I'll confess it; I'm still struggling with my nicotine addiction. Earlier in the year I managed three nicotine-free months before succumbing to the evil weed again. I tell you this, not as a plea for understanding, but simply because it's the reason I haven't visited Wagamama before. It's a restaurant that has a strict no-smoking policy and I never fancied sitting over a meal and a drink without a smoke. But now I know that I can do it - I mean if I can go for three months, surely an hour or two must be within powers? With this conviction firmly in place I set off with my guest Hugo Jellett for King Street.

Actually it's a bit of a busman's holiday for Hugo; he's just taken up the job of marketing director in The Gaiety and Wagamamas, being just across the road, is one of his lunchtime haunts. Still, it occurred to me that there was no harm in having someone with me who knew the menu and could guide me through it. The restaurant is downstairs at basement level, and as we arrived the queue snaked right up the stairs almost to the road. 'Wanna go somewhere else?' I asked Hugo. 'Trust me,' he said, 'the queue moves quickly.' He was right, it did. Which brings me to something you should know about Wagamamas: it's designed to feed you fast and then you get you out to make room for the next customers. It's not that they rush you - they don't - it's just that they take your order almost as soon as you sit, the food comes quickly and it doesn't take you long to discover that the wooden benches you're sitting on aren't built for comfort.

While we waited for a table, moving down the stairs one or two at a time, there was plenty of opportunity to survey the dining room below. It's a lot longer than it's wide and most of the left-hand side is taken up with the kitchens. It's laid out just like other Wagamamas that I've seen in England, with serried ranks of long wooden tables which give it the feel of a school refectory. Hard surfaces mean lots of noise, which coupled with the crowds means that even though you'll find yourself sharing a table with total strangers, the chances are they won't be able to overhear whatever indiscreet snippets you're passing across the table to your companion.

The other big difference here, as opposed to other restaurants, is in their use of high-tech. All the waiting staff have a hand-held communicator which relays your order instantly to the kitchens. Not unlike Star Trek's tri- corder. 'Captain's log star-date 58.3. We're in orbit around Planet Wagamama. A landing party comprised of Lieutenant Jellett and Star-fleet cook Tullio are investigating.' Cut to amazingly earth-like planet surface. 'Tri-corder readings, Tullio.' 'Oxygen levels breathable, very low nicotine readings, nitrogen normal. It's a terra-like atmosphere. The Wagamamans appear to be hominid - their food dispensing technology is very third millennium. It's a restaurant, Jellett, but not as we know it.'

But I digress: it's efficient and quick. And so to the menu. It's on a large piece of card and it's divided by the various types of dish; rice, noodle, curry, fried noodles and 'ramen', which is described as 'the way of the noodle'. Nearly everything on the menu is around the £5 mark, although there's the odd dish at £7 and £8. Health freaks will be delighted to find lots of fresh fruit juices and cordials as well as plenty of vegetarian dishes. There's a section called 'side-orders' which Hugo explained you could treat as starters, although all the dishes ordered will arrive together. A lot of the dishes I liked the look of were chicken dishes, but I felt that I really ought to try something else as well. Being at a table with other people gives you a chance to see what they've ordered and a lot of the dishes that surrounded me looked pretty good. Unfortunately I never got around to asking and just relied on the menu descriptions. Hugo chose skewered chicken and I chose the chicken tempura as starters, and then Hugo picked the Yaki Udon - fried noodles with mushrooms, eggs, peppers and garnished with fish powder - to follow, and I had the noodles with seafood, or the Kai Sen Udon. After entering our choices in her tri-corder, our waitress wrote the numbers of these dishes on our paper place-mats, which seemed a little, well, low-tech but hey, that's how they do it.

The wine list is something of an afterthought, it seems assumed that beer is what you need. There's a couple of South African wines, a couple of Chilean, a couple of Australian - about a dozen in total and all reasonably priced. Kirin, Sapporo and Asahi beers are listed in 33cl bottles or 50cl cans at £3.95. Hugo chose the Sapporo, and I chose the Kirin. Sure enough, within moments our food arrived and I went through one of those ghastly moments of envy looking at Hugo's noodles. They were gently coloured and looked really inviting. My plate had seafood all right, but my thick, pale, anaemic noodles looked distinctly unappetising. I've no doubt they were precisely as they were supposed to be, but I just wanted to point to something behind Hugo's head and swiftly swap plates.

Both of the chicken side orders were tasty, and Hugo's noodles were as good as they looked. I finally got to grips with my chopsticks and used them to separate the prawns and squid from my noodles. Irritatingly the people sitting beside me had some wonderful looking dishes placed before them, leading me to believe that this is restaurant where you really need to know the menu.

After we'd finished it was Hugo who broke first. 'Can we go round the corner to the Fitzwilliam and have a smoke?' I didn't need much persuasion. The bill came to a modest £40, which included two rounds of beer and some of the pricier dishes. You could eat well and cheaply here with a little care in choosing and what's more, you'd be in and out in the blink of a gnat's eye.