SO here we sat amid flowering cherry trees (fake but good) while Chinese music swooped and occasionally shrieked and waitresses brought juicy little steamed dumplings, crisp pot stickers and green beans with chilli.

That was just the beginning.

And over there, near a photo of Gordon Ramsay's smug mug peering mystically over the place, the owner stood and watched and orchestrated the whole show, occasionally wandering by the table asking if everything was all right, recommending a dish (the peanut dumplings for dessert, the toffee fried apple too) and we ate. And ate.

We ate the whole way through, thanking Stephen and Helen for putting us up in Barga in the middle of that drive from Lyon to the village last summer. We actually ate while Stephen nipped to the off-sales next door for a discounted bottle of wine, the licence not yet being available in here, and while talking about Giustis and Salvatores and Coias and how many of our relatives were shoved in Barlinnie during the war.

We ate while oohing over the crisp sweet green beans in chilli, the aubergine with garlic and that sugary yet delicious cucumber salad. I think Helen and Debs paused some top teacher chat long enough to wonder out loud if the surprisingly good crispy shredded potato was just like the crispy bits in the bottom of bags of chips. Then we ate some more.

Until finally, some time after salted chicken wings with their popping Szechuan peppercorns, diced chicken and potatoes, sticky yet still crisp northern beef and our second plate of crispy, spicy squid (somehow we had eaten the first lot and not even noticed), the music stopped playing. Not the Chinese music. The food music. We looked about. The banquet ordered at £22 a head simply to avoid the tiresome task of wading through an unfamiliar menu - in this case based on the dumpling culture of the Changchun region in north-eastern China - was over.

Or was it? A waitress swooped in. Now, she said, that you have tasted everything in the banquet we bring you more of whatever dishes you particularly liked. We paused. We laughed. We shrugged. We ordered. "Which dumplings?" she asked. "All of them," we replied. And some northern beef, those green beans, that aubergine please. We ate. Again. Those pork and coriander dumplings, gone in a single swallow, but so juicy and light. Prawn dumplings too, fried and textured but sweet and mild and good. We considered aloud that there was none of the MSG bloating that's occasionally the price of a Chinese restaurant meal, that despite the number of dishes the palate didn't seem bored or tired.

And of course we discussed the much-rumoured Edinburgh restaurant invasion of Glasgow of which it is whispered Chop Chop here, occasionally described as the best Chinese restaurant in the whole of the UK, is only the first wave.

You can read about the history of this restaurant on the internet, the dumplings, the factory, the catapulting to fame by Gordon Ramsay when he featured the original Edinburgh Haymarket branch with its plain and functional Mao-ist red and yellow decor. What I hadn't appreciated on my previous visits in Edinburgh is how slick the operation is, how clever the marketing, of which this unlimited banquet, which is what it turns out we are eating, is just one feature.

Against all the odds and at the suggestion of the owner whose name is not featured on the web and which we never get but who is standing smiling in the photograph alongside his Gordonness, we have dessert. The peanut dumplings are tiny, subtle and delicious. We, and this confession is slightly embarrassing, have two plates of them and eat them all. But the apple in toffee has burned in the pan and is bitter, the mention of which prompts apologies, a reduction in the bill and even more food being sent to the table. We groan. We eat. We like. We will definitely come again.