Wing Yip Business Centre, Oldham Road, Ancoats, Manchester (0161 839 3312). Dim sum for two: £35

How was I supposed to resist the allure of a restaurant called Glamorous? How could I not want to go there when I have quite clearly made the pursuit of glamour the entire point of my life? And surely they do not come much more glamorous than this? Or, as they put it: "How many other Chinese restaurants do you know with their very own secure multistorey car park, a total seating capacity of 600, and the biggest chandelier you've ever seen adorning the centre of the restaurant?"

Glamorous occupies a football pitch-sized slab of floor space in the Manchester business centre run by Wing Yip, the behemoths of catering suppliers to Britain's Asian restaurant business. In theory I travel all over the country reviewing myriad Chinese places that claim to make all their own food. In reality, as Wing Yip itself boasts, almost all of them will get some or even a huge majority of their dishes from the company, which means that most of the time I've almost certainly been eating exactly the same dishes, just on different crockery. It therefore made a kind of sense to head for one of the motherships. And anyway, it's called Glamorous. It had to be done.

Which is essentially the sum of it. Glamorous has to be done, but probably only once. After all, you would not want to miss out on that multistorey car park. One wall of the restaurant is made up of windows, which look out into its gunmetal-grey depths. We were proudly offered a window seat, and after the long march across the tundra of the dining room were grateful for the rest, even more so for the view of a lovely Lexus.

On a weekday lunchtime the place was packed with Chinese families. Having eaten the food, I do not take this as a sign of quality (I rarely do). Presumably they had all been in the supermarket downstairs, were hungry, and regarded the food here as not actively offensive. In places, however, the experience can be entertaining. Our waiter, a stringy chap in a bigger man's suit, certainly thought so. He took our dim sum order with barely restrained glee, finally belching out gales of laughter when I ordered the goose web. Not unreasonable: he thought we'd hate it, and so did I, but I needed one more look at the matter of fowl extremities. I have long thought braised chicken feet disgusting; all that gelatinous, knobbly stuff. Well, goose feet are exactly the same, only bigger.

Char sui buns, while hardly exemplary, were soft and light, and the sticky, sweet, porky filling did the job. Strands of squid, though showing that rubberiness that comes with a pause in the deep freeze, had at least been greaselessly deep-fried. I loved the seafood in a scallop and prawn dumpling, which had a pleasing bite, but the sticky rice-flour casing was far too thick and gelatinous. The same was true of a steamed dumpling of prawn and chives. This was all the odder because we had ordered it from the deep-fried list, and this had been nowhere near the bubbling oil. I pointed this out to the waiter, who was insistent that, whatever the menu said, this was what we had ordered.

Weirdest of the lot was a mixed meat dumpling with soup, which I assumed from the description to be xiao long bao, those miraculous little parcels of loveliness in which the shell encases the broth so that invariably it dribbles down your chin. What arrived was a bowl of stock and, floating in it, the broken shell to a dumpling and one sad crabstick. We asked a waitress what it was. She didn't know. She asked her friend. She didn't know either. Our waiter came back, said it was for someone else, took it away and then brought it back again, telling us it was the one we had ordered. I dug around in its depths with a spoon, forcing the crabstick to roll and bob. I didn't taste it. There are limits.

There is a much longer main menu and hanging in the window of a kitchen were some glossy lacquered ducks. I concluded it might well be possible to get a glamorous meal here. Ours just hadn't been it.

• Email Jay Rayner at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk

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