Chef Diao — Restaurant in Manchester

I had an awful experience when I went to the Restaurant for a birthday meal. When I arrived I was seated with, we were handed the menus and we started looking, not one minute goes by and the waitress came over to take drinks orders, we hadn't even taken our coats off yet at this point let alone read the menu.

I told the waitress to give us a few minutes and also informed them that we were waiting for 2 more people to arrive before we would order anything, less than a minute goes by and the same waitress came back and asked for our drinks order again and to see if we were ready to order food, unsure if they understood I repeated what I said earlier but in chinese.

They waitress left the table and another came about 30 seconds later to ask what drinks we wanted, this whole process lasted 3/4 more times before we started to really annoyed.

We had to resort to telling the restaurant staff that we woudl wave them over when we were ready to order. The other 2 guests arrived and as soon as they sat down, the waitress ran over to ask us what drinks and food we would like, the other guests were also in shock and literally said 'I've only just sat down and not even opened the menu, can you give us a minute'.

Skip forward to when we were ordering the drinks and food, we were not informed what was not on the menu/ sold out, so we ordered a bunch of stuff and while ordering we were told no to this and that, the waitress also kept getting the order wrong, we said the order byu its chinese name, english name and the number on the menu.

After the whole ordeal, we thought, it can;t be any worse from now, the food came out in the weirdest orders, we had mains that came out before the appertisers, we had the rice dishes come out 10 minutes later so we were all just sat twiddling our thumbs as they items were ordered are meant to be paired with rice.

We ordered 3 roast meats and specified that we wanted it with Duck and not Chicken, went most of the items came we were then told that they had no more duck, frustrated at the entire situation we just said give us the chicken instead.

Sure enough the dish came out, my oh my the rice was stodgy and too wet, the rice was one big old clump, the Chicken was cold, the Siu Yuk did not have the signature crispy bubbled top skin and trhe Char Siu, was tougher than the rubber sole of a shoe, the meat was clearly microwaved

This was not the experience that I was expecting, the quality was not on par, the service was not of a suitable level and the price was outrageous for what we got.

If you want good chinese food that is reasonable priced, cooked right, comes out in an timely manner just go to Chinatown, I recommend...

Was recommended for their dim sum by many friends. It was our first visit here.

Just because we spoke Cantonese to the staff, we were only offered menus in Chinese. FYI, not all Chinese speakers can read Chinese especially those like us British born.

The dim sum menu in Chinese is pretty small and limited.

Fried dough wrapped in rice noodle rolls (炸兩) = fried dough was crispy which we liked but the rice noodle roll was thick and mushy texture when it should be thin and silky.

Fried turnip cake with XO Sauce (XO醬炒蘿蔔糕) = Fried turnip cake was like fried rice cake minus the turnip with very mild xo sauce flavour.

Fried chive dumplings (煎韭菜餃) = this was ok but the execution of these dumplings weren't neat and were in different sizes.

Siu mai (燒賣) = this one was ok too but again, each one was in different sizes.

Chaozhou fun guo (潮州粉粿) = The filling was mushy apart from the water chestnut which is an unusual ingredient for this dumpling. The same problem with the execution. There was a huge one with thick skin compared to the other two.

Steamed Beancurd Skin Rolls (鮮竹卷) = This was ok.

The quality of the dim sum; for what we were there for, was average to under average. It felt like the chef who made these dim sum isn't a trained or fully trained 'dim sum master' (點心師父). Overall, a disappointing visit...

Went here with my partner and asked in advance of ordering if we could have any nut free dishes. Was told only satay would have nuts and clarified if we could order the mock chicken Szechuan making sure there were no nuts.

When the food came there had been some contamination with nuts and my partners mouth swelled up, luckily they did not swallow any food otherwise we would have had to phone an ambulance.

I know it’s probably silly to go to a Chinese with a nut allergy but I trusted that they would make sure there was no cross contamination, don’t take that risk with this place if you have nut allergies. I understand things like this can happen and we asked politely if nuts were in our meal once my partner had a reaction and the man serving was very rude and said ‘the food is just spicy you are not allergic’. This was very bad handling of the situation.

The food other than that was tasty, the dim sum was nice. The meal which caused a reaction was sent back and removed from our bill, but we felt uncomfortable to continue eating in case the other food caused a reaction, ( my partner only tried the one dish). So we payed for the rest of our meal and took it to go.

Overall the experience was not good so I would recommend going somewhere different if you...