Shuang Shuang, restaurant review: When the cooking is as do-it-yourself as this, who gets the credit?

It's easy to be distracted when you're looking up Shuang Shuang online. Instead of finding images of Chinese food, your screen is filled with pictures of a young Oriental actress in abbreviated swimwear, a plunging black evening gown and Kill Bill-style action-hero garb. The reason is simple: she's called Mavis Pan Shuang Shuang, a 27-year-old Chinese actress who is a) gorgeous, b) very popular and c) currently mired in sex scandals in the Chinese press.

The restaurant which shares her name is the newest addition to London's Chinatown, and offers the latest thing: the DIY hot pot. The menu explains that hot pots have been a Chinese tradition for a thousand years "with broths inspired by the regions of China", but some may struggle to discern the cooking style from a fondue. A central feature, the Japanese-style kaiten conveyor belt that sends dishes gliding past the diners, began in 1997 with Simon Woodroffe's Yo Sushi! Shuang Shuang was conceived by Fah Sundravorakul, a Thai entrepreneur who ran three restaurants in Hong Kong. So it has multiple influences.

I took my daughters along on a windy Tuesday evening. A haven from the bustle of Shaftesbury Avenue, the place is bright, swishy and cool, with long wooden slats fencing off the staircase (there's an upper floor for more formal occasions), long dangling gold lights, and immaculate white tiles around the open-view kitchen. The entire clientele seemed to be Chinese couples: a positive sign.

Ranged before us was an elaborate batterie de cuisine: metal cauldron, chopsticks, wire spoon, wooden tongs, soy sauce, soy vinegar, sauce bowl, eating bowl… It was a bit like being on MasterChef. For the next hour, we did a lot of choosing. Guided by the manager, you first pick the broth in which to cook your dinner. There's Temple Brew (made with soy milk, mushrooms, white turnip and dried liquorice root), and there's Fish Pond (it doesn't sound very alluring, does it? Fish bones, prawns, southern Chinese herbs and dried fish oil). There's the mildly bizarre Lamb Tonic (lamb bones with pickled mustard greens and chilli oil), Black Bird (black chicken, jujubes and Chinese wolfberries – ingredients from a fairytale), and Mala (dried chilli, Sichuan peppercorn, fermented beans and herbs). We tasted all five. The only one with any salient flavour was Mala, but the girls, having more ladylike palates, chose the fish and the lamb. Large bearded chaps arrived from the kitchen with giant pitchers and poured the various broths into the cauldrons before us.

You control the heat yourself, choose the ingredients from the carousel, and cook them in the broth. You get two platters of dipping sauces to choose from. You also need to choose a starter. My jasmine tea egg had been hard-boiled until the albumen resembled Tupperware, and was served with figgy jam. It's probably considered ambrosia in Hong Kong. Pig's ears were dry-roasted to resemble pork scratchings. They came with Xinjiang sauce and were fantastically moreish. And the scallop and prawn fritters, pan-fried in mala oil, were a smash hit.

It's hard to judge the actual cooking as an achievement of the restaurant, since you do all the work yourself, but I noticed the veg did best. Pak choi, samphire and mixed mushrooms came to life and flourished in the spicy broth, while the cabbage and mixed roots revealed unexpected nutty depths. I experienced what amounted to a weird vegetarian epiphany. Less exciting was the pork luncheon meat, which no amount of sexy broth can render seductive.

The quality of meat was a puzzle: the restaurant offers wagyu beef, chicken breast and pork belly, which all looked perfectly OK on their little colour-coordinated plates, but immersion in broth doesn't do much more than dye them a uniform grey. Then there's the balls. "What exactly are these beef balls?" I asked the manager. "Which bit of the cow are they from?" He frowned. "From… all over the cow," he said. I take that to mean mechanically recovered meat, like you used to get in fast-food joints. I cooked some in the broth. They emerged spongy and tasteless, like old-style McDonald's chicken nuggets.

The girls worked their way through prawns, squid, salmon, ribeye beef, lamb, choi sum, bamboo shoots and three thicknesses of noodle, and enjoyed the whole experience. "You're missing the point of this place, Dad," they said. "It's a perfect first-date restaurant. You learn the drill together, you choose things and try things together, there's no rules or protocol, you can't do it wrong unless you eat the chicken raw. And everything gets very messy and hysterical. It's food as entertainment." So that was me told. Try it when you're next in Soho – unless you're bad at making 50 choices in an hour.

Food **
Ambience ***
​Service ***

Shuang Shuang, 64 Shaftesbury Avenue, London W1 (020 7734 5416). Around £30 a head, before wine and service