Simple pleasures

At Beijing Banquet, the ingredients get the royal treatment from a kitchen that celebrates freshness and tradition, Mike Peters discovers.

The ripe, purple-red waxberries are bursting with sweetness in their chilled bowls - so enticing that I fear I will get too full to eat anything else.

In the end, there was little danger of that. The onslaught of dishes that followed at Beijing Banquet, served traditionally on a lazy Susan-style tabletop that never seemed to stop turning, was just too tempting.