Live Seafood, 163 Ashton Old Road, Manchester M11 3WU (07894 062 214). Seafood prices vary depending upon choices and weight, but roughly £10-£25

This week’s restaurant is not a secret. Many of Manchester’s Chinese restaurateurs will know exactly where it is: on a scuffed drag, a mile or so east of Manchester Piccadilly station, overlooking wasteground apparently untouched by thoughts of urban regeneration. That doesn’t stop Live Seafood being obscure. And utterly, delightfully nuts. It was once a red brick boozer called the Seven Stars, but now has an extension and a lot of signage, plastered with giant images of lobsters, king crabs and shiny fish. Occasionally the building is hung with fairy lights. They love a fairy light at Live Seafood.

Inside, through the doorway to your right, there are a couple of large, round tables, with lazy Susans. Depending on the time of day there may be more fairy lights. Beyond that are the tanks, bubbling furiously, courtesy of the filtration systems. This is both a retail and a catering operation, Hong Kong style. Here are live turbot, eel and carp. Here are velvet crabs and brown crabs, and in one tank, a king crab the span of a car tyre, which could have your eye out. There are also ludicrously penile geoduck, the single entendre of the seafood world. Ladies and gentlemen, prepare to meet your dinner.

Some will find this whole thing repulsive; they will literally be repulsed by the notion that they should select the living creature they are about to consume. To which I say: get over yourselves. The vegans and vegetarians have a robust and consistent position on this; the others, the ones who are happy to eat seafood as long as they don’t have to witness a wiggling claw before they do so, not so much. It’s very simple. Here, the moment of death has been moved significantly closer to your plate.

There is an extensive laminated menu, which leans towards the Sichuan end of things. There are garish pictures of a plate piled with stir-fried pig intestines with dried chilli and Sichuan pepper. It looks like a big heap of glowering red things. There’s gong bao chicken and lamb with cumin. But given the presence of those tanks, choosing the meat dishes would be an odd way to go.

Just be aware that most of the seafood listings in that menu come with an ominous “market price” tag. You must be prepared to walk the tanks and discuss what you want with the staff, as if you know what the hell you are doing. I’m not sure why you’d come here, otherwise. Just make sure to ask for the prices, so there are no nasty surprises. Most full servings will work out at somewhere between £15 and £25, but that whole king crab, for example, turns out to be £200. “We don’t charge for cooking,” the nice lady says, by way of encouragement. We decline.

Get it right, though, and a meal here won’t be some mere novelty, a cracking anecdote with which to entertain your mates. It will be a parade of the best and (obviously) freshest Chinese seafood dishes you will ever have had placed before you. We do not specifically choose which specimens we wish to eat, though I’m sure you could do that. Instead we point at each tank in turn, ask how we can have the contents prepared and the staff give us the options. It’s a serious business.

As well as the tables downstairs they have four private rooms upstairs, each holding one huge table. Apparently, delegations of Chinese business people fresh off flights from Shanghai pile into these rooms all the time. We are offered one. The wall is cheerily decorated with images from Finding Nemo: you’ve seen the movie, now eat the cast, and so on. Tsingtao beers are brought and, while we are left to wait, I spin the lazy Susan, because that’s always fun and I often wish I was still seven years old.

And then it begins. First to arrive are a couple of cracked velvet crabs, served salt and pepper-style, the edges lightly battered, with handfuls of fresh chilli, garlic and spring onion. I know immediately this will be a “jug of water by the bed” meal, but I also know it’s going to be worth it. We have crackers, but these crabs have thin, friable shells that we can get through with our teeth. It’s followed by a heaped platter of clams, with black bean sauce.

I roll up my sleeves and reach for a pile of napkins, because it’s a hands-on job and there is no way to do this cleanly, if you do it properly. It’s the meaty equivalent of eating pistachios: there is the meditative process of lifting the shell. You probe with your tongue for the good stuff and discard the empties.

We have a large platter of prawns that have been deep-fried in their shells. You may peel them if you wish. I like the texture of those salty shells, crisped up in the hot oil. There is a little sweet chilli sauce to send them on their way and, for no obvious reason, save that fairy lights make everything better, a single bulb tied to the plate by a strand of clingfilm. It flashes blue and pink.

The star of the show is a whole head-and-tail-on sea bass, taken off the rest of the bones. Courtesy of mind-boggling kitchen knife gymnastics, it has been transformed into a fish-porcupine hybrid. The flesh has become thick battered fingers which have risen up in the fryer to point accusingly. It’s then drenched in a sweet garlic sauce. God, it’s good. My cheeks become sticky and I feel the limits of appetite as a failure of character.

They bring huge segments of pomelo, a thudding member of the citrus family, which we pick at listlessly. I regret there are only two of us here tonight. This place demands enough of you at the table to give the menu and the contents of those tanks a proper seeing to. We have had three beers each and knocked up a bill of £125. A larger party would find it cheaper per head.

Downstairs a man has just bought a single huge geoduck at £95 a kilo, which he has paid for in £20s thumbed off a fat bank roll. It has been fished out of the tank, and now its end probes the edge of the bag in which it sits. Stop frowning. At Live Seafood in Manchester, a frisky geoduck heading out the door is all part of the floor show.

News bites

Like Live Seafood in Manchester, the interior of Seveni, across the road from the Imperial War Museum in south London, is big on fairy lights. It doesn’t do live seafood but it does do a whole lot else: old Beijing copper hotpot, table barbecue and raucous Sichuan dishes. As with Live Seafood, go mob handed to get the most out of it (seveni.co.uk).

From 26 November until 26 April 2020, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge will stage an exhibition called Feast & Fast: The Art of Food in Europe, 1500-1800. It celebrates the preparation of food across the continent, its presentation and what that said about the attitudes of those involved. Intriguingly, it points up how concerns about our relationship with what we eat are not a modern phenomenon (fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk).

Amid all the restaurant closure gloom some cheerier news: Pitt Cue, which grew out of an American barbecue food truck before going into administration earlier this year, looks set to make a comeback. Co-founder Jamie Berger has bought back the intellectual property rights to the business. The new Pitt Cue will first make its mark through pop-ups and residences and will concentrate on ‘barbecue, bourbon and beer’.

Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1