Kala, 55 King Street, Manchester M2 4LQ (0800 160 1811). Starters £5.50-£14, mains £16-£30, desserts £6-£10, three courses at lunch £23, wines from £22
Journalists like a story, even those of us paddling in the shallow end in search of something nice for our tea: stories like the Holiday Inn just begging to have its terrible food reviewed, or the Swiss-themed place with the stringy fondue and the bought-in sorbet, or the Kurdish family remembering its own culture one dish at a time. The group of restaurants that has been opened across the northwest of England by chef and restaurateur Gary Usher is meant to be the anti-story. In 2011 when he launched the first, Sticky Walnut in Chester, he went all Royston Vasey and warned the likes of me off. This, he said, was a local bistro for local people. Stay away.
When he opened his second restaurant, Burnt Truffle in Heswall on the Wirral, I ignored him. I piled in and, infuriatingly for him, liked it very much. Usher’s restaurants don’t serve ground-breaking food. He’s not attempting to leap boundaries, or draw attention to himself through his deft cooking. He’s just serving up the kind of classy, appealing food you’d like to eat repeatedly, and at a reasonable price. And where the hell is the story in that?
Over the past few years, in the face of crass intransigence from the banks, he has used the crowdfunding model to help open a growing group of these neighbourhood bistros that I am not meant to visit. There’s Hispi in Didsbury and Wreckfish in Liverpool and Pinion not far away in Prescot (its opening is the subject of a forthcoming Channel 4 documentary).
A few months back he opened Kala in Manchester, after breaking the world record for crowdfunding £100,000 in just 11 hours. Usher may talk down his little neighbourhood bistros, but people seem to love them, and want one of their own.
Rightly so. With a trip to Manchester planned, I scan the available possibilities. The city has many of those. But I keep clicking my way back to the menu at Kala. No, there really is nothing extraordinary about any of these dishes. There is no story. Except for the much bigger one, which is this: the health of a restaurant culture is not defined by a baby-handful of glittering temples to gastronomy flogging platefuls of overwrought ambition and memories. It’s defined by places like Kala quietly feeding you well.
So here I now am, up the curving staircase from the handsome dark wood bar at the front, to this first-floor space with its polished concrete floor and its emerald green banquettes in leather and velveteen. It has shell- shaped wall lights, an open kitchen and inked and eager waiters. To get started we have a plate of golden crusted focaccia which, just for good measure, has been dribbled with a little extra olive oil to ease everything on its way.
At lunchtime, as well as the main menu, there is a shorter version at £20 for two courses and £23 for three. We order from both, though there is no sense of being short-changed in the cheap seats. Both feed us just as well. What defines the cooking is the attention to the essentials. A block of a faultless chicken liver parfait from the set menu arrives pleasingly pink. It is glossed with a little oil and dusted with crystals of salt. “We call that chicken butter,” our waiter says, and I can see why. I slather it on to torn pieces of their brioche, and top it with a smear of their chutney, as if I’m genuinely interested in balancing out the glories of schmaltz.
The other starter is a big dollop of snowy burrata, its foetal cheese subtleties pointed up by a dusting of ground walnuts and chilli. Next to it are roasted purple carrots and for crunch, puffed kernels of rice, looking like the insect-eating revolution has begun. Where the parfait feels like an act of classic bourgeois indulgence – stop rolling your eyes; I hear gout is bang on-trend these days – this is a dish for those trying to claim an interest in restraint, despite the big hit of dairy fats.
A ridged and rugged leg of crisp-skinned duck confit, a contrast to the one that looked so drearily bought in at that rooftop place a few weeks ago, comes with a mound of a neon orange sweet potato purée. It is soft and velvety. It is a root vegetable transformed into an act of kindness and care. There is a meaty puddle of what I should probably call gravy, this being Manchester, and leaves of baby endive, each one filled with a pokey vinaigrette and sprinkled with chopped chives. It’s a plateful which both makes sense, and is achingly pretty.
The nearest to modishness are torched meaty fillets of plaice from the main menu. They come with samphire, brisk cubes of pickled cucumber, deep-fried vinegared anchovies and a chervil sauce, the deep green of a field in winter. Because a positive review is always made by the one, pointed niggle, I shall mention the heavy hand with the salt on the fish, which almost overwhelmed it. I know, Gary, I know; bloody restaurant critics. But take comfort from my deep, intense love for a side dish of charred little gem, sprinkled with deep-fried capers, alongside a big spoonful of a truffled egg yolk emulsion and a serious grating of salty Berkswell cheese across the top. Oh, and the sizeable chips which are really just superb roasties, cut to look like something else.
The dessert list laughs in the face of summer. You’re in Manchester and here, they take the sweet end seriously. There’s a fair old brick of glossy parkin, with oats for texture and the warmth and encouragement of ginger, all cooled down by a scoop of crème Chantilly and a puddle of butterscotch sauce. There’s a subtantial choux bun, sliced open and filled with passion fruit cream and passion fruit sorbet, then laid in a pond of a caramelised white chocolate sauce. After that a double espresso is medically required.
All this, and as it happens, Usher has form as the kind of employer we need more of. Recently he was on Twitter asking for advice on how to sort out admin for a homeless man to whom he had offered a kitchen job. He opens the restaurants that people want. He serves the kind of food people like to eat. And he’s good to his staff. If only I could work out what the damn story was.
News bites
Is it too soon to mention The Spärrows again? I do hope not. This extremely small but perfectly formed restaurant in a railway arch close to Manchester Victoria station, interrogates the food of the Tyrol (roughly) and gets all the right answers. Go there for spätzle, those misshapen noodles familiar across the region, with braised onions and cheese. Move on to plates of meat-filled pelmeni or pierogi. Finish with coffee and cake, and then find somewhere for a quiet lie down (thesparrows.me)
Major developments within the Corbin & King group, famed for restaurants like the Wolseley and Brasserie Zedel. They have closed Bellanger, their Alsatian-accented outpost in London’s Islington, and acquired another site in Notting Hill, though they haven’t said yet what restaurant is planned there. However, plans have been announced for a second Wolseley, within a major landmark building at Monument in the City of London (corbinandking.com)
Veteran chef and restaurateur Cyrus Todiwala of Café Spice Namaste has opened his first restaurant outside the capital, in Leicester. The cooking at Tandem, inside the Highcross shopping centre, spans the Indian subcontinent, though the ground floor space small plates of Goan and Portuguese influenced cooking (tandemrestaurant.co.uk)
Jay Rayner’s book My Last Supper: One Meal, a Lifetime in the Making is published by Guardian Faber on 5 September at £16.99, buy it from the Guardian Bookshop at £11.99. The premiere of the accompanying live show, My Last Supper, in association with Guardian Live, is at Cadogan Hall, London SW1, on 9 September. For tickets and information on other dates around the UK visit jayrayner.co.uk
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
