Midland Hotel, Peter Street, Manchester (0161 932 4128). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £110
At the bottom of the menu at Mr Cooper’s House & Garden, which is neither a house nor a garden but a hotel restaurant in Manchester, it says : “Stay true to your roots.” In the context of a restaurant named after the renowned 19th-century garden that once occupied the same site, this makes sense. Plants have roots and so, I suppose, should good cooking. And if you have roots, perhaps you should stay true to them.
The problem starts when you read the rest of that menu, let alone eat anything off it. This food doesn’t appear to be rooted in anything apart from a neurotic, scatter-gun need to throw everything at the plate. It’s a barking, squawking mosh pit of ingredients; a long list of dishes which have nothing in common save that they have been corralled here on the same piece of paper. I’ve seen more baffling menus in my time. Just not very many.
What’s curious about this is that the restaurant belongs to Simon Rogan, of L’Enclume in Cumbria (which, in turn, has spawned both Fera at Claridge’s in London and The French, also here at Manchester’s Midland Hotel). Rogan is many things: intense, stroppy with people he thinks aren’t giving him enough respect, obsessive. But his food, drawn from the Cumbrian landscape, has its own compelling internal logic. He doesn’t pay lip service to using exclusively British ingredients. He bloody means it. On the menu at Fera you won’t even find references to olives or garlic. There’s a nod to citrus, but only at dessert.
And then there’s the menu at Mr Cooper’s, which reads like the culinary equivalent of a bunch of monks who have been thrown into a brothel and have decided to give voice to all their sublimated carnal urges. On this menu the kitchen is determined to use anything. If it’s edible, on it goes. I should say that what we ate was not actively unpleasant. There was some competent cooking. But did it make for a cohesive experience to which I would gladly return to spend my own money? No, it didn’t. It’s a blunt test, but it tells you what you need to know. Prices of £7 for a starter and £16 and upwards for a main course are OK, as long as you don’t spend the whole meal frowning and wondering who thought any of this was a good idea.
Part of the issue is the decor, which is a polite word for a grievous act of architectural vandalism. This is a grand old hotel space with high, vaulted ceilings and fine, grandiose columns. It has been made to look like a cheap garden centre café in Droitwich. (There is a well known garden centre in Droitwich. I have been there. I’m making this comparison very carefully.) There is wooden garden furniture of the sort you’d pick up at B&Q in a bank holiday sale, including one under an open umbrella. There are bird boxes on the walls, and dried-out-looking trees in the middle. One wall is papered with photographs of logs.
In a corner there’s a wooden gazebo, of the sort other restaurants construct outside for smokers. The pastoral nature of the space is referenced by outbreaks of Day-Glo lime-green paint in unlikely places. And just to give it atmosphere there are lamps in the shape of giant dinosaur eggs. Well, of course there are. It isn’t in poor taste. It’s a total taste bypass.
And then comes the food: among the starters there’s aubergine fritters with ginger, coriander and spring onion, or braised fennel wedges with red curry and soft-cooked eggs; there’s scallops with cucumber sambal, jalapeño fritters and tahini dressing or sea bass ceviche with passionfruit and kohlrabi. It reads as if Rogan, exhausted by all that tight culinary nationalism, has said to his brigade: “I’ve done my bit. You lot come up with a dish each.” I’m sure it’s great for kitchen morale. For the diner, not so much.
Here come buttermilk-fried oysters with kimchee purée, pear and pickled fennel. The batter is a little floppy, suggesting the oil wasn’t quite hot enough, but I get the idea, the way the acidic vegetables are meant to cut through the sweet, fried bivalves. It’s a thing you can do with oysters, if you’re really bored of oysters. But what does it have in common with “Nick’s meatballs” with hyssop, baked apricot and tzatziki? In two dishes we’ve gone for a romp around Italy, Greece, Korea and a few other places besides. Bravo, Nick. It’s a pretty good meatball, though swamped in a weird purée of the advertised tzatziki.
The madness continues with the main courses: here are some cumin and chorizo potatoes, there some green beans in creamy tofu, over there some potato latkes. The best dish we try is a sensitively cooked piece of skate wing, topped by rings of caramelised calamari atop a lightly dressed heap of chickpeas and hazelnuts. It’s a big piece of Mediterranean fish cookery which makes sense.
Less thrilling is a dish of “roasted sweetheart cabbage steaks” – something I had heard much about and the reason I’d booked. The title suggests a slab of cabbage, seared on both sides. Instead this was merely a heap of singed cabbage, with teriyaki sauce underneath, and a worrying blanket of hot wasabi-flavoured mayonnaise on top. At which point the meal began to feel like a terrifying game of ingredient bingo. There was the saltiness from the teriyaki sauce, a less-than-welcome creaminess from the mayo and fighting to get out from underneath it all, a bit of slightly burnt cabbage. My dinner had ceased to make the slightest bit of sense. The same could be said of our side of battered and deep-fried gherkins, refugees I assume from some American barbecue joint where they’d been rejected on the grounds of being too green. They were nice enough, but what were they doing there?
Dessert is a little less radical and a little less well executed. The fillings of both a key lime pie and a caramel tart do what they’re meant to, but the pastry on both is soggy and undercooked. Banana rocks brings boulders of an iced banana parfait that need to start melting before they become at all pleasant. And with that our journey of discovery came to an end. Mr Cooper’s has been running for 18 months. I find myself wondering whether this madness was what Rogan envisaged for the place when it opened.
Jay’s news bites
■ It’s OK for a chef to raid the global larder. You just have to be sure the chef is Peter Gordon. The New Zealand-born cook has the impeccable good taste needed to make true fusion cooking work. Visit his restaurant, the Providores and Tapa Room in London’s Marylebone for the likes of scallops with pickled beets and cardamom or asparagus with smoked tofu and crispy curry leaves (theprovidores.co.uk).
■ Being without a restaurant needn’t stop a chef. Mary-Ellen McTague, formerly of the highly regarded Aumbry just outside Manchester, has set up a commercial kitchen in the city’s Old Granada studios and will be delivering food to homes within a 2.5-mile radius courtesy of the home delivery service Deliveroo. In the autumn she opens an as yet untitled restaurant in Manchester’s Northern Quarter (deliveroo.co.uk).
■ It’s official: men are tight bastards. According to a new survey by booking service Opentable 17% of men never tip compared to 10% of women. The Scots are the most likely to tip and Yorkshire diners the least likely. I’m only the messenger (opentable.co.uk).
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk Follow Jay on Twitter @jayrayner1
