THE table setting is impressive, with its chopsticks, the chopstick rests and the spoons plated in gold and inlaid with jade pieces.

And the dining room, while not exactly breathtaking with its low ceiling, looks classy. A tasteful chandelier dominates the room and two pretty stained glass panels adorn a wall.

The service is sterling. Every one of the service staff speaks fluent English, a rarity in a Chinese restaurant here, and is ever so friendly without being familiar.

All these certainly bode well for Yan Ting, the two-week-old Cantonese restaurant in the equally new St. Regis hotel, which bills itself as a six-star hotel. The restaurant is run by the hotel, a top-end brand by the Starwood hotel management company.

The menu, which features mainly classic Cantonese dishes, looks unremarkably simple except for the prices. Other than the live seafood, which is priced according to weight, everything else is priced per person.

The idea is to allow each diner at a table to order a different dish for himself, like in a Western restaurant, except that servings here are even smaller. This means there is no chance of sharing food like in other Chinese - or even Western - restaurants.

And the place is not cheap, with most of the simpler dishes priced from $10 to $24 each. You need at least five dishes, plus a dessert, for a decent meal, toting up a bill of easily $100, with taxes. And that's for just one person.

The restaurant prides itself on its shark's fin and abalone dishes. The prices for these are comparable to other high-end restaurants, at $48 for a bowl of braised superior shark's fin in golden broth and $98 for a traditional Buddha Jumps Over The Wall seafood delicacy broth.

But I am not inclined to splurge until I have faith that the chef can do the simple dishes well. And there, Yan Ting's executive chef Chan Siu Kong, a Hong Konger, fails.

Individual servings work well for Western cooking or some fusion dishes where the cooking can be done in a tiny pan over moderate heat. But the best Cantonese stir-frying is done in a big wok over a roaring fire.

With too little food in the wok, however, it gets overcooked in no time. But if you settle for pushing the food around in a warm pan, you will never give it the breath of the wok, what the Cantonese call 'wok hei', an aroma awakened by the high temperature. Either way, it doesn't work.

So most of the dishes I tried at a dinner at Yan Ting a week ago failed, and failed miserably.

To make matters worse, the food is bland.

These include a wok-baked chicken with onions and spring onions ($10) where the individual flavours fail to excite the palate without the salt required to bind them together.

You can also forget about the steamed boneless chicken with ham ($12), the eggplant with minced pork ($12), the prawn with egg noodle ($12) and the braised ee fu noodle ($12). They are bland, bland, bland and bland.

Not surprisingly, it is the dishes which are cooked with heavy sauces that fare better. The baked chicken ($12) or 'three-cup chicken', which is cooked in a small claypot with soya sauce and plenty of basil, is a tasty dish that goes well with white rice. So is the slow-cooked pork belly ($15) or Dongpo pork, although the cut is a bit too lean for a melt-in-the-mouth texture.

A baked parcel of scallop and goose liver ($24) tastes pretty good, with just enough goose liver used to lend flavour without overpowering the more delicate scallop. But the rice-flour wrapping is not crispy all the way through though - parts of it are chewy.

The desserts are disappointing. The thousand layer cake ($3), which has layers of custard sandwiched between thin layers of dough, is dry. And the bird's nest jelly ($6) is tasteless.

Based on the dinner, I would have rated the food two stars. But to be fair, I decided to go back a second time. Besides, I hadn't tried the restaurant's dimsum yet, which is available only for lunch.

So back I went on New Year's Day. And I'm glad I did. True, some of the steamed dumplings too can do with a bit more salt. But seeing how most Singaporeans like to dip their dumplings in chilli sauce, I doubt they would notice that anyway.

But the prawn in the har gow (steamed shrimp dumpling, $1.80 a piece) is fresh and succulent, and the rice-flour wrapper is perfect, being neither too thick nor too soft.

With most of the other items, it is one delectable piece after another. The xiao long bao ($4 a piece) is excellent, with its pouch of piping hot and tasty stock encased in a thin, soft pouch.

The steamed barbecued pork bun ($1.80 a piece) is fluffy and packed with a filling of delicious char siew. And the signature radish cake ($1.40 a piece) is gorgeous with its perfect texture and an aromatic flavour that comes from the sausage oil used to pan-fry it.

My verdict? Give the a la carte menu a miss until the chef gets his act together. Go for the dimsum instead.

It's much cheaper too. I ordered 10 dimsum items and paid $25 per person. And for that, you get to enjoy the same good service and pleasant ambience. That's what I call good value.

Yan Ting
St. Regis Singapore
29 Tanglin Road,
(S) 247911
Tel: 6506-6888
Open: 11.45am to 3.30pm, 6 to 11pm

Food: ***
Service: ****
Ambience: ****
Price: Budget from $100 per person for a la carte, $25 for dimsum