63 Bridge St, Manchester
Tel: 0161 839 5550
Meal for two, including wine and service: £75
As you may have noticed from my reviews, I have been spending a lot of time in Manchester recently. It is a magnificent city in so many ways - ooh, the architecture, aah, the drizzle - but it is not my city, which has led to occasional bouts of homesickness.
Being a greedy boy, I have always found the cure to be the flavours of my manor, though - due to my being a Londoner, with mongrel tastes - these can be hard to pin down. Once, while in the Chilean capital, I found myself comforted by a plate of really good sushi. It took me straight to the joys of Ichiban Sushi on Atlantic Road in Brixton, a few hundred yards from my house.
In Manchester, the people I was working with were singing the praises of a Portuguese joint on Bridge Street, which quickly had my bottom lip twitching. I have said before that my favourite restaurant has to be an unassuming Portuguese grill house on Brixton Hill called the Gallery, if only because of the number of times I go there. The Gallery knocks out the best charcoal-grilled piri piri chicken, ribs and chorizo this side of Lisbon and I get take-outs roughly every couple of weeks. The dining room out back isn't bad either. So the prospect of Portuguese food in Manchester, at Luso, promised one of Proust's madeleine moments. Only with smokey chicken instead of sponge cake. And no tea.
That it didn't give me what I was looking for is not entirely Luso's fault. I was hoping for one version of the cooking of Portugal. Luso has a much looser - read baggy - interpretation of the culinary tradition, aided by a rampant imperialism which allows for the food of anywhere once owned or occupied by anybody with even the slightest drip of Portuguese blood to be represented. Here a little Brazilian, there a little tempura (battering and deep frying was, apparently, introduced to Japan by the Portuguese), over there a little Indian spicing. The result is, rather predictably, a set of dishes that can be both satisfying and downright awful.
It is, though, never prissy. The room is a white, wood-panelled box, as though it was once a Cape Cod beach house, now transplanted here from the shore. Against this, every main course, priced in the mid-teens, is a big splash of dirty colour; almost no dish is allowed out of the kitchen unless it has been drenched with an aortic haemorrhage of sauce. So piri piri chicken - advertised on the menu as poussin but instead a big piece of grown-up bird's tit - comes in a soup bowl's worth of something tomato-based, with a satisfying kick. Another big chicken dish, this time the breast stuffed with garlic and oregano, comes amid a Lake Windermere of leather-black Madeira jus. An impeccably cooked hunk of haddock in an under-crisped wrap of ham comes with a rich puddle of creamed leeks and peas. This isn't subtle cooking and it certainly isn't pretty (though I suspect the chef thinks it is), but it is powerful and gutsy.
At other times, though, everything goes wrong. Seared scallops Portuguese-style, if these have been done correctly, are a warning never to eat scallops in Portugal; slightly crusted and desperately underseasoned, they whimpered for mercy from the plate. Worse still were wild boar sausages - an impressive match for those weedy Lincolnshire chipolatas from Tesco - drenched in more of that Madeira jus, and dumped like failed asylum seekers on a raft of chorizo-spiked mash. This was cooking as car crash. Oh well. At least there were some big-thighed Portuguese wines, most of them costing less than £20, with which to sweep away the taste.
Desserts were equally inconsistent. There was a beautifully made custard tart, using crisp shortcrust rather than puff pastry as is traditional, but good for all that. We also liked a gentle and wobbly orange creme caramel. What we didn't like was their vindaloo ice cream. The menu declares that the term derives from Portuguese words for wine and garlic and was their contribution to the culinary lexicon of India. None of this is any excuse for making an ice cream from it, and certainly not this one. First came the sweet creaminess, then a hit of ersatz generic 'curry' flavour, reminiscent of the value range from your local corner shop's spice rack, followed by a huge hit of chilli heat which was about as welcome as a badly inserted catheter.
At the end of last year I interviewed Heston Blumenthal of the Fat Duck, which in its time has served marvellous ice creams of everything from mustard through crab to smokey bacon. Heston said he was worried that at some point some chef would attempt to imitate him and end up doing something really stupid. 'Critics will point at the dish,' he said, 'and blame me.' My friend, I fear that with Luso's signature dessert the moment has arrived. In short, Heston, that vindaloo ice cream is all your fault.
