PINTO Thai Street Food — Restaurant in Bristol

Atmosphere like in a canteen, food quality like in a canteen, feels like in a canteen but it has a proper restaurant prices.

I've ordered tom yum with prawns, pad thai chicken and green curry with chicken + 2 drinks. £35 for all of that. My partner asked what are fried eggs in thai style. Waitress laughed and said these are just fried eggs and are no different to the style in UK. Oh, ok... so why you add there "thai style" to the description?

Everything arrived on our table after around 10 min of waiting.

Tom yum had 3 prawns, 2 mushrooms and 1 leaf. That's pretty much it. It doesn't look at all like on the menu from website but it's not the biggest problem with that soup. The soup base feels like has been prepared fully separately and in the kitchen they put at the end 3 prawns to that base, cooked for 3 minutes and served. Soup base had absolutely zero taste of any sea food.

Pad thai was greasy. Oil was absolutely everywhere. My partner couldn't finish the dish because she felt really heavy on belly after eating just half of the dish. I think it's the first time when both of us didn't like prepared for us pad thai. We left it on the table.

The green curry was very small. I had 5 slices (sorry, I can't call that pieces) of chicken, a lot of green beans (which was probably 50% of my green curry) and a bit of bamboo. The curry was more a soup instead of a sauce. Very average and it felt like made with pre-prepared bags of curry from supermarket. Nothing better than curry which anyone could make at home. Rice felt like cooked on morning and served on afternoon - very dry.

In the middle of our dinner, workers from the restaurant started making very loud noises and bangs around 5 metres from us. It was really disturbing and we couldn't hear each other. That noise was for around 15 min and I could hear other customers were complaining to each other about that. My partner asked if they could stop it for some time. They have stopped but moved to a different part of the building and making noises there but a bit quieter. That was almost at the end of our dinner so we tried to just ignore it.

Will I recommend this place? Definitely not. There are many thai restaurants in Bristol which are waaaaaay better...

I greatly enjoyed eating there.

I was chatting with my brother and we both agreed that usually there would always be something to find fault on, such as soggy spring rolls, but honestly the Thai food was great (btw the spring rolls were crispy but not dry or oily inside – just perfect), very well done, from appetisers, sauces, drinks and to the main course. What blew us away as well was that we had such great food without having to pay a small fortune.

I had chicken pad thai and this the best I've had so far which was hard for me come to a decision to as I've been struggling to find excellent pad thais across restaurants and street vendors for almost a decade now, compared to a street vendor ran by a thai couple who had nailed the recipe. So they have won me over for sure.

This will now be one of my favourite places to look forward to for years to come whenever I visit Bristol!

The entrance to Pinto can be found by walking into the food hall building and up one...

Well, i was looking forward to having a dinner with friends at this place. So excited as i booked a table for 10 at 7:30 on 24th of july to celebrate my graduation. However, when staff noted down on another paper, it turned out to be 6 pm. Im sure that they have a booking book because im the one who wrote down my phone number as i went there to book a table. And an old lady took my booking. I was a bit late so i called to ask whether i could come at 8pm and someone said yes. When i went there, they blamed me for being 1h and a half late so they could not have a table for me. They tried to call the manager who is in charge of taking booking but still, there wasnt a solution for me. Also, they said that most of the food was not available at that time because it was a busy day. Havent tried the food so i cant tell how delicious it is. However, the service is really bad. It was annoying to find other...