Viet Shack Restaurant — Restaurant in Manchester

Our experience at Viet Shack was terrible. We were a group of six girls visiting Manchester for the first time for a bachelorette, and we were excited to try this restaurant, but it was a complete letdown.

Maybe food in Manchester is generally expensive, but with the quality of food and drinks at Viet Shack, it felt like a complete rip-off. My beef bún (vermicelli) was extremely bland and certainly not worth the price. There were minimal vegetables in the bowl, and the “medium-rare soy garlic infused beef bavette steak” was not only overcooked (closer to medium) but also had no flavor at all. They provided a bottle of nước mắm (fish sauce), and even after using more than half the bottle, the dish still lacked flavor. I genuinely don’t understand how this place has such high reviews—maybe people here don’t know what good Vietnamese food tastes like? I ended up sending the dish back because it was that bad.

To be honest, this place feels very “white-washed.” While it might be trying to do some sort of fusion, there was nothing authentic or truly Vietnamese about it. The only decent thing was maybe the pho, but even that was overpriced and not worth it. The Viet Shack fries were also disappointing. They lacked flavor, and we couldn’t even finish them. In fact, we ended up not finishing a lot of our food and drinks because they just weren’t good. The drinks, in particular, were overly sweet with no discernible alcohol taste. If you want to risk diabetes, then go ahead and drink up! As someone with type 2 diabetes, I found the drinks ridiculously sweet. I couldn’t finish mine and ended up giving it to a friend. One of my girlfriends ordered the Lychee Rose, and it took over half an hour to arrive. By the time it finally came, the rest of us were already halfway through our drinks.

Service was equally poor. Once our food was served, no one checked on us or even seemed to care. I had to wave someone down to complain about my dish, and when I finally managed to get someone’s attention, I overheard the waitstaff talking about us because they were standing just three feet away. When it came time to pay, we had to flag someone down for the bill. The staff member who brought it over suddenly switched to a cheery demeanor, asking how we liked the food and service. We were honest and said, “It was not good. The service was nonexistent, and you weren’t welcoming or attentive until it was time to pay the bill and get a tip.” She had nothing to say to that.

To add insult to injury, we ended up spending around 200 GBP on this experience, which is painful to even think about considering how bad it was. Especially if you were to convert that to our home-currency. The reviews for this place are highly inflated. If this is considered good Vietnamese food in Manchester, then you all are missing out on what it...

Manager failed to sort out overcharging issue with good grace.

Ordered the "Any dish with a beer, coffee or soft drink" for £9.99. In small print beneath the offer it says "£1 surcharge for tiger beer, 10% service charge optional". I ordered a qualifying dish and asked for "a beer". Waitress explained that Tiger beer was unavailable and they only had Buddha beer. Thought this was odd since I hadn't specified any particular brand of beer, so reassured her that "any beer is fine". (I was thinking: "actually, that's better because it's the Tiger beer that has a £1 surcharge".) Turned out later that what the small print is trying to say is: only Tiger beer qualifies for the deal AND it attracts a surcharge. (Oh, and that optional service charge WILL be added to your bill without your say so; you'd have to spot that and ask for it to be taken off if you wanted to opt out.) After the meal the bill arrives with 33cl Buddha beer charged separately at £4.95! Called the waitress over and she confirms it's correct and asserts that everything was explained. Couldn't get her to acknowledge that it wasn't made clear the alternative beer I was offered didn't qualify for the deal. Then had pretty much the same exchange with the manager, plus her repeatedly saying "you ordered the Buddha beer so you have to pay for it". I refused to pay and we had a kind of embarrassing stand off situation. After making us stew for 10 minutes the manager returned to the table with an amended bill and patronises me by saying "we're prepared to reduce the bill on this occasion on condition that you take more care when ordering in future", as if I'm ever going to return!

Incidental bonus comment: After seating you they put a QR code on the table and advise you to scan it. Fine, I thought, gonna have to do the online ordering thing that emerged when the pandemic started. But it turns out the link just takes you to a static PDF menu rather than some ordering app. They're putting their customers to the trouble of downloading a 1MB document (that - by the way - is designed for print and isn't particularly easy to read on a small screen) so they can save themselves the trouble of dealing with physical menus. The guy at the next table had to call the waitress back to ask for the WiFi code. (Turns out physical menus are available on request; unclear why they don't just put one of those in front of you rather than a QR...

Visited for the first time after hearing great things and had high hopes. The dumplings were tasty, but unfortunately both the summer rolls and beef bún were really bland.

The noodles were completely plain, served with just beef (which was okay) and salad. They gave us a bottle of chilli and lime dressing with the mains, but no matter how much we added, it just didn’t seem to bring any real flavour. What’s disappointing is that I’ve since seen reviews from a year ago saying the same thing — so it doesn’t seem like feedback is being taken on board (in hindsight, we should’ve checked that before going!)

We were tempted by the shack fries but didn’t want to order an extra main on top of those we’d already ordered, so we asked if we could order the mini shack fries from the kids menu to have as a side just so we could try them. We’d already ordered a starter and a main each, so it seemed a bit silly to be told no because apparently they’re strict that only under-11s can order from the kids menu. While I get the rule if adults are trying to order kids meals instead of an adults main, in this context it didn’t really make sense as we’d already ordered a main each.

The waitress was lovely and polite, and I get that it’s a small venue with quick turnaround, but putting the bill down before we asked for it (with a “no rush”) and then coming over with the card machine a few minutes later, unprompted, while we were still mid-drink made us feel rushed.

Based on this experience, unfortunately, I wouldn’t return...