“This is weird,” said my old friend Dave as we gathered our stuff and prepared to leave Coffee Under Pressure, the drizzle persevering outside. “Normally I know where we’re going in advance when you take me to review somewhere, but today I have no idea.”

He’s right: Dave has become one of my most frequent dining companions, but usually when I eat somewhere out of town – in Oxford, Bath, Stroud or his hometown of Swindon. When that happens I give him a shortlist of places I’ve been wanting to visit, and let him have the final say. He’s not joined me on duty in Reading for a couple of years, and the criteria for Reading reviews are different: not so much where I really fancy, although sometimes I do, and more about where I really ought to cover.

On that basis, the subject of this week’s review is long overdue.

YY Supermarket has been a fixture on the Kings Road for several years now, thriving in a site that was the former home of the Warwick Arms and Bali Lounge; I used to drop in frequently to pick up my Lao Gan Ma, back when I lived in the Village. Then a couple of years ago they opened a restaurant in the back of the supermarket and it has done something no restaurant has done at that site for the longest time, namely flourished.

In the roll call of Reading’s cursed sites, that building occupies an exalted position, having seen off a bunch of places – the Biscuit & Barrel, Cardamom, The Aila, King’s Kitchen – none of which lasted long enough for me to review them. By contrast YY Restaurant is going strong, and has steadily built up a reputation as one of Reading’s best Chinese restaurants.

Its dim sum, made fresh rather than bought in and defrosted, has attracted particular praise. The really unusual thing about YY is this: I’ve not seen an awful lot of people talk about it online, but whenever it’s mentioned, it receives nothing but compliments. From normal people I mean, rather than somebody rambling about a ‘hidden gem’ that just so happens to have paid for their dinner.

In the run-up to my visit, as fate would have it, I had a comment on the blog from a reader, Chris. He had lived in Hong Kong for four years, he said, and he thought that YY served some of the best Cantonese food he’d eaten in the UK. “I intend to try a lot more of the menu during future visits (starting this weekend),” he said. It wasn’t a clincher – I’d already planned my visit to YY by then – but it definitely gave me reassurance that lunch was unlikely to be a duffer.