Chung Ying Garden, 17 Thorp Street, Birmingham

The most famous chef in China during the war-mongering Zhou Dynasty (1122-256BC) was Yi Ya, who began his career in the kitchens of the ambitious Duke of Qi. Equally ambitious, the great chef continually stunned his master with his innovative, exotic and rare creations. Then one night, the evil duke summoned Yi Ya to his chambers and commanded him to cook the only flesh he had not yet tasted – that of a young child.

Legend decrees that Yi Ya went back to the kitchens, and dutifully prepared his own infant son for the court table, by steaming.

It's not easy for a keen Chinese food lover to find new tastes, and even harder to arrange those flavours in a seamless, well-composed banquet. I don't mean those "set menus" offered to groups, but a negotiated feast of special dishes in harmony with each other.

January is the perfect banqueting season, wedged as it is between Western and Chinese New Year celebrations, so off I trot to the Chung Ying Garden in Birmingham.

The menu is inspiring, rambling its way seductively through page after page of the sort of Cantonese dishes that are normally tucked away on special menus printed only in Chinese. Here, fully translated, are things such as steamed tripe with ginger and spring onion, crispy fried frogs' legs, paper-wrapped spare ribs, roasted suckling pig and quick- fried dried squid with jellyfish and celery. There is also a fair swag of the traditional Westernised lemon chicken, prawn toast and sizzling platters, ready to fill the restaurant with their hateful odours.

Not on my banquet, you don't. I want a robust, home-style spread of tender salt-baked chicken, glossy green dau miu pea sprouts in ginger and a bubbling wintry clay pot that rarely makes it on to an English menu of eel and belly pork and bean curd in a thick, soupy gravy.

Chung Ying Garden, which started life as the Thorp Street Army Barracks, is sweetly still known as the "new" Chung Ying 15 years after joining the original Chung Ying down the road. It has undergone a cultural revolution of its own in the past year, keeping up with the general rejuvenation of Birmingham's Chinese quarter and the nearby Bull Ring shopping centre and Hippodrome theatre.

The muted wood panelling, red carpet and spotlit alcoves of entombed Xian warriors still look reassuringly familiar, with more modern touches evident in the decorative lighting and Andy Warholesque portraits of cheong-sammed women.

Already, there is a lot to like about the Garden. Like the fact that there are several Chinese family and business groups here in various stages of banquet. And the way the waiters move like goldfish through the room, keeping one eye on Michael Owen's goal-scoring on the conveniently positioned television. And the way the wine list has plenty under 20 quid, as well as the odd gem like a lively, food-friendly Cloudy Bay Pinot Noir 2000 for £28.

Unusually, the restaurant offers a full list of dim sum at night. It's never going to be as good once the dim sum chef has gone home after lunch, but the steamed har gau prawn dumplings (£2.60) and siu mai pork dumplings (£2.60) are well-made and clean-tasting.

About this time, a banquet can either crash into a series of platters of greasy lookalike stir-fries, or compose itself into a joyful spread of singular but harmonising dishes. Well, Happy New Year to me, it's the latter.

Take the dau miu, for instance – the shoots and tendrils of the mange tout or snow pea plant (£9.50). It costs more than your basic gai laan Chinese broccoli or bok (pak) choy Shanghainese cabbage, but I'd pay double for this mossy green beauty, lightly dressed with a ginger sauce, each mouthful juicy and sweet.

The bubbling, steaming claypot of belly pork, eel and golden-fried bean curd (£10.50) is the kind of dish that makes Chinese families stay together. Good-size cutlets of gelatinous, sticky eel and fingers of tender pork lurk in a sea of gravy that begs to be spooned over rice.

The rice, the rice. Rarely is it as perfectly cooked as it is tonight (£3), each grain separate, glossy and almost juicy, smelling of rice paddies and hessian sacks.

What's not to like? The salt-baked chicken (£8), a dish made famous by the nomadic Hakka people of Southern China, should be fragrant, tender, pale and plump, with a tang of sea salt from its protective salt crust. Sorry, no cigar. This is one tough bird, the meat tight and not particularly fragrant. The maitre d' suggests it is the type of chicken that is at fault rather than the over-cooking of which I complain, but takes it off the bill nonetheless, so both his honour and mine are satisfied.

The banquet finishes with a favourite Cantonese supper dish of slippery wok-fried hor fun (white rice noodles) with tender marinated beef, bean shoots and soy sauce (£6.50).

What a good, honest banquet it has been, in a warm, comfortable, bustling restaurant. Chinese New Year falls on 1 February, so there is banqueting time aplenty in the forthcoming weeks. It's the Year of the Goat, which experts predict will be full of great adventures and splendid new discoveries. Yes, but are they talking about the year, or the banquet? *

Open daily for lunch and dinner. Around £60 for two, with wine and service - tel: 0121 666 6622.