Siam Smiles Noodle Bar

I would quite happily live here if it meant I could eat this delicious, authentic Thai food for breakfast lunch and dinner! I love it.
It’s exactly what you would expect from a restaurant that has appeared smack bang in the middle of a supermarket in China town. It’s not at all fancy — plastic tables and chairs, occasionally tissues rather than napkins, people doing their shopping next to you while you eat. Oh, and it gets pretty chilly so make sure you’ve got your coat. But who actually cares?! It’s hands down the most authentic Thai food I’ve ever had outside of Thailand.
I’ve been many times, and have tried pretty much everything on the menu. Everything I’ve had is tasty, but my faves are the Tom Sam salad, which is hot enough to leave you gasping for water (but weirdly really more-​ish) and the steamed chicken with rice served with soup and sweet chilli sauce– simple but delicious.
Service is super-​smiley, of course!

Argh! This was not what I expected.
My friend and I were pretty excited to try Siam Smiles after all the good reviews and were looking forward to some Thai culinary sunshine but both our dishes were seriously sub par. I had a soup with roast pork belly — the soup lacked any depth of flavour; the meat was just ok. My friend’s chili and garlic chicken and rice dish looked totally uninteresting and was basically just a pile of raw chilis on top of some boring looking chicken and rice. She really didn’t like it.
Drinks wise they were out of lychee and regular Coke (my nightmare!!! Jk. But kind of not jk) so I decided on jasmine tea which cost £1.50…for a mug of hot water with a tea bag dumped in it. Hm.
There are two menus shown on Unilocal at the minute — from November 2014 and January 2015. Neither are what we were shown, and I think the prices have gone up slightly again. In fact, the dishes now aren’t that far off what you would get in nearby Thai restaurants like Phetpailin or even Try Thai or Chaophraya that have far nicer (and warmer) interiors.
Might go back and try it again at some point but certainly not chomping at the bit!

A little gem in Chinatown, it is a unique café/​supermarket hybrid setting which I have never encountered before, but the food is amazing. Best Thai food in Manchester so far. It tastes like food that I can get on the streets of Bangkok. I have to drop a star because it is not the prettiest place and I believe the price can be a couple of quid cheaper for such a small portion.

After two unsuccessful attempts to try Siam Smiles, I finally managed to get a table here yesterday! Hurrah.
Just off George St in the heart of China Town is Siam Smiles Supermarket. It’s a small door with an even smaller sign, so it’s incredibly easy to walk past if you’re not looking for it. Siam Smiles noodle bar is situated inside this Supermarket — no more than 10 tables are set up next to the isles of food, which is why it’s been so difficult to get a table in the past. It’s small, compact and you’re surrounded by people popping in for their groceries, which I find really cool.
The setup is very basic, but that is what I liked about it. It’s nothing like being in a fancy Thai restaurant, but more like the type of eatery that you would actually find in Thailand — very authentic and I loved it. The menu is quite large and I could have eaten or tried most things, so after taking a while to decide we decided to order 2 dishes each and 1 to share.
I went for the Kaow Moo Dang: Steamed rice with BBQ roast pork and topped with red BBQ pork sauce and the Kow Pad Talay — Fried rice with seafood and vegetables. Both were superb!!! The squid in the seafood fried rice was cooked perfectly! I persevered with my chopsticks but had to use a fork in the end to get to all of my rice.
Neil C. went for the Kaow Moo Grob: Steamed rice with crispy pork belly and the Kuai Tiew Ped: Yellow noodles with duck soup — he liked them both. I tried some of the pork belly and it was cooked amazingly well. And we went for the Lock chin moo — Steamed Pork Balls and chilli dip to share between us.
This was MORE than enough food for two and we left feeling full and also smiling!
Despite the food being cooked by 1 chef in the tiny kitchen at the back of the supermarket, it was served very quickly! I also found it to be very good value with most dishes ranging from £6 — £8. They don’t serve alcohol here, which is to be expected I guess and with it being a supermarket it was quite cold inside — so bring a jumper.
I can’t fault this place, the food or the service. 5*

I like the concept of this place. Casual café with supermarket stalls next to you. It’s so simple that I couldn’t take my coat off because its actually quite cold in a wet winter day.
It’s a place for people who want the authentic Thai food, something you would like to find on the street in Bangkok. The simple menu had actually covered the most classic Thai cuisine dishes.
I went into this place for lunch and there was one girl on the till and one woman was sorting out the stalls at the supermarket area. I had been offered the menu and ordered later on. Then the woman went back to the kitchen and then I heard the sound of chopping and smashing. That’s so much like a typical scene in Cantonese film which I had watched in childhood. Later on, the woman brought me the Som Tam Salad with a smile.
I forgot how complicate feelings I had for Thai Salad. They are always extremely chili but irrepressibly delicious. I had the same experience again and again. They smash the chili and get the seeds out and brought out most intensive flavor and its always too spicy for me. Apparently the girl on the till who took my order had forgot my Jasmine tea and I quickly decided to switched my drink from Jasmine tea to an Aloe Vera juice. It’s definitely a better option for my salad. The green Papaya was definitely a delight to eat in the light and juicy sweet and sour sauce. The peanuts had been grilled which is different from the typical Chinese fried peanuts. I was also surprised to find the little dried shrimp in the salad. This is a classic food ingredient in Chinese cooking, and it brought great seasoning into the cooking and famous for being a rich source of calcium.
If you are a real fan of Thai food and you really miss the days in Thailand, you could definitely come and try their menus.

Siam Smiles is so brand new, they’re still using tissues in lieu of napkins. They’ve just changed and updated their whole menu, adding a range of standard Thai takeaway curries and raising the price of each menu item by a pound orso. You can view the original menu in the photos that I marked Current Menu November 2014.
Before the menu change, this place was a solid 4 stars for me. Quick and cheap, with a small menu of tried and true family favourites. The main problems were that it is so cold in there that you have to leave your coat on, and that proteins, especially duck and seafood, were chronically overcooked. Both of these problems remain, but I have a few more gripes now.
I am going to go full Hipster here and tell you that this place was much better before it was popular. There is a massive gulf between the new and old menu items. The original menu items are fresh and vibrant with herbs and chilis. The new menu items feel like they are using pre-​made shop bought sauces from High Street retailers. If they aren’t going to make them with love and care, they shouldn’t be on the menu at all. My biggest gripe is that they removed some of the best menu items, I assume because they thought that blood and offal were two scary for Western palates. They were happy to honour my request for these items but I had to know what to ask for.
The price rises are not a problem necessarily, but lunch for two has jumped from £11 to £15 overnight, and it changes the math just enough that I’ll probably go back to choosing Viet Shack (£8 for 2) or Phetpailin (£10 for 2) a little more often going forward. I’m sure that once their growing pains settle down, the quality of everything will rise a tic. In the meantime, my advise is to stay away from the new additions to the menu. From now on, I’ll stick to requesting the original menu items.

I was really impressed with how chilled out this «blink and you’ll miss it» Thai restaurant just off George street in the heart of China Town is. I kept reading great reviews of it in the past few weeks and thought I’d like a bit of that for lunch (maybe because the previous night I’d been wolfing down burgers in Solita and needed a healthy balance)
Very unassuming — there’s basically seating for around 25 on properly Thai wipe down tables and there’s a basic but good selection of noodle and rice dishes — plus soups and some good solid vege options. I went for the number 10, BBQ pork with rice and it definitely hit the spot.
It was slightly more expensive than I thought it would be — £6.95 and I could have eaten another again but that’s not a problem when the food was so fresh. Very tasty and very healthy, just what I was after! The spicy sauce on each table is great too.
There’s a supermarket in the basement too — you can grab great coconut juice in here which I did :-)

Siam Smiles is neatly tucked away in a Chinatown basement. Word has spread fast about this half-​restaurant, half-​supermarket ever since a critic for Guardian Weekend magazine dropped by to eat here in October.
The setting is pretty basic, but very clean, with white tables and simple orange plastic chairs. The menu, on the other hand, is pretty comprehensive given that all of the dishes are made by just one cook in their tiny kitchen at the back of the store.
Some of the dishes we tried were as delicious as you’d find in places much more salubrious than these surroundings. Sharing is definitely recommended due to the wait — see above re: numbers of cooks.
The drinks you can order (all non-​alcoholic by the way) are simply plucked from the shelves by the waiting staff (bottles of soft drink) or made by the cashier behind the till (hot drinks such as jasmine tea).
It’s not particularly vegetarian-​friendly here, and some of what we had could have been presented/​prepared a bit better (I’m not a fan of eating raw ginger slices or whole red chillis, for instance) — but for meat lovers who like their spice, this place is worth trying.

This place came up on our radar when Marina O’ Laughlin dropped that review on the Guardian.
We had one of those unlikely Sunday when a few of us were free for some food and drink action in town which provided a perfect excuse to try out Siam.
Glad we did, the food was delicious. There are a few «traps» so to speak as the food is so authentic you may not have had it before. One of us ordered the Thai sausages with ginger and cabbage… And that’s exactly what it was. Droplets of juicy and flavoursome sausages, slices of raw ginger, whole bird eye chillis and bits of white cabbage. I’m sure we missed a trick but aside from the sausages we weren’t sure what we were supposed to do with the rest, pardon our ignorance.
The other dishes we chose were super good though, pork perfectly cooked, duck curry seasoned and perfumed fantastically. All coming with strange fruits and vegetables I’ve never seen before.
The concept and lay out might be confusing at first as it is an Asian grocery shop with a few tables. The drinks are made by the same person manning the till and there’s only one «chef». Which means when the 4 of us ordered all at the same time, the dishes arrived one by one, as they were cooked and the by the time the 3^rd dish arrived, the first of us who got served had finished.
But since you’re supposed to share the food it should not be a problem.
I strongly recommend the Kow Pad Moo Grob, pork belly with fried rice and all sorts, bloody good stuff.
Also try their Thai cold teas and other drinks.

Siam Smiles is the perfect name for this place, as that’s what Thais are famous for and it’s exactly what was I left with after a visit here for lunch — the food is as authentic as I’ve had in Britain, down to the setting for the restaurant, slowly taking over an asian supermarket.
In recent months Siam Smiles has had plenty of interest from local food fans and national food writers, as a result I think the shop side of things may disappear altogether if the café becomes any more popular (which would be a pity, because you need the shop to try and recreate these dishes at home).
As it is at the moment, if you want to be guaranteed a table you might want to take a day off work and go at a strange time — it’ll totally be worth it if authentic Thai food is what you desire.
As of writing this, I’ve only recently come back from my first (amazing) holiday in Thailand — one of the best things about it was the street food, Siam Smiles is like transporting yourself back there.

having just returned from Thailand, i needed another hit of authentic street food and Siam Smiles definitely delivered.
I chose the duck noodle soup and was instantly taken back to Bangkok.
Whilst the price is obviously more than in thailand, the flavours are just as amazing.
Dont ever change Siam Smile. We need your authenticity!

Having read all their online buzz since summer (twitter, Mcr confidential, Guardian et al) I finally found time to go! Such a great place — half supermarket, half café (it just works trust me!) This is genuine Thai — none of the coconut milk laden curries here — the majority of the menu are noodles in beautifully flavoured broths. Some include offal & blood but this is easy to avoid if that’s not your cup of tea. I had sukiyaki — a delicious seafood broth with king prawns, squid, mussels & pork with glass noodles and crisp steamed greens. Absolutely delicious — best thai dish I have had in Manchester! I decided to get a second course — Papaya salad. Oh my word it was beautiful — crispy nuts on-​top with dried shrimp. Beautiful hot flavour. There is a mix of extra condiments on the table which I also helped myself too. Great place, can’t wait to go back — only open during the day though, so don’t be disappointed if you arrive after 6pm. I hear they also sell out of dishes, so it’s best to go early.