The Miami Beach franchise of this London-based concept is housed on the ground floor of the hip W hotel. I must say that, prior to visiting this restaurant, I hadn't heard about Mr Chow in London, but it would appear this was one of the places to be in London in the '90s.

The restaurant is very popular and was full on Friday night. The ratio of waiting staff to customers is impressive (see below for the quality of the service, though).

We ordered some cocktails (the Pineapple 100 and the Monarch, which were both nice). For food, we took our waiter's advice and ordered the two course menu at $65 per person. We got the glazed prawns with walnuts, the lobster vermicelli, the signature green prawns and the duck. The two starters were the better dishes of the night. The duck wasn't on par with some of those I've had in London, and was served with the bones still on the plate (including some splinters that I bit on). The green prawns were spectacularly green, but not particularly tasty. The meal deal also included two sides - egg fried rice with prawns and bok choi (both good). The portions were generous, so the meal deal turned out to be a lot of food.

Now, while the food was quite good, the service was not particularly impressive. The waiters seemed to rush us - they took our starter plates away while we still had some starters in front of us, and almost served another table's main course to us. A cocktail my wife ordered took ages to materialise etc.

I wasn't particularly impressed by the fact that only Western style cutlery was available. While I appreciate it's easier to eat rice with a fork, the same could not be said about the nice vermicelli we had for starters, which were screaming for chopsticks!