It's only been five minutes but that’s in Glasgow rain as sticky as custard so I’m soaked by the time I skirt a yellow Danger Slippery Floor sign and push a heavy draught curtain aside. On a night like this everyone should be at home and as I passed Chop Chop next door, head down, lapels up, it looked like everyone was: it being vast and still and virtually empty through its car showroom windows.

Yet there are enough people in Lychee Oriental here with its cream leather seats and smooth, serene wooden floors for it to take a moment to spot Debs and Luca waving from the booth over there saying: we’ve already ordered dim sum. Dim sum, I think, while the UK’s dim sum kings are right next door?

When the steaming bamboo basket arrives and while being given forks to lift beef and prawn and pork dumplings I’m in the middle of remembering the Tesco salesman telling me it would only be on nights like these that I would fully appreciate the £70 business suit. How right he was. The water has run clean off its plastic fibres. 

The dim sum turn out juicy, fresh and at just over £12 for a dozen pretty good value. We’ve ordered Vietnamese king prawn rolls with a hand-turned look to them while the garlic and chilli in the yuk sung, with its bowl of fresh gem lettuce leaves for wrapping purposes, is deliciously pungent.

Of course, nobody else agrees it has the consistency of the stuff at the bottom of a chicken and mushroom Pot Noodle, but hey you can’t be a prophet in your own land. 

It’s certainly clean and crisp in here and Debs claims it smells of freshly washed linen. They should bottle that. 

But before fully addressing the dish of soft shelled crab, piled seductively, a tangle of stiff little legs reaching out from a light batter, fried chilli and garlic completing the pyre, I’m trying to work out if the elevator rock coming from the sound system is too loud. Or just horrible. Hang on: it’s both.

Soft shelled crab, then. Hard to perfect and a dish Glasgow has been lacking since Asia Style at Charing Cross disappeared virtually overnight, or so it seemed.
This is quite good. Maybe not enough white crab meat, maybe those chunks are a little too heavy and dark, and it’s easy to push soft-shelled crab the wrong side of flavourful and let the pungent flavours dominate, but this is definitely crisp and definitely acceptable.

No chop sticks offered. No dragons, no paper tapestries, no ting-tang sounds. Lychee Oriental here is pretty much fully Westernised and fine dining, I believe I read somewhere.
If the starters were full of flavour and quite delicately prepared I’m not so sure about that fine dining tag when the main courses come. 

Stir-fried beef in chilli, garlic and asparagus is just that, the sauce like the rain outside, the beef generic and OK while asparagus and red peppers are chopped and tossed in. It’s pleasant but no more.

A katsu curry has two lovely tender pieces of breaded chicken and a curried sauce that if it was made from scratch here still kind of tastes like the canned curry sauce in just about every other Chinese restaurant.

Halibut? The fish is dry, the sauce too light with ginger and spring onion. And as for those noodles? What are they thinking of? Also far too dry.

I’ve got to say that given a choice I would be next door in Chop Chop where the food is, frankly, a lot more interesting, but …where’s everyone sitting tonight? In here.

And if you want more hardcore, palate-popping, regional Chinese restaurants Glasgow has those too, though decor is not usually their thing. 

Lychee Oriental is an upmarket take on the reassuring and familiar Chinese food we Scots grew up with. It’s a pleasant place to be, and the food is not unpleasant to eat. But that’s about it.

Lychee Oriental

59 Mitchell Street, Glasgow (www.lycheeoriental.co.uk, 0141 248 2240)

Menu Nothing that’s going to blow your socks off, reassuringly familiar oriental food and sauces with lots of gingers and spring onions and chilli. 3/5 
Atmosphere Smooth, creamy, upmarket and entirely untraditional Chinese restaurant. Possibly its strongest selling point. 4/5
Service Fast and efficient ladies who couldn’t really be faulted though never slow to upsell the drinks either. 4/5
Price The halibut and ginger was almost £20 before the noodles were factored in yet the dim sum was £12.50 a dozen. Pick your way through the menu and it can be reasonable. 4/5
Food Yuk sung worth a go, dim-sum certainly juicy, soft shelled crab, too, but all the action is in the starters, mains rather more ordinary, if well presented. 6/10
Total 21/30