Tag Archive for: Restaurants

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Quo Vadis, Mountain, 64 Goodge Street – Old Soho, Fresh Soho and the new Fitzrovia frontier

We each have our own private Soho. For the long of tooth it may well be Paul Raymond’s Revue Bar and the nudge nudge of sleaze or Jeffrey Bernard regaling his reprobate chums slouched across lunchtimes that never ended. Perhaps Gaston Berlemont’s French House and Muriel Belcher’s Colony Club, L’Escargot with Elena Salvoni at the helm or Victor Sassie’s goose-fattened politico haunt, The Gay Hussar. So many ghosts. Even a near contemporary of mine, Alastair Little, whose eponymous restaurant brought a blast of fresh culinary air to Frith Street in the Eighties, is no more (my tribute).

Camisa in the 70s when I first shopped there
The Gay Hussar (now Noble Rot)

Northern-based, I’ve only had the tiniest of bit parts in the pulsating Square Mile of Sin, much sanitised these days, of course. Maybe, on a flying visit, a café au lait and croissant at Maison Bertaux before stocking up on Italian essentials at I Camisa & Son (recently granted a two year stay of execution; its drab rival around the corner, Lina Stores, has now swollen to a glossy five-strong chain). For cocktails it still has to be tiny Bar Termini on Old Compton Street. And if we ate in in Soho it would inevitably be at Andrew Edmunds in Lexington Street, an 18th century townhouse that for four decades has combined being dog-friendly with offering a remarkably affordable fine wine list, well matched with the game it regularly serves. Alas, Andrew, too, died last year at 80, another key figure in ‘Old Soho’ departed.

There were occasionally more flamboyant experiences. A random invitation, by his biographer, to the funeral of Sebastian Horsley, the ‘Last Dandy of Soho’, where to a Marc Bolan soundtrack the horse-drawn hearse delivered his heroin-ravaged body to St James’s Piccadilly, Stephen Fry delivering the eulogy.

Another time I lingered into the early hours in the Groucho Club in the company of Lembit Öpik, Liberal Democrat MP, I’m A Celebrity contestant and Cheeky Girls squeeze, and one Ron Brand, dad of Russell (whatever happened to him?).

Quo Vadis – no wriggling out of Jeremy’s eel sandwich

The Groucho Club is a homage to the wittiest of the Marx Brothers, but it was the former home of a more seismic Marx  – Karl – that hosted us on a recent return to Soho. Once also a brothel, Quo Vadis in Dean Street is definitely ‘Old Soho’, launched as a restaurant in 1926, one year before L’Escargot (Camisa arrived two years later). It has enjoyed a resurgence over the last decade under the stewardship of the Hart Brothers, whose neighbouring Barrafina is definitely a standard bearer for the ‘New Soho’.

The Quo Vadis kitchen is in the hands of national treasure Jeremy Lee, whose Cooking Simply and Well, for One or Many (Fourth Estate, £30) has just won Best General Cookbook in the 2023 Guild of Food Writers Awards. I wrote about his championing of salsify here a year ago. That root vegetable wasn’t on the menu on the Monday evening we dined there, but his signature starter was – the smoked eel sandwich. I’ve tried to replicate at home several times, quite recently with in-house prepared eel from Upton Smokery in the Cotswolds, but the restaurant version was miffingly superior. At £14.50 a tranche it had to be.

Lee’s smoked eel sandwich
Masterpiece terrine

Amazingly, it was pipped by the other starter we shared in the cosy, quirky dining room –the best terrine I’ve had in years. A quid cheaper, it was a master class in the charcutier’s art. Tender tiles of compressed chicken, grouted with a moist blend of ceps, savoy cabbage and bacon, accompanied by fresh figs. 

The scene was set. The extended, enhanced ground floor restaurant looked a treat, as did arguably London’s most beautiful paper menu. Alas, the mains didn’t match all  this level of excitement. A case of NOFOM? (never order fish on Mondays)? I’d like to think that wouldn’t apply to a place, whose rigorous standards are apparent from Jeremy’s gloriously written book, but my wife’s hake with clams dish (£32.50) was dull and over-beaned, while my skate with tartare sauce (£34.50) smelt too much of the pan and felt tired. And yes, I am allowing for skate being a fish actively benefiting from a few days’ ageing. Neither dish was done any flavours by a timid Rousette de Savoie Cru Frangy Domaine Lupin, which cost £50. Our jolly neighbours were knocking back their white, a Puligny Montrachet at thrice that price, and we were so jealous.

Ain’t no Mountain high enough?

So a certain disappointment at Dean Street’s old stager, made up for thrillingly by new arrival Mountain in Beak Street. I vaguely remember the corner site being occupied by a Byron Burgers, but there’s also a louche Soho legacy, naturally. From 1913 it was home to  Murray’s Cabaret Club; in the Fifties Ruth Ellis danced in the club before murdering her husband, in the Sixties hostess Christine Keeler met Stephen Ward here before embarking on the Profumo Affair. 

These days it would be a scandal not to make the pilgrimage to taste the latest manifestation of Tomos Parry’s genius. His Michelin-starred Brat in Shoreditch (former strip club premises, a theme developing) set the bar high for the ‘Welsh Wizard Who Cooks With Fire’. The restaurant name? His inspiration has always been the ‘mar y montaña’ cooking (sea and mountain inspired) along Basque and Catalan coasts. Tast Catala in Manchester nods to that same culinary philosophy through its Costa Blanca-based exec chef, Paco Pérez.

Big investment has gone into the two floors occupied by Mountain, each boasting a state of the art Gozeney wood-burning oven, losing some of the hipster vibe along the way, but the food offering has suffered no identity crisis on the evidence of our early evening walk-in. Tables are currently booked out for weeks after the metropolitan critics swooped with their ‘already a candidate for restaurant of the year’ snap judgements. 

They might well prove right. We just loved everything about the place as we perched at the counter and wanted to order all of the menu. With a train to catch we settled for half a dozen treats, small plates except for a spectacular loin of fallow deer on the bone (£40) – dark char giving way to perfect saignant flesh. Like some Game of Thrones hero emerging from battle. Alongside, a squad of Parry’s signature smoked potatoes, even better than their equivalent at Yorkshire’s legendary Moorcock at Norland.

The supporting cast was equally impressive. A plate of home-cured ex-dairy beef (£12.50, fanned out wafer thin (the meat slicer is as much in evidence here as at Brat’s Shoreditch rival Manteca), then substantial chunks of raw sobrasada (£6.50), doused in honey. on their own wood-fired bread, topped with squiggles of guindilla pepper. Apparently this spicy, spreadable sausage is sourced from an organic Mallorcan farmer called Luis Cirera. 

Loin of fallow deer
Those amazing smoked spuds

Such attention to detail is everywhere. Wines show a Noble Rot influence. Where else might you encounter that delicate North Italian white, Nosiola? At £8 a sizeable glass, it had been our welcome drink, to be followed by a 500ml carafe of a Portuguese bulk tinto that was remarkable, fruity value for £20. It handled the spice of the chorizo we ordered in envy of our neighbours on the counter because of the balloon-light flatbread they also got.

Returning another time then to dig deep into a no-compromise menu offering beef sweetbreads, tripe, turbot head and, for three or more to share (£90-£120), a whole lobster caldereta (one pot stew) that may prove to be the peak signature dish for Mountain. Aiming to scale it one day.

Finally, a satisfying foray into Fitzrovia

We were staying in the Treehouse Hotel in Langham Place, , which has a Mexican restaurant Madera on its 15th floor, where we sampled assorted seafood ceviches and organic, grass-fed carne asada served over hot lava stones. Alas, Madera won’t be accompanying Treehouse when it opens in Manchester next year; consolation, head chef at the main restaurant there will be the remarkable Mary-Ellen McTague (ex- Aumbry, Creameries and The Fat Duck). 

The London hotel is opposite the BBC and John Nash’s All Saints Church on the edge of Marylebone and Fitzrovia, both exceptional districts to dine out in these days. The latter is home to the Sicilian food of Norma on Charlotte Street, which I have previously reviewed.

This time 64 Goodge Street was our destination. In its few weeks of existence it has been garnering plaudits akin to Mountain for its retro French bistro looks and menu. A new venture by the Woodhead Restaurant Group, creators of The Quality Chop House, Portland and Clipstone, it’s a handsome fallback destination for those who can’t squeeze out an advance booking for equally francophile Bouchon Racine in Farringdon (read my review) I dined in the shadow of a dark oak armoire in the intimately lit bottle green interior. I half expected Inspector to Maigret to sidle in out of the Fitzrovia dusk.

The ‘Famous Belgian’ would certainly have relished my amuse bouche, a truffled Comté gougère and my hors d’oeuvre, a duo of snail, bacon and garlic bon bons – a cute, deep-fried take on classic escargots à l’ail.

Snail bonbons were a tasty scene setter
The lobster dish I’m coming back for

Starters were a litany of Gallicness. What to choose from soupe au pistou; Morteau sausage, walnut and Morbier tourte (a homage to my beloved Jura); scallops, lentils and beurre blanc and a rabbit Niçoise. The latter won the day and there were enough olives, capers, tomatoes and basil to justify the substitution of blander bunny for the regulation tuna.

That dish cost £16. My main was £36. Like virtually everywhere of quality in London and other cities, even with modest wine, bills are now regularly topping £100 a head for three courses. No matter, if they get the details right From another well-judged wine list, a carafe of Austrian Blaufränkisch did the trick, its black fruits and whack of acidity a perfect match for the myrtille compote that underpinned squab pigeon two ways, breast seared, leg stuffed with Lyonnaise sausage. Perhaps a substantial addition of beetroot and chanterelles tipped the dish towards excess, but chef Stuart Andrew’s menu is built on richness. Comforting in discomforting times. Let me confess then. I wish, for therapy’s sake, I’d splashed out an extra £4 and gone for the lobster vol-au-vent with a cream/brandy infused sauce Américaine.

For 2023’s critical kitchen darlings the world appears to be their lobster.

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Stunning 20 Stories, Black Friar’s grounded garden and a true rooftop buzz at Climat

A head for heights? Most certainly as long as I‘ve a cocktail in my hand or, better still, a series of small plates arriving against a panoramic backdrop. To satisfy my needs, every high rise development these days seems to come with a rooftop bar or restaurant. At the Manchester version of Soho House, due later this year, they are even throwing in a swimming pool eight storeys up below its bar and I note that the ubiquitous Gino D’Acampo has been getting in on the act over in Liverpool, opening an eponymous Sky Bar Terrace at the top of the INNSiDE by Meliá hotel.

View from The Shard
The Willis Tower Ledge

It may be that city’s highest alfresco restaurant and bar, but at 270 ft it’s a mere molehill compared with the tallest viewpoint I’ve visited – Chicago’s Willis Tower, the Western Hemisphere’s third highest building at 1,730ft. One caveat, its Sky Deck with jutting-out glass Ledge is the same height (1,450ft) as the top of that old stager, New York’s Empire State.

Both dwarf our own Shard in London, which stands at a mere 1,020ft. One advantage is that the 72nd floor viewing gallery is partially open air, offering views of the pinnacle, as well as 360-degree views around the building. I’m still gob struck by how tiny Tower Bridge looked from 800ft above.

Spectacular 20 Stories
Vegan dish with a view

All of which brings us to Manchester’s 20 Stories, whose major selling point is its huge outdoor terrace and bar (with appropriate shelters for when the city’s weather lives up to its reputation). At 300ft, it’s a glamorous, stunning spot to take in the ever-changing skyline and cityscape (see main image). You can understand its appeal as a special place for a drink and a people watch. The wine list is arguably the best in town, but food quality has been variable with a constant change of head chefs since its inception in 2018. 

I dined there recently, road-testing their new five-course tasting menu, available Monday to Thursday, 5.30pm-8.pm. It started well with a vegan opener of broccoli steak with horseradish and lemon, but after that it didn’t live up to its £65 a head price. A better bet is to pick from the more casual Terrace Menu, perhaps mixing and matching tomato, basil and parmesan arancini, truffle fries and BBQ flat iron steak tacos with a tipple or two from their Aperol Cocktail Menu.

Black Friar, Salford – keeping it down to earth

Casual and al fresco is a good way to go in this sweltering summer and the maturing  ground-level garden of the re-born Black Friar is a choice spot, even if there is no view to speak of. Well, who would want to ogle the traffic hurtling down Trinity Way? By chance, it has chef connections with 20 Stories. Aiden Byrne, launch chef there, was scheduled to do the same for the Black Friar but pulled out around Pandemic time; his replacement Ben Chaplin came from… you guessed it. 

His 20 Stories fine dining pedigree was obvious when I first sat down to eat in the newly planted garden with its big fence two summers ago. A couple of dishes were over-elaborate for what was aimed as a gastropub. The menu has since settled down  from trying to balance all this with ‘pub classics’, maintaining high quality ingredients while  taking fewer risks.

It is good they are still making the most of their urban greenery, though when we went recently to sample their summer ‘Garden Menu’ gusty showers weren’t doing it any favours.This particular menu is served straight from the outdoor bars, so we benefited from its canopy and ski heaters. And a couple of goblets of holy Gavi to heal the soul. There’s a choice of three amply topped flatbreads, including an artichoke version for vegans, who can also dive into a Falafel Friar Bowl. Alongside the charcuterie and cheese platters sat our big extra temptation, definitely not plant-based: Honey-glazed Ham Hock with Welsh rarebit and pickled onions. The Black Friar is very generous with its pickles and, alas with a mountain of coleslaw that accompanied the hock. As a £17 sharing plate this was a meal in itself. We took the half-stripped bone home with us. Combined with yellow split peas and stock, it formed an un-seasonally  ballasting soup that lasted us all next day. As blazing sunshine reappeared.

Queen Bee with a red dot, signature vol au vents – it must be Climat

The other end of Blackftriars Street and Chris Laidler is showing off his stings on the rooftop terrace of Climat, now home to four hives and 40,000 bees, including a Queen, marked with a red dot. The wine-led restaurant’s founder and his exec chef Luke Richardson also brought back from Hampshire a further 50,000 bees that are now ensconced at their respective homes in Wrexham and Chester – all contributing honey to Climat and sister restaurant Covino in Chester, a place I also really love.

Chris tells me they expect the total of 90,000 bees will swell to 500,000 over the summer before reducing in size to weather the winter months. He’s resigned to the occupational hazards of bee-keeping – despite wearing the full gear to handle them. He’s more worried that there’ll be enough opportunities for his charges to pollinate in Manchester city centre, even though it’s leafier than you think.

And there is competition. Chris points across the road to the roof of the car park behind the brutalist former Ramada Renaissance, slowly being transformed into the Treehouse Hotel. Here Manchester Cathedral have installed a total of 10 hives in addition to the six already on the cathedral’s roof producing ‘Heavenly Honey’.

It’s amazing what your eye takes in from a great height. On the eighth floor of Blackfriars House, Climat actually benefits from not being up in the stratosphere. I prefer the more intimate nosiness of being level or slightly above rival rooftops, so you don’t miss intricate features. Seen from the outside terrace (well away from the swarms) or through floor-to -ceiling plate glass. Perhaps with a 500cl carafe of Bourgogne Aligoté at your elbow – ‘is that honey on the nose?’ – and a signature vol au vent while awaiting a small plates parade of what Luke dubs his ‘Parisian expat food’.

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Food hall overload? I’m more for supporting great new indie restaurants

Spoiler alert. Ancoats is so last year. Not demonstrably, so but Manchester’s coolest ‘hood is yielding fewer food and drink surprises. The action has moved elsewhere. In contrasting directions. A new wave of indie chefs is bravely fermenting away in other corners of the city centre and further afield. The emphasis is understandably casual. Their rivals for attention, a flurry of gigantic food hall projects, arguably takes casual to a frenetically ridiculous level. 

Certainly the ‘golden goose’ seems to be laying its commercial eggs everywhere. That metaphor came to me in response to a puff for the latest project rolling out its CGIs for our delectation – Kargo at Salford Quays. “Blend Family is adept at building new, unique food hall experiences, intricately engineered to become community hubs. With a mix of design and culinary excellence, Blend Family, in partnership with Quayside MediaCity, will showcase the best in up-and-coming food and drink talent, hand chosen and incubated to bring the best in world food under one roof.”

That’s not to diss the street food credentials of Blend, who operate the Cutlery Works in Sheffield (here’s my report) and also GPO in Liverpool, which prompted Guardian reviewer Grace Dent to opine: “I need to ask a very honest question here: are food halls ever a truly satisfying dining experience? I’ve no doubt they seem so on paper and in the marketing meetings, they’re fantastic for filling old, unloved but historically important spaces and they’re good news for downward-spiralling city centres. Yet in reality they’re noisy, unrelaxing and the food is often patchy, with the occasional gem hidden among the colossal choice of menus.”

Spot on, but such criticism is not stifling the food hall stampede. Manchester and its hinterland already boast Exhibition, Society, New Century Hall, Exhibition, Escape to Freight Island (shut for months but due to reopen amid much-publicised unrest from laid-off staff), Stretford, Sale (about to shut permanently) GRUB, Hatch, Hello Oriental, Stockport’s The Produce Hall, the pioneering Altrincham Market plus its siblings Macclesfield’s Picturedrome and Mackie Mayor, this month named the UK’s best by a global travel site.

Mackie Mayor
And its predecessor Alty Market

Now, alongside Kargo (echoes of orthographically challenged foodie neighbourhood Kampus) in the new Quays revamp, Central Bay, we can also expect two further massive projects, this time on post-industrial sites.

Located in the city’s largest factory and metalworks north of Piccadilly Station, the 5,000 capacity Diecast will open in phases from summer 2023 onwards, and will be home to Manchester’s biggest beer garden, brewery, open air BBQ kitchens and a ‘NeoPan’ pizzeria. There are also plans for it to be a huge ‘creative resourc’e. It’s from the team that have done such a good job with Firehouse & Ramona in the NQ, this time aiming to create “one of the most exciting destinations on the planet.”

Further big dreams, from an interloper, Allied London’s shipping container food and drink operator Boxpark. They are calling their new 30,000 sq ft complex on Water Street overlooking the River Irwell Shipyard. Its neighbours will be the Factory International arts venue and Soho House (neither on my bucket list). 

No comment on this revelation of its dynamic: “Early plans show that graffiti, huge graphics and industrial features will be part of the aesthetic for the exterior, giving it a Williamsburg Brooklyn kind of feel.” Expect the food hall to offer “a mix of artisan vendors and rolling smaller stalls.”

These are the high profile beasts but they are not alone on the horizon. In the slightly stalled First Street new frontier plans have been submitted for a 400 cover ground floor food hall open to the public in a student accommodation block called The House of Social. World cuisine is the selling point of a fifth food hall in the pipeline on Bury New Road, Broughton. Plans have been approved for a former car repair centre to be transformed into TBNR Foodhall, a 200 cover canteen dining experience with upstairs shisha bar. 

Spring awakening for a new wave of restaurants

You’ve probably gathered by now this kind of large communal dining experience is well down my list; the street food scene seems to have been hi-jacked by commercial expediency. Harsh? Maybe the lockdown years, which have made so many folk all the more eager to mingle, have made me keener for a more intense encounter with quality food and drink.

It is interesting that two of my Manchester food heroes have jumped ship from their food hall tenancies. Caroline ‘Sao Paulo Project’ Martins no longer has an outlet in Exhibition and is back at her original pop-up venue, Blossom Street Social with ‘Sampa’; Michael Clay, chef/patron at its stalwart Ancoats neighbour Elnecot, launched his Anglo-Saxon pizza project, Dokes in Society but has now shifted it to a permanent site in Prestwich.

Elsewhere it’s good to see the sites of The Creameries. Chorlton and Cocktail, Ramen Beer + Bun in the Northern Quarter finding new foodie occupants.

Late in 2022 I confess I expected far more closures. Instead a fresh wave of talent has come on board, reinforcing the city’s culinary upturn first initiated by Ancoats warriors Mana, Erst, Jane Eyre, Rudy’s, Edinburgh Castle, Street Urchin and in the city proper 10 Tib Lane and Another Hand. My new faves (including outliers in Marple Bridge, Liverpool and Haslingden) are: 

Beef vol-au-vent (Climat)
Pig’s head terrine (Higher Ground)

Higher Ground

A new Manchester superstar is born. I am an unapologetic champIon of chef Joseph Otway and the rest of the stellar team, who have finally laid down restaurant roots in their adopted city after pop-ups, a pandemic where they created their own Cinderwood/ market garden, and created Flawd natural wine bar at Islington Marina (still going strong). Read about their commitment to sustainable animal husbandry here. This nose to tail ethos results in my beloved pig’s head terrine.

Climat

I had much fun celebrating the signature snack of this rooftop wine-led restaurant – the vol-au-vent but the small plate menu from exec chef Luke Richardson and head chef Simon Ulph offers more sophisticated delights, as does a wine list majoring on Burgundy. Big plus the cityscape views from the eighth floor of Blackfriars House.

Lamb tartare (The Alan)
Steak main (Our Place)

The Alan

Check out my recent review celebrating the impact new exec chef James Hulme has had on the menu in one of Manchester’s coolest looking dining spaces.

Our Place

Iain Thomas was the chef who launched The Alan restaurant in 2022 to great acclaim. Now he and the hotel’s former marketing head David O’Connor have set up this itinerant sustainably focused supper club, initially at The People’s History Museum. Read my interview with Iain about his food philosophy.

Steak tartare (Stock Market Grill)
Nigiri akami (MUSU)

Stock Market Grill

Tom Kerridge was always going to be a hard act follow after he pulled his Bull & Bear project from the upmarket Stock Exchange Hotel. Cocktail kings the Schofield Brothers, who’d already established their Sterling Bar in the basement stepped into the breach and hired Eleanor Bristow from The French as front of house and highly rated Joshua Reed-Cooper (ex-Simon Rogan/Where The Light Gets In) in the kitchen. Classic grill cuisine the aim to match the affluent ambience of the former trading floor.

MUSU

If the converted Stock Exchange represents old money then this ’contemporary Japanese’ restaurant, a £3m investment, is a bold splashing of the cash. It’s undoubtedly mega plush with menu prices to match (£150 for the 11-course kanseiki menu) but the sushi/sashimi raw materials are of the highest quality and the whole food operation is steered by chef/patron Michael Shaw, who brings an impressive Michelin pedigree.

Colourful prawns (Fold)
Brill (Restaurant Metamorphica)

Fold

Bistro and bottle shop it calls itself, so there’s a fine choice of wine to accompany squid bolognese and other quirky dishes from chef Craig Sherrington’s imaginative menu that helps this Marple Bridge newcomer transcend the neighbourhood gem tag. My Fold fave the toasted corn dish (the main image of this piece).

Restaurant Metamorphica

I previewed this ambitious tasting menu operation before it opened in under the radar Haslingden; a return review visit for Manchester Confidential confirmed the star quality of one-man-band chef Steven Halligan.

NORD looks gorgeous
Its crab toast tastes gorgeous

NORD

I made a rare visit to Liverpool for the recent launch of this new-build restaurant/bar, where chef Daniel Heffy puts to good use his top-end Michelin experience at Frantzen in Stockholm. The name also signals his commitment to the UK’s own northern provenance. Everything came together beautifully in a dish of Cornish white crab, soured cream, pickle silverskin onions and fennel on buttered toast. Like Higher Ground and Climat in Manchester it benefits from the support of developer landlords Bruntwood.

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Happy 25th to Paul Heathcote’s landmark Rhubarb & Black Pudding

The last time I ran into Matthew Fort he was with fellow food critic Tom Parker Bowles at Booths Salford Quays flogging an upmarket brand of pork scratchings they were both associated with. They later jumped ship when the actual producers abandoned a core selling point – the use of English pigs. 

Not the high point of Fort’s championing of British food. That would have to be the publication 25 years ago of Rhubarb and Black Pudding (for evocative northern cookbook titles it vies with Crispy Squirrel and Vimto Trifle, in which I admit a vested interest). I hugely enjoyed his foodie romps around Italy on a Vespa, but his account of a year in the Lancashire kitchen of chef Paul Heathcote was equally evocative… and benchmark influential at the time. A real fly on the wall record of an exceptional restaurant’s workings and relationship with suppliers in the unlikeliest of regional settings.

In the preface Fort wrote of the Eureka moment of his first visit to the Longridge Restaurant – to review for The Guardian. “I was immediately transfixed by the style and quality of the food. I was served poached salmon with a courgette flower stuffed with courgette mousse, smoked chicken and broccoli soup, slow-roasted shoulder of lamb braised with an aubergine mousse, and chocolate parfait with honey and oatmeal ice cream (all for £12.75!). Although the influence of French cooking and finesse were uppermost, nevertheless there was English sensibility running through the flavours, the textures, the combination of ingredients.”

The influence of one of Paul’s mentors is obvious. On occasions he had crossed swords with Raymond Blanc while working for him at the Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons but also found inspiration for when he set up his own restaurant. Aged just 29 and with a £200,000 loan he opened in 1990 and within four years had won his own two Michelin stars.

I treasure my copy of Rhubarb & Black Pudding as much as the memories of meals Paul cooked for me over the years. But as 2023 stumbled into life it took an image re-Tweeted by my friend, the food historian Dr Neil Buttery, to tangentially remind me of its distant impact. Ah, rhubarb. There, glowing enticingly crimson in a custom-built ‘forcing’ shed in Pudsey, West Yorkshire, was the first of the new season crop, due to be harvested by candle light in a week’s time.

The social media charting of the coveted stalks’ development is a recent phenomenon, but Twitter poster Robert is the fourth generation Tomlinson to grow forced rhubarb by this traditional method. The plants first spend two years outdoors to harden against frost, then are brought in to a dark, heated habitat, to grow quickly, while straining for light. Once ready, the spears are picked by candlelight because too much light causes photosynthesis, which can halt the growth of the crowns. This process produces a sweeter fruit with a white core – a kind of Rhubarb ‘premier cru’.

It’s estimated only 12 such producers remain across the ‘Rhubarb Triangle’ between Wakefield, Morley and Rothwell. Originally the trade benefited from a surplus of cheap heating coal from the local pits.

Paul Heathcote’s rhubarb source has aways been from nearer his Lancashire base in Longridge – via long-time veg and fruit supplier Eddie Homes, who set up a supply chain of raw materials of the quality he required.

“Rhubarb and asparagus were just two items we persuaded local allotment holders to grow for us,” Paul tells me as I catch up with him at Preston North End, another connection that goes back a long way. His Heathcote & Co team have been responsible for match day dining and events since launching in 1997 (with a six year hiatus). His flagship restaurant, eponymous Brasseries and Olive Presses are now all in the past, the Longridge site forlornly on the market, but his corporate catering business maintains the iconic Heathcote brand. 

No looking back for Paul? “Until you told me I hadn’t given it a thought it was a quarter of a century since the book came out. It certainly took longer to do so than we envisaged! It was expected to come out in 1996 or 1997 after first being mooted in 1994. 

“I remember vividly Matthew turning up at what was our makeshift front door – we were having a new kitchen fitted on the other side. He’d got off the train at Preston and, satchel on his back, walked the 14 miles as the crow flies, a lot of it along an old railway track. It was a warm day and he looked knackered.”

Matthew Fort’s personal Lancashire journey had begun long before. The family home for generations was Read Hall, near Padiham, his father (who died when Fort was 12) the MP for Clitheroe. After Eton, the food critic to be studied at Lancaster University, further sowing the seeds of his knowledge of the county’s topography and cuisine. 

The acquaintance was resumed during his exhaustive research for Rhubarb and Black Pudding. Paul agrees with me: “Yes, there was a lot of Matthew in the book, but there have been few better evocations of how a restaurant works. Certainly not a place as off the beaten track as ours.”

A quarter of a century on what still shine vividly are the portraits of the suppliers who Paul cultivated primarily to have the freshest raw materials to hand. “It was not deliberate policy on my part to promote the area’s produce as such. It never occurred to me to put images of my suppliers on the walls. Good products come to you or in some cases you create them. There was so much enthusiasm but it could be a slog at times. In Fleetwood Chris Neve (still an active supplier of fine fish) got it straight away. Reg Johnson down the road recognised what I wanted but it took a bit longer to produce the quality of corn-fed poultry I required. It was frustrating at times, there were failures along the way if I’m honest.”

Still poultry farmers Johnson and Swarbrick never looked back as top-end restaurants across the land coveted their speciality chickens and ducks. And Mrs Kirkham’s Lancashire cheese from down the road gained much needed national recognition. 

Black pudding, too, got a serious profile upgrade thanks to Paul. And it was all down to his old friend and Ribble Valley gastro rival, Nigel Haworth, once of Northcote, now back at the Three Fishes, Mitton (where he once dispayed images of his suppliers).

“We were in a team of chefs, who travelled over to Champagne and had to cook for our French equivalents and Nigel challenged me to create something different. So I decided upon my own refined version of black pudding and it was a success – the dish I’m most proud of.

“I used to make black pudding from scratch, using fresh blood in those days, but after BSE came along we had to change to powdered. The texture of the original was different – much creamier.”

It all seems far off now. The last black pudding of PauI’s I tasted was in a main at The Northern, a restaurant Heathcote & Co launched briefly pre-Pandemic inside the town hall complex of his native Bolton. It tasted good but no fine dining aspirations with its mustard grain sauce, mushy peas and triple-cooked chips. Alas, no rhubarb on the menu. Maybe it was the wrong season. Maybe you can be too elegiac.

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Featherblade – the official steak secret of Kala success

I love the shaded downstairs bar at Kala in Manchester. It’s a place of assignation. You just slip in off King Street and slide onto a tall stool. Open a copy of The Times at the obituaries section to signal you are here to the swarthy man in the Crombie three seats away. There is information to be shared in covert fashion. The fate of nations may hang in the balance over a glass of Sicilian Catarratto. Even that name is suggestive of subterfuge.

OK, it’s called fantasising. As I await the October publication of a posthumous John le Carré novel I have daydreamed back into the treacherous world of George Smiley and his Russian nemesis, Karla. Just lose the R. The swarthy contact is an old PR pal I’m meeting for lunch and urgent post-lockdown gossip. He may know where the bodies are buried but he’s not telling. 

There’s a table awaiting us upstairs at this Manchester link in Gary Usher’s Elite Bistros chain. You can’t avoid mentioning the patron; it’s like failing to affix ‘Putin’s’ to ‘Russia’. Inimitably he’s been back on social media recently, defending one corner of his empire against some bolshie customer while in June he re-emphasised his crowdfunding genius by raising over £150,000 in 24 hours to create a catering arm for his company.

As you can gather I’m a fan of Usher and his bistros and I’m glad they’ve held it all together during the pandemic. I’ve dined at four out of the six and never had a remotely unsatisfying experience.

This last time is no different. The set menus are pricier than of yore – three courses for £40, two for £35 – but worth it. There’ s a canny continuity about the Elite food offering in the hands of exec chef Richard Sharples. The unsurpassable wobbly custard tart is nowhere to be seen, alas, but the stalwart featherblade of beef glows out of the menu sheet and has to be my main. The swarthy one take a punt on the plaice.

First, though, the starters. Mine is an uncompromising looking dish of squid rings two ways, au naturel (encasing charred aubergine, lemon and confit garlic) and blackened on a red pepper sauce. Perfectly Med. My ‘sinister companion’ finds equal joy in the creamiest puddle of burrata hosting cubes of pickled kohlrabi with a blackened spring onion and fennel seed dressing.

The surprisingly fleshy plaice is grilled whole, then dressed with salted lemon butter. Watercress and straw potatoes are ideal simple accompaniments and there’s also ‘leek ash’, which is superfluous.

Which brings us finally to the signature bistro dish that is as magnificent as ever – the featherblade, here partnered with ruby beetroot ketchup and parmesan truffle chips. Oh and a summery bottle of Jean-Marc Burgaud Beaujolais.

So what is the secret of the Kala featherblade?

We went undercover to find out. Actually we Googled it. First you need the right cut from a grass-fed beast – a long flat muscle tucked in behind the shoulder blade, also known as flat iron. A line of connective tissue runs through the featherblade’s centre; cooked down this creates a gelatinous texture that generates great gravy and consistent texture. The blade is best slow-cooked whole.

The Elite Bistro chefs braise it for up to eight hours in chicken stock and red wine, along with a mirepoix of onion, carrot, celery, leek, garlic, thyme, and rosemary. To create a sauce they stick the mirepoix in a huge pan with a load of chicken bones and simmer overnight. Next day the liquid is strained, then reduced with red wine until it’s a rich, glossy sauce. 

It’s not finished there. Usher revealed the final secret touch in an interview: “We take the blade and put it in a pan of this sauce. Then literally someone stands there spooning the sauce over the meat, again and again, for 20 minutes. What happens is, as the sauce reduces, it’s getting thicker and stickier. Every time you put it on, it’s creating a layer. That’s where the sticky, naughty dirtiness of it comes from.”

Truly evil, just like Karla.

Kala, 55 King Street, Manchester, M2 4LQ. 0161 839 3030. Reservations 0800 160 1811.

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Anchovy is of the essence – Garum, Colatura d’alici and Nam Pla

I noticed recently Mana was advertising for a ‘Chef of Fermentation’. That’s quite a specific job title in a hospitality marketplace that’s struggling to find sous chefs and KPs. But when you’re on a mission to net that second Michelin star it’s best to stay true to your culinary direction and gut feelings (sic). 

Garum will certainly be on the kitchen to-do list for the new recruit. It entered the conversation early on in my first visit to the Ancoats Manchester game-changer. I’d already been impressed by dishes such as smoked yakitori eel, glazed with roasted yeast and blueberry vinegar, and Dungeness crab baked in hay celeriac and masa.

Underneath that shell the oyster dish that leant on chicken garum

Chef patron Simon Martin had talked us through both. Next up was a raw oyster tucked taco style into a cabbage leaf with fudge miso, chicken fat, English wasabi, pine salt and chicken garum. In mid-explanation he was surprised by my knowledge of garum’s back story – the fermented fish sauce used as a condiment in the cuisines of Ancient Greece and Rome, not a million miles away from Thai fish sauce Nom Pla..

Simon had adapted garum to incorporate chicken. At his culinary alma mater, Rene Redzepi’s Noma in Copenhagen, they offer a whole palette of garums. Look at this beauty: rose and shrimp garum with a suitably rose-tinted description of what is essentially a whack of umami-rich funk. 

Rose shrimp garum symbolises Noma’s innovative take on ancient traditions

“We take shrimps, water and salt, with fresh roses and blend it. It is naturally fermented by the enzymes inside the shrimps. During the foraging season last year, the fresh roses were added and they have been fermenting together ever since. The garum is quite intense by itself but the roses bring balance to it with its floral notes and sweetness.”

There’s a whole chapter on garum in The Norma Guide To Fermentation (Artisan, £30) by Redzepi and David Zibler, the man he entrusted to run the restaurant’s Fermentation Lab. Another member of the team convinced them to diverge from fish as the base. Hence, chicken, bee pollen and grasshoppers. All made is temperature controlled cylinders, leaving nothing to chance in this stinkiest of production processes.

That would probably be heresy to John Niland, chef owner of St Peter in Sydney, Australia. His ethos, laid out in his cookbook/manifesto, The Whole Fish, is to use all of the creature. Like Nose to Tail meat cooking, the object is not to waste the 60 per cent or so of  a round fish that is routinely discarded in a western restaurant. Again one of the team (so democratic this new wave in the kitchen) came up with a sustainable garum.

“To produce the garum, start by adding 50 per cent of water to the total amount of heads, bones and scraps you have from small fish, such as sardine, mackerel, anchovies or trevally, then to this total quantity add 20 per cent of fine salt. Mix together, transfer to a mason (kilner) jar, seal and place in a circulator bath set to 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit). Leave for seven days in the dark, stirring once daily. Make sure that the gall bladder is removed as it will make the finished sauce extremely bitter. This recipe is versatile and can be adapted to produce scallop, prawn (shrimp) or cuttlefish garums.”

In Niland’s follow-up book, Take One Fish: The new school of scale-to-tail eating (Hardie Grant, £26, to be published August 5) he goes one challenging step further with a recipe for custard tart, made with a sardine garum caramel made using the head, bones and scraps of sardines.

Imperial Rome was an enthusiastic consumer of garum (or liquamen)

Leaving aside today’s state of the art equipment, it is a method the Ancients would have recognised. Garum was a fermented fish sauce used as a condiment in the cuisines of ancient Greece, Rome, and Byzantium. Liquamen was a similar preparation, and at times the two were synonymous. It enjoyed its greatest popularity in the Roman world.

Pliny the Elder derives the Latin word garum from the Greek γαρός (garos), maybe a type of fish, and states that it was crafted e from fish intestines, with salt, creating a liquor, the garum, and a sediment named (h)allec or allex. A concentrated garum evaporated down to a thick paste with salt crystals was called muria – packed with protein, amino acids, minerals and B vitamins, so not far off today’s soy sauce.

After the liquid was ladled off of the top of the mixture, the remains of the fish, called allec, was used by the poorest classes to flavour their farinata or porridge. 

The finished product—the nobile garum of Martial’s epigram—was apparently mild and subtle in flavor. The best garum fetched extraordinarily high prices, and salt could be substituted for a simpler dish. Garum appears in many recipes featured in the Roman cookbook Apicius. For example, Apicius (8.6.2–3) gives a recipe for lamb stew, calling for the meat to be cooked with onion and coriander, pepper, lovage, cumin, liquamen, oil, and wine, then thickened with flour.

The traditional way of creating Colatura d’alici from salt and anchovies

And so to Colatura d’alici. I hastened to purchase a vial of this intense stuff (it translates fetchingly as anchovy drippings) after one of my favourite chefs, Jeremy Lee of Soho’s legendary Quo Vadis recommended it in Observer Food Monthly.

He  wrote: “Alici is the essence of anchovy and it’s a very precious condiment. It comes in a very small bottle, like a bottle of perfume. It’s not cheap, but it’s relatively easy to get, and a little goes a long way. It’s never gone off – well, not that it lasts long enough to find out. I get it from Andy Harris at the Vinegar Shed (£26.50) and use it sparingly. It’s an elegant variation on using Worcestershire sauce in something, but it’s not so overwhelming. There’s a softness to it that’s amazing, it adds a roundness. You just need a few drops.

“It’s extraordinary in braised lamb and hogget dishes – lamb and anchovy is such a fabulous combination. Pork too. I add the alici to porchetta tonnato as a final flourish, much as you would add a squeeze of lemon juice. I find the combination of alici and lemon juice incredible in all sorts of dishes. It’s an extraordinary ingredient and one I cherish.”

Colatura d’alici works well as a simple dressing for spaghetti

Like traditionally made Southeast Asian-style fish sauce, but with a much longer ageing process, colatura is concocted with just anchovies and sea salt. For colatura anchovy fillets and salt are layered in wooden barrels (chestnut is good) and then set them aside in a temperature-controlled environment to ferment for up to three years. The liquid exuded ages into colatura, which is surprisingly unfishy. Still a health warning – this is mega pungent. But worth it.

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Habas – A Yorkshireman goes East (and we don’t mean Hull)

Unless I’ve missed it previously, Zhug is making a Manchester debut on the menu of Simon Shaw’s eagerly anticipated third restaurant in the city, Habas, which opened in early June in the former Panama Hatty’s site on Brown Street.

Brought by Jews from the Yemen a century ago, Zhug is the Israeli national chilli paste, mixing parsley, coriander, and assorted spices. I first discovered this fiery condiment on the counter of Soho’s vibrant Palomar restaurant and in the pages of Ottolenghi’s Jerusalem. I slather it over shawarma; at Habas it accompanies homemade garlic and herb flatbread with hummus.

Potato skins filled with sliced lamb

Other dishes feel very Ottolenghi, the Guardian Weekend readers’ passport to Levantine dinner party heaven. So familiar that maybe it lessens the excitement of Habas. Still what’s not to like about small plates such as Middle Eastern raw slaw with pomegranate molasses; batata harra – spicy fried potatoes with dill sour cream; beetroot hummus with Greek yoghurt and dill (main image); feta cheese, wilted spinach and sunblush tomato filo cigars; spiced lamb ‘jackets’ – fried potato skins filled with spiced lamb, served with mint yoghurt. 

But is it a culinary game changer? One Manchester Confidential reviewer, of Persian heritage, accused it of ‘culinary appropriation’. Fair comment? There may be a certain residual bias against a classically trained Yorkshire chef’s temerity in tackling cuisines not ‘his own’. Certainly Habas is a lurch east from his twist on Shaw’s ‘Iberian-influenced’ food at El Gato Negro (Spanish) and Canto (Portuguese).

Simon Shaw feel the MIddle Eastern project is a natural progression

Shaw is very much aware he is surfing a certain ‘Zhug Zeitgeist’, telling me, a friend and supporter from El Gato’ first stirrings in the Pennine village of Ripponden: “It’s phenomenal just how much people’s appetites have evolved over recent years. 

“Back in the late Nineties you’d have struggled to have found Middle Eastern restaurants outside London. Even there, they existed largely to feed the local community, people from those countries living in the city.

“Times have changed and there’s a whole new wave coming through. It’s an amazing style of food, simplistic but with a real depth of flavour. It’s what excited me about it as a chef and I think it will have really broad appeal.”

Habas cuisine is a picture on a plate

Like El Gato Negro and Canto, the menu centres around a generous number of small plates, coupled with larger dishes and feasting platters. 

“Middle Eastern cuisine has many influences and Habas is a fusion of all,” says Shaw. 

“It’s about ingredients. There are lots of connections to Spanish food, the Syrian lentils, lamb meatballs and spiced aubergine dishes enjoyed at El Gato Negro all lean towards the style of cuisine. I suppose part of my mind was already on it.”

Habas means fava (broad) bean) in Spanish and also is the name of a settlement in the Yemen, where zhug is the relish of choice, no doubt.

Batata harra – spicy fried potatoes with dill and cream

Habas, 43a Brown Street, Manchester M2 2JJ. 0161 470 9375. Opening hours Thursday-Sunday 12pm to late (food service until 10pm, after which we’d recommend continuing with suitably-themed cocktails). Expect opening hours to be extended when the industry’s current staffing issues are resolved.

The bar is the place to try Habas’s cocktails, prepared with a Middle Eastern twist
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