,

Jeremy Lee is right to devote a whole chapter to roots duo Salsify and Scorzonera

Though Samuel Pepys remains the diarist closest to my heart (with a dishonourable mention for the entertaining Alan Clark) it is Pepys’ Restoration contemporary, John Evelyn, to whom I consistently turn in penning my vignettes about food. Not so much to his Diaries proper but to his horticultural treatises. In my Quest for Cobnuts I […]

Read more
/by
, ,

Climat change! How cosy Covino spawned a wine-driven restaurant in the sky

Up on an eighth floor rooftop with a leaden Manchester skyline all around I’m talking ‘terroir’ with Chris Laidler. He gives me Montagny; I raise him Mercurey. We both agree solidly on Macon in the search for affordable Burgundy wine regions. He confirms Domaine de la Romanée-Conti (average retail price price £25,000) won’t be on […]

Read more
/by
,

Why Chicago Lightning has never struck me before… but Joe’s creation is a Sterling effort

Chicago fleetingly came to mind at the launch of Sterling, a new cocktail bar from the Schofield brothers in the basement of Manchester’s Stock Exchange Hotel. All dark wood and sepulchral lighting with illuminated ranks of bottles the backdrop for some serious bartending.  It’s the kind of joint you might slip into as dusk falls […]

Read more
/by

Fresh, green and sustainable – how Indy Man and JW Lees are making a great hop leap forward

It’s the beery equivalent of Beaujolais Nouveau – well kind of. I’ve never twigged why, Kent apart, we don’t celebrate the UK’s new ‘green’ hops harvest by brewing with them. Virtually straight from the stalk. It’s a big thing in the craft ale heartlands of the USA. On a road trip stop-off in Washington State’s […]

Read more
/by
, ,

Will ‘Queen Beer’ Jaega go for the jugular in the MFDF battle versus the cocktail kings?

Question. What the devil is the owner of ‘the UK’s toughest pub’ doing at Manchester Food and Drink Festival debating the food matching merits of craft beer over cocktails? Of course, every city boasts a roughhouse contender but the Kray twins’ locals around London did have the Wild West edge back in the Sixties. Notably […]

Read more
/by