Pacific, Manchester

I have only been to Pacific once, but I'd quite happily go back again. It is one of the larger restaurants in Manchester's Chinatown and has an unusual setup in that the lower floor is a Chinese restaurant and the upper one a Thai restaurant with two separate menus and separate kitchens. When you book, you book for one or the other. We ate upstairs at the Thai restaurant.

The room itself had very modern, minimalist decor with a Far Eastern flair and the service was attentive. We chose from a variety of dishes that included all the Thai standards. We settled for fishcakes, a Thai curry and a Pad Thai noodle dish, all of which were cooked to perfection.

Overall, I find Manchester very lacking in Far Eastern restaurants that are not Chinese - Thai, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and the ones that do exist can be on the pricey side. Pacific was certainly more upmarket than many of the establishments in Chinatown and fell into this category of Thai food that is more expensive than in a city which has more Thai restaurants, but this was not just upmarket in terms of cost, at least in this instance we got what we paid for.