Gingko is the Rolls-Royce of Sichuanese restaurants in the province's capital city, Chengdu: sleek, glamorous, and dripping with wealth. In the early evening, chauffeur-driven cars pull up outside the riverside frontage of its main branch, and disgorge their passengers into its huge marble hall. On the right, there's the kind of low-lit lounge you might find in a five-star hotel; upstairs, the dining room is gorgeously decorated, its wood-panelled walls studded with golden heads of the Guanyin buddha, Chinese paintings and calligraphies. Private rooms, de rigueur in upmarket Chinese restaurants, are available.

This is the kind of restaurant where locals take people they want to impress. The menu is fronted by show-off haute cuisine, such as bird's nest and abalone, alongside sashimi and Kobe beef (the menu is trilingual: Chinese, English and Japanese). But if you don't want to sink Rmb1,680 (￡159) on half a kilo of humphead wrasse, there is a good and more reasonably priced selection of traditional Sichuanese dishes. Service is very good, as you'd expect.

In general, the cooking here is accomplished and sometimes excellent. Our starters were exemplary: cool strips of bean jelly in a garlicky, sour-hot dressing (suanla liangfen); “phoenix-tail” lettuce in a well-seasoned sesame sauce (majiang fengwei); and rabbit tossed with fried peanuts in a spicy black bean sauce. Mains, however, lacked the punch of their classic versions: a mapo doufu (pock-marked old woman's beancurd) with a rather grainy minced meat topping, and a Gong Bao chicken that was more sweet-and-sour than spicy. The twice-cooked pork (huiguo rou), a Chengdu favourite, was, however, delicious. We finished our dinner, Sichuanese-style, with a refreshing soup, made, here, from black chicken and waterlily flowers.