Our Guide to Chinatown

Everyone seems to have their own Chinatown favourites. You could spend years eating around here and still find someone ready to tell you you’ve been going to the wrong place. That’s half the fun. Find somewhere you love, tell everyone about it, then immediately get told where you should’ve gone instead.
Really, the only difficult bit is choosing where to eat.

We can help with that.

Here are some of our favourites.

Pho Cue

Pho Cue really picked a name it had to live up to. Its pho is outrageously good. The broth gets around 24 hours on the stove, arriving deep and intensely savoury before handfuls of fresh herbs wake the whole thing up. Beef, chicken, roast duck and tofu can all get involved. And really, Manchester couldn’t make a better case for it. Cold, grey, raining again? Get the big bowl. You should be completely happy with your lot. Well that’s right up until the rest of the table starts filling up. The bánh cuốn don’t help, all soft steamed rice rolls wrapped around pork and mushrooms. Neither do the cha nem, summer rolls or whatever’s just come smoking off the barbecue and landed elsewhere on the table. Keeping your chopsticks to yourself becomes a matter of manners rather than appetite. So get the pho. Absolutely get the pho. And make sure everyone else orders differently.

Teppanyaki

You’ll spend quite a lot of dinner at Teppanyaki looking at food you didn’t order. Can’t really help it. Everything is happening in the middle of the table. The grill’s right there,
your chef, your tea, someone else’s tea you definitely wish was yours. Then the grill goes up in flames and it’s hard to keep pretending you weren’t watching once half the thing is on fire.

They’ve been at it since 1987. Teppanyaki was the first traditional teppanyaki restaurant in the North West and one of the earliest in Britain. It’s a nice reminder of just how much food history is packed into these few Chinatown streets. Then you’ve actually got to decide what goes on the grill. The Land & Sea puts fillet steak next to a lobster tail, while king prawns, salmon and scallops arrive together on the seafood combo. There’s duck, lamb and monkfish too, all heading straight onto that searing-hot plate
in front of you. Or, if narrowing any of that down sounds a little overwhelming, the set menus are there to solve that problem for you. Just don’t give every inch of the table over to the grill. The sushi, sashimi, tempura and gyoza need somewhere to go too.

Dragon Oriental
You don’t exactly have to guess what they were going for here. Dragon Oriental wanted Hong Kong on Faulkner Street. So Hong Kong on Faulkner Street it is. Even the neon made the journey. The red and green signs were imported directly from Hong Kong. The menu gets even better. French toast comes stuffed with peanut butter and jam, fried
and finished with butter. Then there’s the baked pork chop rice, where tomato sauce, pineapple and cheese all pile in too. Don’t question it. Order it. And somehow we’ve got this far without mentioning the roast meats, noodle soups, claypots or the pages and pages of rice dishes. Yes, the yuenyeung really is coffee mixed with milk tea. Might as well.
If you’re booking, there’s one table you want: number 6. Seems oddly specific; we know. Then you see the Chinatown Gate right outside.

We’ve done a round up of all of our favourites, head to our Instagram to see where else we’d recommend.