58 Mosley Street, Manchester (0161 236 1811). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £75
It’s late at night and I’m in the newly opened Manchester outpost of the London-based Hawksmoor steak house group, all wood panelling, reclaimed parquet and seared animal. I am happy. I have a ribeye and a pot of their anchovy hollandaise, which really ought to be prescribed on the NHS as a pick-me-up.
But life is never simple. A chap who says he has already drunk deep hunkers down by my table for a chat. He smells of good red wine and newly minted opinions. He wants to talk about the gap between London and Manchester restaurants. I would prefer to stick a fork into the soft part of my hand, but try to be polite. The arrival of Hawksmoor is a good thing, he says, but the prices are steep. “Well,” I say, “if the city doesn’t want to pay those prices Manchester will get the restaurants it deserves.” He looks at me woozily. “That’s a bit harsh.”
Perhaps it is. Then again Hawksmoor, while not cheap, has always struck me as good value. Serious steak costs. If you want to eat the quality stuff, don’t complain about being charged for it. This issue of willingness or ability to pay goes, I think, to the heart of the debate around the gap between the restaurant sector in London and everywhere else in Britain. The fact is that, in economic terms, London is now another country. More people can afford to spend more on dinner. This is not always a good thing. It results in stupidities like the Dorchester Grill and Quattro Passi. Happily, it also results in John Doe and 10 Greek Street.
Recently, BBC online wrote a sweaty-palmed piece asking whether, with four Michelin-starred restaurants, Birmingham was a challenger to London. Well no, obviously not, as the capital has dozens which have been felt up by the tyre company. Cue outrage from Brum and Manchester, who feel patronised and overlooked. I feel your pain, but you have to face reality. The London restaurant sector does not compare itself to the rest of the country. If it was going to do any sort of comparison it would not be with Nottingham or Sheffield. It would be with New York or Paris, and it doesn’t even bother doing that any more.
Anecdotally a big part of the problem out of London is the strength of the mid-market restaurant sector; brands such as Jamie’s Italian, Zizzi, Côte, Byron Burger and the rest. Any time a high-street site with an A3 restaurant-ready licence comes on to the market, all of them pile in. Landlords, offered the choice between a new independent chef and an established brand will, more likely than not, go for the latter.
Landlords aren’t interested in gastronomy. They’re not interested in clever things with duck fat. They’re interested in the bills being paid. It leaves the chains to compete with each other and push up the rents, making it even harder for independents to get a foot in the door. Their availability in turn breeds a habit, where reliable chains get the trade over the plucky, unknown quantity that is the independent.
I was thinking about all this during a rather lovely lunch at 1847. Many of my Manchester friends whinge at me about the city’s restaurants not being taken seriously. And yet here I was sitting in this (for the most part) excellent independent on a Thursday lunchtime and it was all but empty. What’s more nobody I knew in Manchester had ever been to it. I haven’t heard anything about the Birmingham sibling either. It looks a little austere: a square grey box of a room, utilising rough-hewn, raw materials, as if it’s determined to be good for you. But it’s comfortable, and, at £25 for three courses, good value.
Chef Damien Davenport knows how to punch flavours without chucking too much at the plate. Cubes of roasted celeriac, hinged between a warm nuttiness and something earthier from the depths of the field, come with a date purée with a hint of piquancy, and the very lightest of coconut creams. In between the cubes of celeriac are sweet-savoury leaves of deep-fried kale, clearly the adornment of the year. There is nothing obvious about introducing these ingredients to each other, but they quickly make friends. As do long-roasted baby aubergines, their shiny skins as wrinkled and burnished as mine after a day at the beach, alongside a salad of toasted pine nuts, and a dressing of dried puréed tomato and smoked yogurt. It tastes like a deconstructed baba ganoush, the various bits waiting to be brought together.
In a reversal of the usual way of things, main courses are even more compelling. Large pieces of halloumi are deep fried, so that the crisp batter gives way to soft stringiness. The strident saltiness of the cheese is soothed by a velvety minted pea purée. In another dish, long-grain rice is mixed with puy lentils, spiced with turmeric and a garam masala and then piled with smoked tofu, curried root vegetables and soft-boiled quail’s eggs. Describing it as a kedgeree seems more than reasonable given that’s exactly what it tastes like.
Unfortunately it all falls apart at dessert. Making a cucumber sponge smacks of good ideas in the wee small hours that were never discarded by daylight as they were supposed to be. The sponge is wet, like someone spilt their drink over it. A gin sorbet and little balls of cucumber are mildly diverting without entirely making amends. Worse is what’s advertised as carrot cake with rum syrup and Chantilly cream – a take, on paper at least, on a rum baba. The cake is as dense as dried-out gingerbread, the portion of syrup miserly. A white-chocolate crème brûlée is passable but would have been better without the overly sweet white chocolate.
But I’ll (almost) forgive them the failures at dessert because of the impressiveness of the savoury courses. You may have noticed something specific about those dishes. I have reviewed 1847 for what it is: an interesting independent trying to distinguish itself in the marketplace through inventive cooking. But it would be obtuse not to mention that it is named after the year the Vegetarian Society, which still has its headquarters nearby in Cheshire, was founded. I should also mention that tomorrow, 23 March, is the beginning of Meat-Free Week. You now have an independent out-of-London restaurant in which to mark it, and nothing to lose but your high cholesterol level. I know; I spoil you.
Jay’s news bites
■ Vanilla Black in London’s Holborn, is a rare example of a restaurant whichtransplanted itself successfully into the capital, in this case from York. The dishes can sound a little odd – how about a starter of brie ice cream with spring onions and poached blackberries? But there is an extremely assured hand in the kitchen. Try the likes of seared seaweed and cabbage with pickled potatoes or goat’s cheese and toasted cauliflower millefeuille (vanillablack.co.uk).
■ The relentless advance of the pimped hamburger continues apace. Meatliquor, which started life as a streetfood truck in a Peckham car park, is to open its seventh branch… in Singapore. “The airport code of SIN alone suggested this might be the place for us,” said founders Scott Collins and Yianni Papoutsis (meatliquor.com).
■ People serving you your dinner may have filthy habits. A survey by the British Heart Foundation found that around a third of people working in food and hospitality smoke – the highest proportion of all the UK industries surveyed. Those in education smoked the least, with just 11% lighting up (bhf.org.uk).
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk. Follow Jay on Twitter @jayrayner1
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