Tuesday 17 July 2012

Chaophraya, Manchester

A quick post about Chaophraya – ‘Thai fine dining’ in Manchester.


Chaophraya, as their website boldly states, supposedly offers ‘the ultimate Thai fine dining experience.’


Housed in the building above Sam’s Chop House on Chapel Walks, the décor is certainly impressive. It would take pretty special food to live up to the surroundings – sadly I did not feel this was the case, on the strength of my lunchtime visit.


I took advantage of their set price lunchtime deal of two courses for £10.50; supplemented with a Papaya Salad.


To start I selected the Tempura Vegetables – I found the batter to be average at best. The accompanying ‘sweet & sour plum sauce’ was far more sweet than sour. If I was in the habit or rating food out of ten this dish would struggle to score more than a five. Local chain Tampopo serves a much better batter in my opinion.


For my main I opted for the Tofu Pad Thai Noodles. The dish consisted of stir-fried rice noodles with egg, carrot, spring onion, sweet turnip and bean sprouts served with ground peanuts and lemon. I found the whole thing a little stodgy and bland. Another five.


My Papaya Salad proved to be a little better - if feeling generous I’d give it a seven.  The component ingredients (shredded papaya, carrot, tomato and lettuce) were fresh and crisp. A few more peanuts for added texture and a greater quantity of lime and chilli would’ve added some welcome zing and taken the edge of the over sweet palm sugar sauce. I enjoyed the sticky rice balls served on the side.

I would be interested to go back one evening with a group of people to see if my opinion changes. 





Chaophraya on Urbanspoon

Square Meal

4 comments:

  1. Went in the evening recently and found it to be really overpriced. The food is just "OK", they need to charge about a fiver less for each dish and stop referring to themselves as "fine dining".

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Agree with the 'fine dining' thing... setting themselves up for a fall without the quality of food to back it up.

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  2. Was not impressed when they forced us to have set menu because we had more than ten people. No prior warning on booking neither. The food was not even making average.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It's good to know that people agree with me... sometimes I feel a bit harsh when a post is less than positive. :-)

      Delete

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