There was a flurry in the press a couple of years ago when it was revealed that Kai Chinese restaurant in Mayfair was serving a soup called Buddha Jumps Over the Wall for £108 a bowl. At the recently opened Pearl Liang in Paddington Central - that Marie Celeste of an office/residential/retail development - a soup with the same name sells for £20 a "mini pot".

Small it is and, in a meal where every other dish was happily shared, Reg, who had ordered it, hugged the pot closely to his chest. The story goes that, while meditating, Buddha caught a whiff of the aroma of this soup from Fujian province which can include more than 30 ingredients and take days to prepare, leapt over a wall (or left the monastery) and broke his commitment to being vegetarian in order to savour it.

Reg, my very own Buddha, didn't have to wrestle with his conscience, just the large piece of dried abalone which is one of the reasons for the price of the speciality. The broth - I was allowed a tiny sip - is complex, resonant, savoury from ham, healthy from vegetables, slippery from shark's fin. It is worth the leap on the bill.

One of the directors of Pearl Liang, is Humphrey Lee, long-time manager of Mandarin Kitchen in Queensway, a restaurant renowned for its fish and shellfish even if not for its grasp of the concept of booking.

Another is the father of one of personable waiters who gave me a smile as if to say I know who you are. "Where have we met before?" I asked. "At Zen Central, I was 17." "How old are you now?" "Thirty-four." Ah, when food is good, how time flies.

There is an enticing and very reasonably priced - £2.30-£2.50 - list of dim sum but they turn into a pumpkin, or anyway a taro dome with monk vegetables, at 5pm. But we managed to find two still available; zucchini prawn dumpling and Shanghai dumpling with pork. The finesse in their preparation will have me returning to Pearl Liang for lunch. Unusually, the set menus are not totally clichéd and probably represent value, but I wanted to devise dinner myself.

Best of the dishes we tried on two occasions were Imperial cold mixed hors d'oeuvres - written in another part of the menu rather sweetly as Hor Oderve - which included succulent drunken chicken, jelly fish with sesame, slinky slices of five-spice beef sheen (shin), Arctic clams and Faushan pork trotter; delectable deep-fried softshell crab; barbecued roasted duck (not the duck with pancakes) which has subtle, juicy liquorice appeal; stewed beef goulash with clear soup; emerald green, garlicky tao mui (pea shoots) and a dish described as the chef 's speciality, lobster noodle with ginger and spring onion.

Its price of £28 made me order only one for our party of five but it went round reasonably generously, at least as far as the lobstery-gingery noodles were concerned.

The interior of the restaurant gives the feeling of no expense spared. Powdery pink and mauve colours and soft seating make it flattering and comfortable and the space is divided in such a way as to give areas of intimacy. Although our taxi driver said he had no idea where number 8 Sheldon Square or indeed Paddington Central was, a reassuring number of others, many of them Chinese, have already found it.