Katherine MacAlister finds the food a bit too luminous at Headington's Dong Dong Noodle Bar If there is a restaurant more blatantly aimed at the student market than the Dong Dong Noodle Bar I have yet to find it.

With a name that hits you over the head like a sledge hammer - however bad the hangover - it's situated slap-bang in the middle of Headington, ready for all those starving Oxford Brookes undergraduates desperate to soak up the alcohol or line their stomachs for the next session.

And just in case that's not enough, it's painted like an EasyJet check-in desk - all bright orange walls, glass doors and minimalist wooden tables.

Forget about intimate - this is blatantly about chowing down and then rushing off to the pub/lecture/lodgings. It should be called The Feeding Trough.

But as feeding the hordes was what we were about on an autumnal Tuesday night, Dong Dong sounded like the perfect answer.

It has its work cut out, because just up the road is the marvellous Yummy's where the food really doesn't get much more authentic. The problem is it's so authentic it's quite hard to understand the waiters, read the menus or find a table in the small and packed day-glo interior, and what Dong Dong lacks in subtlety, it more than makes up for with space.

So what did we have? What didn't we have would be simpler. There were six for dinner and we pretty much ate the menu. We started with a bit of everything from seaweed to spring rolls, deep fried chicken wings and deep fried spare ribs, beancurd and mixed vegetable soup and crispy duck. And we polished off the lot, hoping that the next course wouldn't be overly generous as we were already stuffed. It was nice enough and disappeared in no time. The chicken was a bit KFC but the crispy duck was especially great.

We then tried the chicken and pineapple, mixed vegetable curry with cashew nuts, more soup, Singapore noodles and sweet and sour Hong Kong chicken.

It was like Jack and the Beanstalk feeding the giant. These enormous plates of food kept turning up - even Jack's giant would have struggled with these portion sizes, although a starving student would have given it a good go. As for dessert, forget it.

Any complaints? Sadly quantity didn't make up for quality. Large glutinous sauces smothered the dishes, in lurid colours you'd be hard pressed to find in Ainsley Harriot's wardrobe. Any decent vegetables were in scant supply, their numbers bumped up with large quantities of beansprouts, but the Singapore noodles were probably the biggest success.

And we could only pay with cash, and as the bill was £70+ pounds we had to rally around to raise the money.

Verdict. It's hard to complain when none of the dishes were over £6.40 including the accompanying rice or noodles. Next time we'll order far less, share, or forget about starters altogether.

But in this age, where freshness is everything and colouring and monosodium glutamate is thankfully becoming a thing of the past, it was a shame this wasn't reflected in the kitchens.

I'd rather go to Yummy's any day of the week - but I have no doubt that Dong Dong will be a great success.