Telephone: 0161-834 3210
Address: Back Pool Fold, Chapel Walks, off Cross St, Manchester M2
Open: Mon-Sat: lunch, noon-3pm; dinner, 5.30pm-9pm (Fri & Sat, 10.30pm)
Price: Around £60 for two with a bottle of house wine.
No disabled access.
Greasy trilby, covert coat, Racing Post, large whisky: the once-dapper punter in the bar at Sam's Chop House is straight out of central casting. The downstairs tavern is equally filmic, a Victorianarama setting for a Mancunian Dickensian melodrama featuring Doulton tiles, copper pipes and ruddy good scoffs. What Sam's offers today's trencherman is enormous portions of honest food, and what might just be the best wine list in the north-west. Mismatched wipe-clean tables and pub grub chairs simply do not prepare you for a wine specials board trumpeting Château Lynch-Bages 1989 at £150 a pop - "hurry whilst stocks last".
The menu suggests classics with a twist; our orders are taken by a charmer straight off Corrie who deadpans her way through our selections. Asked if the fennel and cockle soup is up to much, Deirdre replies, "Delicious - couldn't make it better meself." She also deems Sam's "famous brown onion soup and Lancashire hotpot salad" up to snuff, then stalks off to score a glass of Talus 2000 and a half of Boddingtons. As promised, the pinot noir is ripe and freshly opened; the Boddies perfectly conditioned.
Our fellow lunchers were a mixed bunch: a couple of property boys in shiny suits and matching complexions; a man and his mistress necking champers; a table of bellies in posh shellsuits. Starters arrived - larger portions than most London mains. The quart of soup was crowned with a giant cheddar-topped crouton that proved to be better than the oversweet onion gravy that it covered. As postmodern deconstructions go, the hotpot salad left me cold. Sliced new potatoes and a couple of grey pencils of lamb fillet over carroty salad don't add up to the muttony staple that once sustained King Cotton. Just as well we hadn't gone for crispy Goosnargh duck pocket parcels. ("Like posh samosas, do you? Me neither.")
Sam's seasonal roast of the day is usually rib of beef, but when I visited this was seasonally off, and we'd been warned off modish interlopers such as linguine with cherry toms, artichokes, warm feta and Parmesan crisp. There are no chops on the Chop House menu: instead, Deirdre brings us gargantuan chargers of fish and chips with "fresh-cut lemon and homemade tartare sauce, no fuss" and steak and kidney pudding, which she announces is as big as a "baby's head". Must have been a bonny baby - it struggles to be contained within the confines of the oversized plate. The fish is spot on, the chips, mushy peas and sauce homemade. Described on the menu as "not seasonal, just substantial", the pudding's chunked meat was captured in a thick, suety pastry that soaked up the accompanying jug of gravy faster than Tarquin at the bar was sucking up the Bells. It came with a "garden of peas". Captain Birds Eye's garden, that is. Both mains were fine, but next time I'd go for the thick pink steaks, which everyone else seemed to be ordering. Clos Poggiale, a charmingly complex Corsican wine, spoke volumes about the wine buying and washed down the Rennies stylishly.
Having talked us into sweets, Deirdre was chuffed to bear bread and butter pudding ("Up at five, I were, making that - nice clean plate, please") and baked Eccles cakes, both with jugs of lovely, unctuous beige custard. Were it any less leaden, the bread and butter pud would doubtless elicit complaints from the regulars; the Eccles cake, equally, owed more to avoirdupois than legerdemain.
Sam's offers vintage ports, some glorious dessert wines, including a pinot blanc from Sepp Moser in Beerenauslese ("Bloody good, even if they did bomb our chippie") and well-made coffee. It doesn't offer retiring rooms for overstuffed diners, but it should. Excellent wines take pride of place here, alongside the old-fashioned concept of good cheer. Gourmets will be disappointed, but they'll be missing the point. Sam's is where you go for a nice steak and a first-growth claret or battered fish with Krug. Fancy, that.
