Even on Main Street, where destination dining spots are starting to outnumber the ramen dives, little indiscernible Ping's Café delivers a fair chunk of wow factor, ensuring that its few hard but polished seats are generally filled.

Shrewdly marketed to local, in-the-know hipsters - as there is no standout exterior design to lure you inside – Ping's makes its own distinctive design statement. Street signage has been kept to a minimum – that aged sign is from an earlier generation Chinese-Canadian "Ping's: (Chow Mein for the masses), and, in fact, was the inspiration to be the restaurant's current name.

Step inside, however, and the space has been revamped to its hip potential. The sparse but handsomely appointed dining room features a few distinctive touches that make for cool, comfortable dining regardless of the size of the dinner party. Designer-concept upholstered benches and bleached wood chairs blend with unadorned tables. Alternating white and black designer chandeliers hang from overhead like modern-age Christmas ornaments.

Ping’s menu sticks to its own definition of Yoshoku-style Japanese cuisine. A generic term for Asian dishes based on Western cooking, Yoshoku items are tapas-sized, cheap and meant for sharing. The menu is quite cool at first, because each small plate sounds so individually interesting, it takes a couple of meals to acknowledge that many plates are required to add up to a full meal. Think of Ping's Café as Yoshoku-Ya light, but that’s not a bad thing.

With the Yakitori - skewers of tender, grilled chicken - the meat is charred just enough to bring out added flavour. Little plates of bite-size Gyoza (pork dumplings) are a sure-fire hit. Edamame are great accompaniment to your accumulative meal, as is the Kinpira, a sautéed mix of thinly sliced carrot, burdock root and lotus root, much like coleslaw, but injected with a bit more flavour and oiliness.