I REMEMBER reviewing this venue when it opened five years ago - and being pretty tickled by the Ha! Ha! Bar.

I loved the trendy modern dcor and the lively atmosphere and the food was pretty good too - although I wasn't laughing when I got my bill which made Kilimanjaro look like a road hump.

However, Ha! Ha! had the last laugh because today it is a buzzing bar and a popular destination on the ever-expanding York social map.

Nestled between Coney Street and Davygate, it shares its New Street location with a couple of other equally trendy outfits: Dusk and Blue Fly.

It's one of those seductive places that invites you in with its squidgy brown leather sofas and airy interiors, then splashes cold water in your face when you get the tab. Anyone who has forked out a fiver for a Ha! Ha! fish finger sandwich or £5.50 for egg and chips will know the sensation.

The menu states that all dishes are made from scratch by their own chefs, which is laudable but hardly justification for the hefty prices.

Tying in with its open-all-hours spirit, the menu (which is updated seasonally) offers everything from brunch (served until 4pm), sarnies, salads, and the likes of mezze, tapas and nachos for sharing to full-blown three course dinners.

When I visited last Saturday with my girlfriend Vanessa we were ravenous having skipped lunch to catch a matinee at the Odeon (The Wedding Crashers, and recommended for full-speed fun).

We ordered chicken satay skewers (£4.95) from the main menu and tiger prawns in tempura batter from the specials board (£5.95) for starters followed by fishcakes (£7.75) and roast char sui pork fillet with wok-fried veggies (£10.50).

Our starters arrived and just from looking I could see Vanessa had won round one. The chicken on her satay skewers was generous in size and succulent to taste. When dipped into the tiny (why so minute?) side bowl of crunchy peanut sauce is was quite knock-out.

For the tempura prawns, I was expecting big juicy specimens enveloped in a light, see-through, crisp batter. What arrived looked more like scampi: knuckles of tasteless, rubbery shellfish covered in a bright orange breadcrumb coating.

However, when our main courses were served Vanessa and I had a reversal of fortune. Her fishcakes (all two of them) were soft and bland and looked lonely next to a small leafy salad. The side chips she ordered never materialised.

My pork stir-fry was the better bet. It came in a large open soup bowl with two hunks of pork fillet sitting like royalty upon a generous selection of spring vegetables, including spheres of tender asparagus. The veggies were cooked in a tangy soupy broth and were delicious. The pork had that tell-tale sweet coating that you find in Chinese char sui meals and was perfectly cooked. It was very filling.

For pudding we couldn't resist the 'star' of the summer menu: the hot strawberry jam sandwich (£3.95). We assumed it would be a warm Victoria sponge. How wrong we were. It was exactly what was stated on the menu: a hot jam sandwich, featuring French toast. Odd as it sounds, it was quite lovely: the butteriness of the fried exterior; the warm pillow-like quality of the bread inside, the shocking sweetness of the jam and icing-sugar coating, all worked surprising well. However, it was heavy going and with hindsight, a pudding to share. Of course, the proof of that was in the eating, so we had already ordered another dessert: Eton mess (£4.50), a scramble of strawberries, meringue and crme fraiche. It was OK, but far too sweet for my palate and suffered from featuring those white powdery meringues rather than the nougat-brown chewy varieties.

With decent coffees - lattes at £2 each - to finish and a couple of white-wine spritzers and bottles of fizzy water thrown in along the way our bill topped 50 quid.

Slosh! Slap! Splatter! (That's the cold water hitting my face in case you were wondering.)

Ha! Ha! is a nice place with pleasant staff (although ours forgot about us two-thirds of the way through the meal) and not bad food. But it's just a caf for crying out loud and is really taking the Michael by charging more than a fiver for a starter and £4.50 for puddings.

So you have to conclude that at Ha! Ha! the joke is on the customer - or rather our wallets - as the bosses are laughing all the way to the bank.

Ha! Ha! Bar and Canteen, 13 New Street, York

Tel: 01904 655868

Maxine visited on Saturday, July 23, 2005

Food: mixed

Service: up & down

Value: too dear

Ambience: lively

Disabled access: Yes

Updated: 16:25 Friday, July 29, 2005