I had the pleasure of finally trying dim sum su's vegetarian bao buns during Chinese New Year…read moreweekend and I was not disappointed! My husband loved his chicken version too. I've wanted to try bao buns for a long while now but the majority of places do pork versions and as I don't eat pork that left me out to dry. Luckily Su caters to all and the crispy aubergine and sweet pepper vege bao buns are utterly delightful. Packed full of flavour and dangerously moorish. At around 3.50 each they aren't badly priced either. I'd need two for lunch but one is perfect for a quick snack. We went to the event stall on St Anne's Square but we're delighted to hear she's got a place on deansgate. I genuinely can't wait to try these again. Su herself is such a lovely, bubbly person. She clearly loves what she does and you can taste that in the lovely homemade food she sells.

I popped in to The Kitchens the other day to catch up with Jimmy (Nasi Lemak) and got chatting to…read moreSue who runs Dim Sum Su. Her passion and energy for what she does is amazing and extremely contagious! I'd already got some Fried Chicken to go from Jimmy but looking at the food Sue was making and hearing her tell me all about it, I couldn't not have some, so I opted to go for something I've never tasted before as appose to my usual Dumplings that I get all the time from anywhere that will do them! I went for a Pan-Fried Duck Bao - honestly, go and get one for lunch, you won't regret it! In fact, speaking of lunch, Dim Sum Su do a great £5 meal deal which gets you a Bao, Fries and a Drink - amazing!

Chicken Pad Thai on a budget is how this joint is best described. Ideal for students as well as…read morethose suffering from the January light wallet syndrome. Aside from the prices there isn't much else to talk about. The menu is pretty bog standard with most mains costing south of £8 The quality of the food is more than acceptible and not too greasy. They're on my speed dial for whenever I'm at a drinking hole in these neck of woods.

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.

A brief history of Chinatown favourites…read more..... I was introduced to real Chinees food - I mean proper Chinese food, not gwailo-style, westernised stuff - in the late eighties, by my old friend Ronnie Chan. Ronnie and I would go weekly to Win Wah on Portland Street, an astoundingly cheap place where dishes cost £3-4, and I learned very quickly to use chopsticks (out of necessity - otherwise Ronnie would have eaten all the grub before I had any chance). Then Ronnie moved back to Hong Kong, Win Wah disappeared, and I was in the wilderness. After some years of searching, I found a new home at Wong Chu. Cheap, no-nonsense, with high-quality offerings - the noodle dishes, and the duck / pork / squid were always spot-on, I wandered the streets, checked the menus, and tried the other places - but always found myself returning to Wong Chu, because it was cheaper and better than the competition. I dined there hundreds of times. One Saturday morning in 2001, I opened my newspaper and saw the headline "Hacked to Death by Triad Maniacs". It was Mr Wong and his family. I'd seen Mrs Wong go through her two pregnancies, watched her kids scurry excitedly around the place, and I was devastated. But the restaurant re-opened, now managed by Mr Wong's adult daughter from a previous marriage, and continued to deliver great dining..... for another 5 or 6 years. Then it went into a sad decline - I have no idea why - and by the end, it was a pale shadow of its former self. Back to the wilderness. Now I have a new home in Chinatown. As good as Win Wah & Wong Chu at their respective peaks, with the same format - no-frills, low-end prices, but great quality, a relaxed and friendly informal atmosphere, and a menu of Hong Kong-style Chinese dishes that are a world away from the MSG-laden gwailo junk that's so ubiquitous in UK Chinese restaurants, Fu's is the real deal. Welcome home.

A blink and you'll miss it gem. Not named after whoever that damn person Mr T was referring to when…read morehe got annoyed, Fu's is instead a traditional Hong Kong style café with a huge amount of hot, yummy options including your usual szechuans and sweet and sours, chow meins and hoi sins, and they're all lovely enough, but what you want to try here are the more unusual, authentic dishes. My favourite is the fish stew, done hot pot style and just so delicious you'd happily force yourself to eat too. Combos and sauces you might not have encountered before are the order of the day here and the creativity pays dividends. The secret trick here is not to be given the blue menu. They'll automatically pass it on if they think you're English, but it's the red one you want; that's what harbours all the wonderful stuff. The drinks are interesting too, especially the traditional Hong Kong iced tea, it's uber refreshing. And with wicked prices and smart service to boot, this is one gem you should ensure won't stay hidden long. Get stuck in.

Didsbury Noodles is a restaurant come takeout based on Lapwing Lane in West Didsbury. Just across…read morethe road from the West Didsbury tram stop and close to the major bus routes it's in the perect location to be able to grab something on your way home from work - which is exactly what I did tonight. I opted for Didsbury Noodles because I had a craving for the traditional Vietnamese noodle soup and I was aware that as well as your standard chinese takeout options, here Vietnamese dishes are also available. There are a few tables in the front of the restuarant but as far as I've seen in the past most people are sitting waiting for their food rather than actually eating in. The front of the restaurant is open with large glass windows so if you were to eat in you can enjoy the sites of Didsbury and people watch. I decided on the chicken pho and meat dumplings. The staff cleverly wrapped the chicken, noodles and beansprouts separately to the chicken stock and herb broth, which meant that when I got home I could mix it myself into the portion size I wanted and also things weren't soggy by the time I was ready to eat it. The pho was very flavoursome and had a little kick of chilli through it. The noodles were soft and the beansprouts were crispy giving the dish texture. The dumplings were filled with mixed meat and some vegetables, they were soft on the inside with a good crisp on the outside. A little greasy but certainly delicious. I will definitely be returning to Didsbury Noodles in future and I would recommend it to anyone in the local area.

The curry is delicious though they didn't sell my favorite dishes, still buy their curry rice from…read moretime to time

Wing's is a Chinese take out within the Arndale Food Market. They have an excellent variation of…read moreChinese meals on offer and they're perfect for lunch times, especially if you're in a rush. You can order from any of the set menu meals on the large board at the back or essentially mix and match anything you want - they even cook some meals to order rather than serving it from the counter. The staff are friendly and I was served and got my food in just a matter of minutes! They do get busy, which is a good sign! My noodles were fresh and had only just bee put out. I took it back to my office to eat and it was well packaged and still piping hot. I'll go here a lot whilst working in the city!

I was really surprised by my visit to Pacifica. When I first arrived here, I sat at the bar waiting…read morefor my friends to arrive and had therefore spent my time pre-judging the restaurant on its decor alone. To me the clean lines, white leather upholstery and blue lighting made it feel cold and sterile, almost intimidating. Yet after a couple of Stolichnaya Vanil and Tonic cocktails served by a very friendly bartender, somehow the colour scheme felt calming and tranquil. Funny that. Once I was sat down, it only got better. This Cantonese restaurant and Dim Sum bar offers high quality cuisine and great service. We started off with a mixed plate of dim sum and a couple of steamed char siu bao (sweet buns filled with barbecue pork, and a personal favourite of mine) to share, which were practically inhaled by my table in seconds. For my main I ordered Pacifica sirloin steak, a twist on a regular sirloin as it's prepared in the wok with onions, straw mushrooms and oyster sauce. The meat was cooked perfectly medium rare as requested and for £12 was a healthy size and premium quality. Absolutely no complaints. My friend ordered the hot and spicy Sichuan mussels which were the talk of the table: served with crushed ginger, garlic and chilli sauce, they had some kick to them. Somehow, with cocktails and wine included, our bill came to less than £30 a head. You didn't see any of us complaining, it could have been twice the price and we'd still have been happy!

Great food to eat but the manager loves his money as long as it's not busy as even if you book your…read morenot garuenteed a seat. And even if you try to communicate with him he will ignore you if he's busy. Service seems good food great but the manager needs to concentrate on good reliable customers and not just be seeing pound coins going round his head.

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!