The Cafe Deco Group is catering for a younger crowd at Langham Place with its latest establishment, Zero, where diners can choose their toppings for pizzas and desserts.

The restaurant is on the second-highest floor of the mall, and it takes a while to travel the escalators to get there.It’s a nice open space and, as expected, there were many young couples.

We ate there a few days after it had opened and hopefully some teething issues with the dishes will have been sorted by now.

For appetisers, the assorted starter platter (HK$198) had a cute presentation like a moving Ferris wheel, with different items in individual baskets. We liked the mini meatball skewers, and the spiciness of the chicken wings surprised us. The dish was also covered in cereal flakes, making it confusing. The deep-fried okra and squid were more soggy than crisp, and there wasn’t much exotic about the Turkish bread.

On the menu under the pasta section we tried a curious sounding dish – steamed truffle and prawn parcels with poached egg, fried shallots, pickled shiitake and madeira dressing (HK$148). It turned out to be truffles and prawns stuffed in rice noodle wrappers and then steamed. It was an interesting experiment, but the flavour was underwhelming – even the truffle fragrance had evaporated.

The choose-your-own toppings for pizza (starting at HK$98) had many options, including the sauce (care for tomato, salsa verde, hoisin, or even lemongrass and chilli?), to cheeses, a variety of meats, seafood (unagi, scallop and clams, to name a few), and garnishes such as pineapple and fresh coconut.

We chose some of the more classic options: tomato sauce, buffalo mozzarella, artichokes and salami (HK$146) which sounded like a decent amount of toppings, but when it arrived, our pizza looked rather sparse. It was a thin-crust pizza (which we like), but it wasn’t piping hot.

By this time we were getting quite full and didn’t have enough room for the dessert pizza (from HK$88) so we chose the ice cream(HK$78) instead. With only two choices, we had two scoops of cookies and cream topped with blueberries, yogurt chips, honey crumb and salted caramel sauce. The sauce wasn’t heated and was a dollop on the side instead of drizzled over the ice cream.

Zero, shop 05-09, Level 12, Langham Place, 8 Argyle Street, Mong Kok, tel: 2918 1234