Albert’s Schloss 27 Peter Street, Manchester. (0161 833 4040). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £50-£80
If you didn’t pay proper attention, you might dismiss Albert’s Schloss as Dante’s third circle of hell, only with less glamour. Or, even worse, as akin to a beer warehouse on a Friday night in Guildford. This is not casual prejudice towards the drinking culture of Guildford. It’s pre-meditated prejudice. I once spent a Friday night with the Surrey police, watching them crowbar drunks into vans. If I breathe deeply I can still smell the sick, overlaid by the dizzying waft of Lynx Dark Temptation.
Yes, Albert’s Schloss on Manchester’s Peter Street is a barn. It has beer taps like the cockpit of a 747 has switches, and enough bar length for one of those aircraft to use as a runway. The music is so loud it could dislodge a filling and there’s a photo booth in the basement for when you need pictorial evidence of something you’ll regret in the morning.
And boy do they lay on the Germanic schtick. The waiters aren’t wearing lederhosen and slapping each other’s thighs manfully, but they might as well be. The drinks list includes slogans like “Haus of Martini: Superior Trinken.” There’s a cocktail of vodka and strawberry liqueur with bubble gum syrup called the Wilder Kaiser, which is entirely uncalled for, and an awful lot of faux wood panelling. There are skis nailed to the walls, and burning log fires in the middle of stone tables. They sell a salted caramel schnapps. The menu is full of pictures of Teutonic castles.
If a Manchester friend hadn’t implored me to go – “You’ll want to hate it, but you’ll love it” – I would have made the sign of the cross and scuttled away in search of a gloomy cicchetti bar. But he was right. Albert’s Schloss is brilliant, and it’s not just the booze, or the blistering music from the Sunday Best Jazz quintet, or the 9ft 7in drag queen impersonating Joan Crawford. Although obviously all of those things helped. I do love a drag queen who really puts her back into it.
It’s the cooking. Because they needn’t have bothered. They could have called up some dismal food service company, signed a contract based on massive volume and opened the delivery doors. The kitchen could have been nothing but the ping of microwaves and the fizz of the deep fat fryer. Instead they’ve gone for it, building a bakery section producing terrific loaves of crisp crusted sourdough, and a white full of smoky cheese and ham, as well as knock-offs of cronuts – they’ve put a K on it – which are better than anything I’ve tried from Dominique Ansel.
Granted, the menu is eclectic: a confit duck leg here, a bit of hummus there. An “Alpine Pizza” topped with nduja and chorizo stretches the definition of mountain food but perhaps that Albert gets around a bit. Croquettes are made with ham and cheese, the latter described as “Alpine. Many things on this menu are – we’ll take their word for it. These are crispy shelled, golden and pouting gusts of hot cheesy, piggy air at you as you bite in.
Their sausages are made by a local butcher and are an impressive piece of work. The bratwurst is tight skinned, meaty and peppery in all the right places. It reaches from one end of the plate to the other. We have ours without bun, but with potato salad that has just enough bite and vinegary edge to stop it slipping into sludge. There is a crunchy sauerkraut and a big puddle of sweet savoury mustard. The £13 price tag is a lot for one sausage, less so for this complete plateful.
From the Alpine Cook Haus list comes the Schweinshaxe at £16 and it’s the best Schweinshaxe I’ve had since the one with which I comforted myself in Munich 25 years ago, after having lunch with a neo-Nazi. He told me I should go back to where my sort came from. I said: “What, Harrow on the Hill?” He looked baffled. Enough about bigots: it’s a long-roasted pork knuckle, with enough meat on it to serve two of me or three of you. It’s a monumental plateful, as in you could use it as a headstone when the time comes. The crackling is crisp and plentiful, the meat soft, the gravy rich, the red cabbage almost as good as my late mother’s. It really is as sustaining a plateful as anything I’ve had in a real Bavarian bier hall.
A skin-on fillet of pearly hake gives its all to a heap of Provençal lentils. A toasty beurre noisette sends everything on its way. Of the sides, it’s the sformato, a loaf of truffled mashed potato, with a burnished top of toasted cheese, which is the winner. As in, it completely defeats us. It’s food to get you through a siege, in a good way. There are lighter things, too: finely sliced Brussels sprouts with cranberry and chestnuts, for example, or charred branches of tenderstem broccoli with black olive aioli.
With this I’m supposed to tell you I drank beer, and I did have a glass of a lemony weiss bier at the bar, but it was a well-priced Gavi di Gavi that got me through. We are seated next to a pastry display which we suspect has been out all day. Still, I order one of their kronuts, a peanut butter and raspberry jam job. It is a model of the kind: all crispy, friable and fried golden pastry, sugared within an inch of its life. It is generously filled.
Better, by which I mean it could stand comparison with anything coming out of Britain’s grandest kitchens, is their burnt Alaska. It is served at a perfect temperature so your spoon doesn’t hit a boulder when you get through the gorgeously singed meringue. Inside is soft raspberry sorbet, at the bottom a crisp base. Bravo. We have clearly over ordered; you could fill your boots for £25 a head.
And all of this is delivered to our table with grace and wit, by a young woman called Emma who has this job nailed. Every service at Albert’s Schloss must be like the first 15 minutes of Saving Private Ryan (only without the blood loss). She doesn’t miss a beat. At the other end of the hall Sunday Best Jazz hit their mark on stage, the drag queens parade and the crowd starts dancing on the benches. I really should hate it. I should want to be anywhere but here. But I don’t. Albert’s Schloss is a class act. See you there for the cabaret next Tuesday.
Jay’s news bites
Few restaurants come with cabaret thrown in, but Alan Yau’s Park Chinois on London’s Berkley Street does. Styled after a 1930s Shanghai supper club, you can eat serious Chinese food, while listening to very good jazz. The Peking duck is exceptionally good. At £98 it’s also exceptionally expensive. But hey, the jazz is free. Kinda (parkchinois.com).
Honest Burgers, which has grown from one Brixton outlet to a 24-strong chain, has invested £600,000 in a butchery unit so it can make its own burgers. With LTTC (less than thoroughly cooked) accreditation, their burgers can be served rare. It’s now supplying five of their south London restaurants (honestburgers.co.uk).
Just after my review of Stevie Parle’s Palatino went to press came news that his first restaurant, the Dock Kitchen in London’s Ladbroke Grove, has closed after eight years. It started as a one-week pop-up in the showroom of furniture designer Tom Dixon and stayed there.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
