At the start of the Year of the Pig, when the Chinese economy is surging ahead and almost anything from that country is suddenly in the news, the Tong San Restaurant in Botley manages to retain a sort of timewarp quality. This is how Chinese restaurants used to be.

Add to that the fact that the food is cheap, traditional, and unexcitingly acceptable, and you find yourself feeling at home and at ease in the place even if not exactly inspired by your surroundings.

The food has the charm of the familiar too. My crabmeat soup, sort of khaki in colour, looked so like the chicken version ordered by colleague Maggie Hartford that I wondered whether the two were one and the same.

The nondescript taste of the stuff - not unpleasant, more what is too often described as "mild" - was no help either: only by fishing for crab and analysing the catch did I ascertain that it was indeed fish not fowl.

The soup arrived in comfortingly familiar china bowls with matching china spoons, delivered by a shy but bored-looking girl from Malaysia, as part of a £7.50 set menu.

Business Editor Andrew Smith went for the sweet and sour Peking spare ribs of pork as a starter. He pronounced them tasty and crispy enough but still only awarded them five marks out of ten.

Red wine (£10.50) arrived on our table in a fancy-shaped bottle, its label proclaiming it to have originated in France under the name of Cuvee Tradition.

It too was very bland and a little too much I am sure would furnish you with a first rate headache.

My prawn with mixed vegetable second dish was a pleasant surprise. I would go so far as to award it six out of ten.

The vegetables were not overcooked and as Maggie remarked (she had the same dish but with rice instead of noodles) it fullfilled one criterion of a good stir-fry: it contained a few items that were difficult to identify (water chestnuts perhaps?) However, there was little verve or panache in the presentation. No feeling of New China having come to Oxford. We even had to specially ask for chop sticks.

Andrew had pork for his second course too (it is the year of the Pig after all). Average, again, was the verdict.

Perhaps the secret at the Tong San is to desert the set menu and spend a little more for what looked like a very much better meal being eaten at the next table.

Customers there were treated to little extras - like mints brought along with the bill! All in all, eating the set lunch was a little like travelling economy class with the curtain between you and business class passengers left undrawn to reveal the goodies you are not getting!

But what in the way of business would anyone ever discuss in a restaurant like this, set as it is in that ineffably dreary 1960s shopping parade known as The Square, Botley, itself reminiscent of buildings built in China with Soviet money shortly after the cultural revolution?

You would certainly not take a client there if you wanted to impress him or her. Perhaps you could take a creditor there to convince him that you had no money but that your heart was in the right place.

Or if you were a landlord you might I suppose take a tenant there to explain to him why you couldn't pay him back his deposit.

It's that sort of place - though to be fair it was far from empty and I heard one group of people, obviously regulars, promise to be back the next week.

n Contact: Tong San restaurant 01865 798206