Phetpailin

There’s hardly a better place in close proximity to Manchester’s Chinatown if you want to take a trek to Southeast Asia than Phetpailin, a Thai restaurant along George Street that offers traditional Thai dishes plus a few Anglo-Thai hybrids for fusion fanatics. Located down George Street equidistant between Piccadilly Gardens and Manchester Art Gallery, Phetpailin is also a good place if you’re taking a trek across Manchester’s city centre, seeing the sights, and sampling the fantastic food in this bustling precinct.

Phetpailin opens its restaurant’s doors from Tuesday to Saturday for lunch noon until 3pm, dinner from 6pm until the generous hour of 11pm, and for dinner on Mondays and Sundays from 6pm until 11pm. This is a blessing for workers in Manchester’s city centre looking for lunch, curious foodies in and around Chinatown looking for something other than, well, Chinese food, and for Southeast Asian and Thai cuisine lovers in general, for whom the set menus (including a vegetarian set) for a minimum of two people are a great introduction.

The most lavish of these Phetpailin’s set menus showcases the Southeast Asian and Thai powerhouse cookery at work in the restaurant’s George Street kitchen, offering the house’s mixed starter platter followed by tamarind duck, prawn green curry, Thai-style grilled sea bass, stir-fried beef with chilli and basil and plenty of fragrant steamed jasmine rice. Other wise, the a la carte menu at this city centre restaurant on the fringes of Chinatown is a joy to explore.