We were looking for an early dinner after spending the day walking around the city center and knew…read morewe wanted some kind of Asian because our townhouse is near to Manchester's Chinatown. This spot had decent reviews and it was open for an early dinner so we stopped in. It was absolutely delicious and definitely hit the spot for what we were hoping to get. We split everything between 4 of us so we shared the short ribs, the shredded beef in spicy sauce, egg-fried rice, and then the pork dumplings, shrimp dumplings and red bean buns. The ribs and beef were delicious - a really tasty sweet and spicy sauce. The dumplings were great and served steaming hot. All of us were pleasantly full after the meal and it was all cooked hot and fresh. The staff were all super friendly and helpful. It's comfortable and cozy and a great spot to great delicious Chinese if you're ever in the mood - and it looks like they do a lot of take out as well as have tables to sit down and dine in.

I brought a couple of American students who were studying abroad in the UK for a week. These…read morestudents live in NE Ohio/Western Pennsylvania and are therefore unaccustomed to eating authentic Asian food. Holy crap, was this place good, and my sheltered students agreed: Red Chilli's food is better than anything available at where we live in the States! I ordered the Gong Bao Chicken (Kung Pao, for those Yankees who often get Panda Express) and...wow. Not only was everything super fresh but there were flavors/seasonings in the dish that I had never experienced before. I would certainly come back here again if I return to the area. The negatives, however nit-picky: The entrees don't come with rice (though, that could be my American fatness talking). The side of fried rice we did order was pricey and good, not great. Also, for those who are used to a Chinese restaurant menu in America, you might find Red Chilli's menu to be a little limiting, as there's no General Tso's Chicken or something similar.

So it was one of those nights where it took aaaages to decide where to eat..despite living in…read moreManchester with millions of places to choose from..a bit like Netflix I guess.. Anyway we had originally settled on Red Chili on Portland Street because their menu looked divine online...however do not expect a warm welcome if you turn up at 9.30pm...Expect to receive a cold scowl and shoulder to match instead..so we left.. Anyway back to this place....Mooching through China town we thought ''hey lets try here'' the odd name certainly intrigued us... Instantly a cute waitress beckoned us in, pleasantly handing us a menu and guiding us to a table...each table was simply set with Chinese bowls and chopsticks which gave it that humble feeling... The menu in all honesty offered you items you would find on any Chinese menu, except for the odd fancy Sea bass dish.What grabbed our attention was the set meal where you could choose 3 items EACH from the starter menu, quarter of a duck to share , a main meal and rice/noodles each and a dessert....all for £24 ....bargain.. I was quite concerned how we were going to demolish this all...I mean my handbag was big that night..but the potential doggy bag was not going to fit... The starters to my relief were manageable , there were 4 pieces of assorted dumplings, dried seaweed, one chicken kebab and two hot and sour soups...which came in cute little glass casserole dishes.... The dumplings were like any other, but the soup ...tasted quite OXO cubey....very heavily flavoured in beef stock... The duck flew in next, to which a really polite waiter lovingly shred it in front of us... I admit I broke my Pescaterian diet because it looked so good...plus ducks live on water right? The mains , again ...these did not stand out...they were like any other Chinese Takeaway but the excellent service and friendly atmosphere ...made this special.. By the time we tried to eat this...there was no room for dessert and we were the last ones there..So I thought it would be polite and let these lovely people go home... Overall this place is really good value for money, I think it would be ideal for a large group to meet here and dine. as there would be no quibble about the expense.. The staff are just so genuine , and approachable..I think foodwise this is a three star,,,waiter wise I gives it a four...

Unassuming from the outside and oddly named, BBQ Handmade Noodles King serves delicious food at…read morevery reasonable prices. They also serve beer (ordinary lager) in jugs, which is excellent. We asked if one jug would be enough for our party of 3, to which the faultless response was "that depends how thirsty you are". As my visit here was about a month ago, the finer points are now lost in my memory. The stand-out dishes (the ones that I find myself daydreaming about) are the deep fried aubergine and the cold garlic belly pork. Give me a pile of each of these and I'll be very happy. Don't take squeamish companions here (or do, if you want to scare them). The menu is replete with various types of offal and organ. We ordered some lamb's ovary which was tasty enough - I'd order it again as part of a selection of dishes but it doesn't linger on my mind quite like the aubergine and the pork. The eponymous handmade noodles are delicious - thick and slightly chewy, in a delicious broth. Ours came with beef cooked with garlic and ginger, which was great. We ordered some baby squid skewers but had to make do with 'adult' squid as they had none. This was the main disappointment of the meal - so tough and chewy we struggled to maintain our dignity while gnawing through it. The seasoning hadn't permeated the squid at all and just left a greasy yet chalky residue on my tongue. Boiled rice was, you know, whatever. It's not something I ever personally choose (feels like a waste of time, money and calories) but it was sort of added to the order in a "and how many portions of rice would you like?" way. Food and beer for three greedy, thirsty people came to around £40. I would eat everything again other than the squid and would love to go back to try some more exciting and unusual dishes from their menu.

I mostly go to this restaurant during lunch time as I work nearby. The lunch menu offers a great…read morevariety of rice and noodle dishes, and it is hard to go wrong. The only time I did go wrong when the dish was too spicy for me - but the staff kindly replaced it with the 'plain' version. A couple of times I opted for non-lunch menu. Oh my, these were fantastic. Lunch menu portions are far from small, but these were so big two people could share them! The only slight downside is that the you are charged 50p for take-away box (which I need way too often as portions are big), but I can live with that.

Lameizi is another one of these Chinese grocery offerings with its clever location off Oxford Road…read more In terms of it's purpose, I get the impression that it's a shortcut type, ideally located, small store for those who cannot face the vast choice and the goods amongst industrial sized products. Use Lameizi as the guide to which necessities are needed for your Chinese cheffing attempts. Organized in a sensible way, follow yourself round to pick up the core ingredients in your attempt to get creative. I use Lameizi for this very purpose, a sort of dummies guide to Chinese grocery shopping and a convenient, calm rather than hectic experience you may get amidst China town. Yet to wander upstairs to check out the other half of Lameizi's empire but will sure Yelp it soon enough when I do.

A fine purveyor of Szechuan cuisine, which is one of my favey daves. R&H offers a pretty extensive…read moremenu of tasty dishes, with the ever helpful 'chilliometer' to alert you to super-spicy foods. The boyf swears by the chilliometer, and on one occasion refused to order food until he was given a vocal chilliometer by the waiter. So, you know, good work with the chilliometer, R&H. The menu is very good, offering such delicacies as eels and duck tongue (euwwwww!) alongside the more workaday ribs, prawns and whatnot. The prices here are more than I expected, with it being in a none-too-shiny area of Chinatown, and not being all to sexy itself. Expect to pay over £5 per starter while mains are all around the £7-£10 mark, depending on what you're having. My sizzling black pepper beef (£8.50) really hit the spot, and the boyf paticularly enjoyed his salt and pepper king prawn dish. The egg fried rice was amongst the best I've had in Manchester, so kudos. The atmosphere is OK, but I feel like maybe we came at a bad time, earlyish on a Tuesday. I can see that it does have the potential to be quite a happening place if busy. The staff are incredibly helpful, and service is super fast. Drinkswise, you can bring your own, but they charge £10 if you do so! Shocker. You're better off having the house wine, £10, which is alright. Pints of the usual (Tiger, Grolsch, Bud) are a reasonable £2.50. Cutely, they offer Bacardi Breezers and the like, under the heading "Romantic Drinks", yeah, romantic for a school disco! R&H is good, and well worth a visit for the food alone, but if you're aafter a buzzing, fun atmosphere, this ain't the place.

Wasn't expecting great Chinese food being from Los Angeles where Asian food is extremely good and…read moreaccessible. However, this place surprised me (despite my initial worry with the lack of customers ... granted I came around 9pm on a weekday). Every dish we ordered was packed full of flavor. Kung pao chicken was delicious, though it was a bit too sauced up for my taste. Sliced pork szechuan style was definitely my favorite dish we ordered. I could do without the onions piled up on the bottom though Water spinach was standard My friend who ordered the hot and sour soup said it was the best one he's ever had (but he's white and from Texas so I take it with a grain of salt heh) Pan fried dumplings were also tasty. If you're inkling for some authentic asian food, definitely give this place a shot.

Tai Wu, taiwu.co.uk, formerly known as Tai Pan is Hong Kong style cuisine found sitting atop a very…read moreaffordable Asian Supermarket. The menu is expansive, covering many dim sum delicacies, lots of roasted duck dishes, including a variation that resembles Peking/Beijing duck, but without the added prep substituting a good roast duck in exchange for an on-demand item, all the seafood favorites (whole steamed fish, lobster, crab) and even some regional favorites never found on overseas menus, like Dinghu Shangsu (which is a mixed vegetable dish comprised of fresh and rare dried veggies like clouds ear, snow fungus, osmanthus, pickled Dictyophora, lotus seeds, silver needle fungus, et.al.) Service is typical efficient Asian, that if you get your order in from the start, everything progresses quickly and arrives expediently. If you attempt the Euro custom of adding this and that as the dining commences, you'll probably get frustrated trying to constantly interrupt the running servers to add just one more dish to your meal. Order up front and be happy. It's also a typical family-style banquet house, so as the crowds fill up, it will become quite loud with conversational chatter. All in all, a wonderful find parket outside of City Centre and nowhere near the Manchester Chinatown proper. Instead, this is where the local workers and families go to have a special lunch or dinner, and that's the ideal for really good Chinese food.

Who knew you had to go all the way up north to get decent dim sum in the UK! I certainly didn't…read more I'm just glad to know there actually is decent Chinese food somewhere on this island kingdom. There are two menus for dim sum. One is a tick box menu in Chinese only, the other is a laminated card that has English and Chinese, but is not as extensive as the Chinese only one. Just an FYI. Most of the standard stuff is in the English menu, but if you don't see it, make sure to ask because they probably do have it just isn't listed. Attentive and very helpful staff. This place is more than decent, it's great. I'd definitely come here more often if I didn't live in the so many hours away.

Clean, customer-service minded team, and while delivering authentic and tasty Chinese food.read more

This was the worst chinese food. They came on my friends duck and somehow messed up fried rice…read more Service was good as the food came very quickly, but that can't make you for the food. Service was good tho!

2nd visit within a month, every time we have friends staying with us it's our restaurant of choice…read morein Manchester. Never fails.

The attention to detail regarding our last visit was very impressive. Welcome was genuine and…read moreservice could not be improved upon. Great experience at Tattu again for my wife and myself with a special mention for Edwin who looked after us so well.

The food was top notch. The sauce for the crispy beef and the portion was good. Sad I was traveling…read moreand couldn't take much with me.

Sweet Mandarin is a Chinese restauraunt in Manchester's Northern Quarter, which is basically behind…read morethe Crowne Plaza of Rochdale Road and close to the Holiday Inn, owned by three sisters it has gained a lot of publicity on television which was the reason I wanted to try it. They were featured on Gordon Ramsay's The F Word and were also on UK business show Dragon's Den twice, advertising their ready meals in 2005 and more recently advertising the sauces they sell in supermarkets and use in restaurants - the story behind their products and the three sisters working together to produce "great quality Chinese food catering for allergies such as gluten-free" was appealing to me, however my high expectations were far from met, infact my experience here was so disappointing, it made me feel sick. The prices here are a little high, with mains generally between 10 and 20 pounds but the presentation for me is a little poor and sloppy, for example, I ordered a lemon chicken as my main, all it was was slices of chicken, it comes with nothing other than the chicken and sauce - no sides etc which were all extras. The "mains" are more like big sharing boards for groups, rather than mains for one person perhaps. For my starter, I ordered gluten-free spring rolls, is excited to try them have never tried them before, being quite a newbie to Chinese cuisine, I found out this was basically fried puff pastry containing vegetables and spring onions. For me, they were basically inedible, I found them to first be extremely hot and even after they had cooled, they were hard and the vegetables were too wet and stringy. My friend ordered seaweed as her starter, I found it to be far too salty but she appeared to enjoy it. For my main, I ordered the lemon chicken which was once again dreadful, the chicken was a little hard and bland but what made it worse was the big thick sauce, it looked like a thick discoloured bodily fluid rather than a nice, enjoyable sauce - the USP of this restauraunt and the brand as a whole is the sauces, and if they can't even get that right, I'm astonished and lost for words. It was basically a sickly and ugly mess. The rest of my party seemed to order the chow meins, one mixed meat, one just with chicken, a group of four people all complained about the chicken which was amongst the poorest quality of chicken I've had in a long time, the portion sizes again were huge - it is a real shame the waiter seemed more interested in what money they could get out of me, rather than offering ideas and warning us about what to expect with the portion sizes - knowing how big the plates were we could have ordered a variety of things, or less food. Even if the food was remotely pleasant, it still was far too large in size for a portion. I decided to order an extra side to go with my chicken, the salt and pepper chips which I found to be probably the only edible part of my meal, the chips were decent quality but it just was the vegetables which were not, they once again were thick, and also hard. The overall decor of this place seems a little cheap, it is slightly small as you walk in through cardboard barriers, and it just doesn't have the overall feel of a restauraunt. It's slightly strange and not the nicest of places that's for sure, it certainly doesn't give the high-end feel, infact the only thing about this place which is high-end are the prices. With tea being a huge export in China, I was pleased to see a huge and great selection of iced tea for just £4 each, I decided to opt for a pear iced tea but it was incredibly sweet and filled with sugar, it was a watery and sugary mess to the point those awful flavours basically made the tea hard to taste and the drink once again an abysmal mess. The opening hours are also slightly restrictive and they also appear to open after 5 only, and a lack of an online booking system makes it hard to arrange a table as you have to communicate with email, which I don't like and shows not only is Sweet Mandarin lacking with the competition in terms of pricing and food quality, but it also lacks behind in the technology form too, and the egotistical act of boasting of their own achievements seem to outweigh everything else, including making the experience better for the customer, I can't help but feel a sense of arrogance too, Sweet Mandarin might have won many awards years ago, I can't comment having not visited before today, but I feel these awards have added a sense of arrogance, making the owners slightly arrogant when really they're food was a dreadful, overpriced mess, which meant I'd leave the restauraunt hungry and feeling sick. When making a reservation via email I was told "We look forward to welcoming you to Sweet Mandarin for some delicious Chinese cuisine" but my experience was an insult to Chinese cuisine and is enough to put anyone off from ordering Chinese food, being a mess from start to finish so I sadly feel Sweet Mandarin is somewhere to Avoid at all costs!

I love Red Chilli, but my only critique is that the service can be rather slow and inattentive…read more The food, on the other hand, is incredible! Crispy chilli shredded beef is one of my favourite dishes, and that is how it is. Crispy. Spicy. Shredded. Beefy. Perfect. On my last visit with colleagues for a leaving lunch, I ordered the salt & pepper baby squid for a starter, and it was very tasty. For my main, I ordered the Gongbao diced chicken. Again, quite a spicy dish, with the added bonus and flavour of peanuts. Superb! Red Chilli offer a great lunch deal that comes with a starter and main for less than £10, however, in December they add an extra couple of pound on this, despite offering the same food and calling it the "Christmas lunch deal". Come on guys! Step it up a gear! The decor is quite bold, but offers a comfortable setting, with large round tables for groups, dark wood dividers and booths.

One of our favourite restaurants when looking for some excellent chinese food. This restaurant…read morespecialises in Szechwan dishes, so do expect that most items on the menu will have a chilli rating next to it! This is one our favourite places for Peking Duck, hanf carved right in front of you. i would also recommend any variety of their lamb dishes, including the lamb ribs. If you're feeling adventurous, try the cold spicy platter too. Only gripe about this place is the lack of available parking. There is a multi storey nearby but its not the cheapest place to park!