AMAZING DELICIOUS AUTHENTIC MEALS!

Staff are very friendly and always greet me with a smile

There is on offer a $10.90 lunch specials Monday to Friday is very popular and is very good value. The portions are generous and leaves you full.

The restaurant serve authentic thai dishes.

My personal favourites include green thai curry with pork as , entree of chicken satay skewers have a chunky sauce which is very flavoursome and chicken tom yum soup.

Bonus is that you earn Myer One, Qantas and Citibank rewards using the respective cards.

Highly recommend this restaurant.

I thought long and hard about whether and how to review Chiangmai, and especially what rating to give it, because the problem that I have with it doesn't really fall into any of the categories of "Quality", "Service", or "Value".

On the one hand, my personal experience, which involved several visits over two or three years, has been consistently good. I wrote a review of Chiangmai on Urbanspoon in February 2011 singing its praises. On the other hand, I stopped eating there a few months ago, because evidence has come to light that management is engaging in an unsavoury practice. I cannot confirm this first-hand, and for a long time I didn't want to believe it, but the evidence became so overwhelming that I couldn't ignore it anymore.

So rather than just say "I don't think you should go there", I have decided to submit to WOMO the most fair and balanced review that I can, giving both sides, so that you can make up your own mind.

Here are the reasons why I became fond of Chiangmai and kept on returning there over a period of two or three years:

I like the food. The entrees, salads and curries are fresh-tasting and well-cooked, with lively, zingy flavours. You can taste all the separate notes that make up good Thai cooking - hot, sweet, sour, salty. The minced chicken salad is a personal favourite.

There's only one main meal I've ever ordered that I haven't liked, and that's the pad thai. You should be able to taste all the different ingredients in a pad thai - the chicken, the egg, the peanuts, the coriander, the chilli. This one tasted of not much other than noodle. It had muddy flavours and a stodgy texture. But to be fair, it's the only dish that I haven't liked, and I haven't eaten a really good pad thai anywhere for years, since Thai Na Palace in Brunswick closed. The pad thai across the road at Ying Thai is even worse than Chiangmai's.

I don't normally bother with desserts at Asian restaurants, but the ones at Chiangmai are worth making an exception for. There is an excellent mango ice-cream, and a truly swoon-inducing coconut ice-cream. I have cravings for it now - and I'm not even all that fond of coconut! It has a glorious creamy texture, studded with chunks of what I think is fresh coconut, and it has the most intense coconut flavour. If you choose to eat here, and you like coconut, give it a try. Another dessert I was very impressed by was a pumpkin custard, from the specials board. We're not really accustomed to eating pumpkin in sweet dishes here in Australia, so I was a bit dubious about ordering it, but I'm glad I did - it worked brilliantly.

Service at Chiangmai could be improved - it's polite and friendly, but also hesitant and slightly nervous, and some of the waiters don't speak English all that well. They're also occasionally very slow to bring some of the meals out. On one occasion my companions had almost finished their mains, and I was still waiting for mine, when the waiter came and told me that they'd run out of my main, could I order something else? I was not pleased. Restaurants do run out of certain dishes, but the time to tell the patrons that is at the time of ordering, or very soon after - NOT when their companions are almost finished eating.

So that's my personal experience. On balance, it was good. I went back many times, and enjoyed almost every meal I ate there. Now I'll tell you the rest.

Chiangmai is a participant in discount voucher schemes (from Living Social, Scoopon, and the like). To use these vouchers, the customer is meant to make a booking, and is meant to state at the time of making the booking that they have a voucher. Nothing wrong with that so far.

But if you look up Chiangmai on Urbanspoon, you'll find no less than SIX separate reviews, dated June 2011 to September 2011, from people who have dined there with a voucher and who claim that Chiangmai keeps two separate menus, one set with inflated prices that they hand out to voucher holders, that effectively wipe out the value of the discount. (According to one reviewer, "grilled chicken cost $6.90 more on the fake menu".) It is alleged that staff get very annoyed when the customer fails to mention the voucher until they're paying the bill, which is hardly surprising, because from management's point of view, the customer was given the "wrong" menu to order from.

One reviewer on Urbanspoon tried to defend Chiangmai by saying that these disgruntled reviewers are mistaken - it's only that Chiangmai has different menus for lunch and dinner, with smaller portions and cheaper prices on the lunch menu, he said. Red herring. It's quite true that there's a cheaper weekday lunch menu - I've known that for ages. But what the unhappy reviewers are talking about here is not the difference between lunch and dinner. They claim that voucher holders and non-voucher holders are charged different prices for the SAME food served at the SAME sitting.

I read one of these customer complaints on Urbanspoon back in June, and my first thought was, "Customer with a grudge. Probably didn't like the curry, or something." I really didn't want to believe that a restaurant I liked so much was engaging in a dishonest practice.

Then I read a second review. "Make that two customers with a grudge," I thought, a bit more uncomfortably. Then the third one. By this time, it was getting difficult to ignore, but I was still in denial.

Finally came the fourth review, in July. This one set out in more detail the customer's experience, and I found their evidence convincing. This customer had not mentioned the voucher until after they'd been handed the menu, and when the bill arrived, the prices were higher than the ones they had remembered seeing on the menu earlier. The total bill was more than $30 higher. They queried this, and were handed a menu matching the prices on the bill. Convinced it wasn't the same menu they'd seen earlier, they borrowed a menu from diners at a nearby table, compared the prices on the two menus, and found they were different. This, they say, proves beyond a doubt that there is a dual-menu pricing structure going on here.

This is the review that finally convinced me. Since then, there have been two more with similar complaints, the most recent dated Sep 2011. I find it hard to believe all these different people are mistaken or lying, although I encourage you to read their reviews and decide for yourself, rather than just accept my paraphrasing of them.

Here's another piece of evidence that would seem to support the allegations. On Chiangmai's website, each item on the weekday lunch menu has a price next to it. But none of the items on the main menu do. (The main menu is the one used for weekend lunches and dinner every night.) There's just a general range of prices at the top of this main menu: entrees $6.90 to $14.90, mains $14.90 to $25.90. Have you ever in your life seen a restaurant that took the trouble to put its entire menu online, listing every food item available, but without individual prices? I certainly haven't. Restaurants either put the full menu online, with prices, or they don't bother to put the menu online at all. And even if they wanted to keep prices a secret, then why put the individual LUNCH menu prices online, but not the dinner ones? Is it mere coincidence that discount vouchers can only be used with the dinner menu? Chiangmai's decision not to put its individual dinner prices online implies that the restaurant is trying to give itself a bit of leeway to fiddle prices when the customer actually arrives, by preventing customers from looking up the website beforehand, noting down the prices, and comparing them with the menu they're given. It's not definitive proof, but all the circumstantial evidence is adding up.

If these allegations are true, then Chiangmai is engaging in a deceitful and disgraceful practice, of which they should be ashamed. Discount vouchers aren't meant to be an opportunity to rip off unsuspecting customers. They're meant to get new customers through the door in the hope that they'll return in future and pay full price. I don't see how it can possibly be to a restaurant's advantage to give customers the impression that "full price" is more expensive than it really is. Even if the customers liked the food and didn't detect the dual-menu scheme, there's every chance they'll decide not to return because they can't afford the inflated prices that they believe are the restaurant's normal prices. The managers are also very foolish to believe that they could get away with it in this internet age. Word gets round very quickly, especially on review sites such as WOMO and Urbanspoon.

I should mention that I have never used a discount voucher, at ANY restaurant, and I probably never will. So you could quite reasonably say that I have no first-person, direct experience of any dual-menu scheme, and you'd be right. The only evidence I have is hearsay evidence. But balanced against that is the fact that because I've never been the victim of any such dishonesty, I have no personal axe to grind here. I'm not seeking to get my own back on a restaurant I just happened not to like. Quite the opposite: learning about this dual-menu scheme has been personally upsetting to me; it's taking place at a restaurant that I like very much, and I've found it very hard to accept that fact.

But I believe in fair play. I'm not prepared to look the other way while people get ripped off. I therefore made the difficult decision not to return to Chiangmai until I see evidence, either on this site or on Urbanspoon, that management have ceased this dishonest practice and are treating all customers fairly, whether they have a voucher or not. I've yet to see any such evidence. I've yet to even see a response from Chiangmai's management. This is sad. I'd love to return to Chiangmai. There are often two sides to a dispute, and I'm prepared to listen to Chiangmai's side. I want to believe that all these reviewers are wrong, that there's some other explanation for all this. I'm even prepared to forgive and forget if the allegations turn out to be true, provided Chiangmai expresses contrition and states that they will now treat all customers fairly. But so far, nothing.

So if you're thinking of eating at Chiangmai, I encourage you to read the reviews here, and then the ones on Urbanspoon - all of them, to get a balanced picture, because Chiangmai has as many fans as it does critics - and then make up your own mind.

Great on service. believe that home delivery is free. There are a lot of meals that are under $15, the more expensive have prawns or seafood which is totally understandable.

Approximate cost: $16