It really does upset me when a famous restaurateur opens up the first outlet of a new cheapo chain and invites all the critics to special private meals before the official opening, and then plies them with dishes biked in from his celebrated upscale eateries round the corner, or has food cooked specially for them on-site by his own private chefs, so that they write reviews that are wholly, wholly wrong and misleading, and the place ends up thriving, instead of closing as it would in a just world, within the week.

I cannot prove that that went on at Cha Cha Moon (well, I can prove the critics were there on special invite-only nights, but not who cooked for them), but it is the only explanation I can possibly offer for the four and five-star ratings that Alan Yau has been receiving in the press for this shameless mockery of a restaurant, which is an insult to every man, woman and child who ever paid for a mouthful of hot food in London.

I am not being a snob here, the place is a noodle joint and I went to judge it only according to its aspirations. It charges just £3.50 for each dish (though that may be an opening season stunt) and for that sort of money I would not expect the standards of cooking you (sometimes) see at Yau’s Michelin-starred Hakkasan and Yauatcha. I would expect something approaching the standards of Wagamama – which Yau founded and then left – which is to say, upmarket student food. At a push, I might dream of the fiery authenticity of a roadside Hong Kong or Kuala Lumpur noodle stand – but things that great just don’t happen here.

Nor did I take snobs with me. I usually take a Chinese foodie pal on a jaunt like this, but I had, as it happened, an Arab staying with me last week rather than a Chinaman, my old friend the writer Robin Yassin-Kassab, who is here for the publication of his first novel, and his nine-year-old son, Ibrahim. After a few hours spent at the Doctor Who Exhibition in Earls Court, the trip into Soho for noodles and fizzy pop seemed the least I could do to thank Ibrahim for my morning with the Slitheen, the Autons and a whole roomful of Billie Piper’s used underwear.

The place looks OK, in a Wagamama-meets-Hakkasan sort of way, with long refectory tables and young, sloppy staff all wearing T-shirts bearing some sort of slogan (I don’t know what slogan, I don’t read clothes). They sat us at one end of a table, close to the long bar/pass, at which blank-faced staff of 1,000 nationalities stood idly, avoiding the glance of customers.

Ibrahim asked the waiter for a glass of water.

“Still or sparkling?” came the reply, quick as a flash. To a child. No acknowledgement of the invention of the tap. I guess at such low prices you have to start fleecing your customer somewhere.

The menu hops randomly around the Far East (ho hum), offering ten kinds of soup noodle (food for retards, I always think – slurping and drooling like prisoners over boiled brown water); six forms of garnished lao mian; eight “wok” things; and 11 “sides”, which included some veg, dumplings, miscellaneous fried stuff.

XO Cheung Fun (rice noodle cannelloni) didn’t specify the filling, so I asked the waiter what it was. Unfortunately, he said, there was no cheung fun of any kind, nor any beancurd roll, both having been removed from the menu personally by Alan Yau on grounds of “quality control” – which is odd, because on that basis he should have taken everything else off the menu too.

“It’s very noisy,” said Ibrahim, referring to the clatter and scream of the kitchen positioned four inches from our earholes. This from a kid who’s just spent two hours in a stadium filled with exploding worlds, screaming “Exterminate!” into a voice-distorting amplifier.

We ordered a lot of food. Ibrahim’s duck noodle soup arrived first. He looked very excited. He slurped a mouthful. His face fell. He looked at his dad, uncertain if it was OK to complain.

“It doesn’t taste of anything,” said the boy.

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