sticky. At £8.50 for a plate of its honey roast pork or its roast duck, each with a puddle of sweet, salty sauce, it’s money well spent.

Less thrilling is the Hong Kong Chinese restaurant LongJi, which manages to make Singapore noodles – fried rice vermicelli with the most blunt of “Indian” spicing – extremely bland. We douse it with soy and chilli oil. Much better is Thai Silk, a spin-off from the Waterloo restaurant. Its spiced ground pork, with enough fresh red chilli to put your diaphragm into spasm, is a highlight.

We also approve of the spicy chicken ramen from Ramen Samurai Ryu, out of Hong Kong. It doesn’t match the best in London but at £8.50 it’s both generous and extremely serviceable. The winner for me, though, is a generous plate of slippery, snowy-white steamed pork dumplings, alive with spring onion and sesame oil, for £9.80 from Xi Home, specialising in the cooking of northern China.

I’m intrigued by Uncle Chilli, a Sichuan outlet at present only doing skewers – spam, pig intestine and so forth – and gnarly-looking ribbon noodle soups. A place called Hakka looks interesting, too. And that’s the point. The regional fracturing of Chinese food in the UK really is a thrilling development. Here, it’s all on show. There are niggles. There are dispensers for plastic cutlery, but none for extra chopsticks; likewise, all condiments must come from each kiosk. A central place for extra chilli oil and soy would be handy. But these are small points. Trust me: Bang Bang will be rammed for the foreseeable.

Jay’s news bites

■ For something less familiar from the Chinese culinary regions, head to the ever-popular Silk Road in Camberwell, which serves the food of Xinjiang in North West China, at pleasingly low prices. There are skewers of grilled lamb, crusted with cumin and chilli, terrific dumplings and, best of all, the big plate chicken,
a huge soupy stew into which they slide platefuls of wide ribbon noodles. Take friends.

■ A new cookbook to look out for, though only if you’re a dog. In October, 2018 the actor Nicola ‘Milly’ Millbank will publish Give the Dog a Bone, a collection of 40 recipes for, er, dogs. Plus loads of pics of dogs. Can’t wait.

■ The food of sub-Saharan Africa has been greatly under-represented in London, given the size of the community. A welcome then to Ikoyi, named after a neighbourhood in Lagos, Nigeria, which began as a pop-up and now has a base in the St James’s Market development.
The menu includes octopus pepper soup, lamb ribs with relish and Nigerian tiger prawns with banga bisque (ikoyilondon.com).

Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1