Manaao Thai Comfort Food

We were seriously impressed on our first visit to Tustin’s Manaao, noting that it was serving some of Orange County’s best-tasting curries and a broader Thai menu with excellent overall quality, all in a relatively small but well-kept plaza space. But after a second visit in late 2024, the earlier magic had unfortunately evaporated – across food, drinks, and service – leaving us less likely to return.

Originally, we sampled choo chee curry with catfish, yellow curry khao soi noodles with soft shell crab, and green curry with soft braised beef as entrees. While the catfish didn’t wow us – mostly due to the fairly small portion, bolstered by a portion of rice – the soft shell crabs were spectacular in size, batter, and flavor, with a great mix of crispy and soft noodles. The green curried beef simultaneously tasted very good and was reasonably portioned, arriving with tasty roti bread instead of rice.

On our second visit, we tried mostly different items, including a holy basil and chili squid dish (pad ga-prao) that was pretty threadbare apart from the ample squid portion, including an overly thin but otherwise good sauce; a stir-fried morning glory dish that was little more than a lightly garlicky collection of stems; and a Lao-style papaya salad with truly tiny “salted crab” that was more sweet than salty and 95% shell rather than meat. We re-ordered the khao soi noodles with soft shell crabs, the former part just as delicious as before, but this time with crabs that were far heavier on crispy breading than meat.

Our first visit’s appetizers included tender grilled pork jowl and giant prawns, each with nice citrus dips, plus nice clams with a strong and optionally spicy holy basil sauce. On our second visit, we tried shrimp cake rolls that sounded a lot more interesting than they were (think spring rolls with a full piece of shrimp inside), and relatively plain chicken wings, neither of which we’d rush to order again. Notably, the appetizers arrived out of sequence relative to the entrees, creating some challenges at the table, and some of the servers seemed to be more occupied talking amongst themselves than clearing dishes.