LOCATION schmocation. This place is located above a cash and carry on a business park near Stoke.

It's not quite the back of beyond, but I can think of more auspicious sites for a fashionable restaurant.

Yet Wing Lee Sakura is one of the most talked about ethnic venues in the area, and part of the interest is generated by where it is.

Most of the people who've been urging me to visit this cool new Chinese/Japanese restaurant in a shed at Trentham Lakes seem to feel that the improbable location lends a touch of mystique.

It's like finding a branch of Greenwood's in the middle of a university campus.

Wing Lee Sakura is certainly different from other Chinese restaurants. The high ceiling makes the big, open room feel a bit like a converted school gymnasium, although there are smaller rooms for private dinner and karaoke parties.

Cream-coloured banquettes fan out from the sushi bar, around which dishes travel on a perpetual carousel.

The atmosphere is light, fresh and airy, splashes of colour provided by lanterns, prints and a display of dolls in traditional costume.

Modernity rules, though, and the menu is designed to accommodate the adventurous, as well as those who just want their favourite dishes expertly cooked and presented with style.

Fears having been expressed for the wellbeing of my interior workings, I decided to exercise a degree of caution.

In a reference to my recent attack of gout, a reader warned of "the ravages inflicted on your interior workings by the regular ingestion of spicy exotic concoctions of dubious origin."

Another said it was time for me to embrace a "more monastic diet," which sounds a bit drastic: "This week Brother Alan tucks into more coarse bread and beans."

Their concern is appreciated, however, and on this occasion I chose not to expose my interior workings to dishes involving eels, fish heads, frogs' legs or ducks' tongues.

All these are available under 'Authentic Chinese Dishes', which doubtless explains why on Sunday afternoon the majority of our fellow diners were of Oriental background (always an encouraging sign, of course).

We hesitated to order one of the inclusive 'banquets', because set meals are sometimes stronger on volume and variety than they are on flavour and texture.

But the £14.95-a-head deal on which we did finally settle got off to a promising start with a choice of soups: either the regular chicken and sweetcorn or a hot and sour alternative.

Herself had the hot and sour alternative, which turned out to be a thick meat and vegetable broth-with-a-bite. She was impressed.

Crispy seaweed I can take or leave, and I usually leave, but the spring roll was vintage and I could have eaten a dozen of the barbecue spare ribs.

The beef in black bean sauce, so often a rather humdrum dish, was a revelation: chunks of crunchy pepper and onion, pieces of lean beef that melted in the mouth and a sauce so delicious you didn't want to waste a drop, and we didn't.

That left the sweet and sour chicken Cantonese-style with a hard act to follow, but it was not found wanting, and nor were the mixed vegetables in satay sauce.

The meal might have consisted of 'spicy exotic concoctions', thereby posing a threat to my internal workings, but the only after-effects I experienced were a burning desire to repeat the exercise at the earliest opportunity.