WHAT'S the hardest thing to find in professional cooking? Easy. A good Sunday roast.
The 40 day aged meat was easy to the knife, rich on the palate, and gorgeous bunched on the fork with some of the veg or a gravy sodden Yorkie portion.
The joint greatest British culinary creation, with the breakfast, is such a creature of timing that it can end up flabby and distraught when stretched to meet the needs of catering for numbers of people arriving over, say, a four hour period.
It's as though the roast was designed to bind families together as it fits like an oven-glove, a small group sitting down at the same time. There is nothing as disappointing as a dried Yorkshire pudding hardening slowly into the fossilised remains of dinosaur dung, the classic symptom of a roast cooked sometime earlier.
The roast at new restaurant 3 Twenty One was one of the best I've had away from the home front. Dryness was banished, moist, lively food was the order of the day. Mostly anyway.
Beef from heaven
I'd been hoping this was the case as the chef Jason Latham had talked confidently and cleverly about what the kitchen was aiming for the other week for the Food and Drink Round-up - click here. Normally Confidential would wait longer than a week to review a new place to enable teething problems to settle down, but Latham seemed ready to hit the ground running.
He has.
This was confident food right from the kick-off, the elements of the roast lit beautifully on the high altar of the pass like a diety to be worshipped as we passed by - main picture at the top of the page.
The service on a bubbling along Sunday was very good as well. A smile and a welcome as we arrived, and competent, attentive staff throughout.
Even the Sunday menu card has clarity and in its Times New Roman typeface (I think) is beguiling. Bloody good deal for the quality we were about to experience as well. £12.50 for two courses, £14.95 for three.
3 Twenty One Sunday menu
We had the beef, the half chicken, the pork roasts. All were huge plates of food with Yorkshire puddings, roast potatoes, beans, peas, spinach, carrot and swede and gravy. Wow. The range of veg was really welcome.
The beef was slightly the pick over the chicken. The 40 day aged meat was easy to the knife, rich on the palate, and gorgeous bunched on the fork with some of the veg or a gravy sodden Yorkie portion. The chicken was equally well cooked and clearly came from a quality bird, while the pork wasn't far behind. With a Sunday roast, I always feel beef trumps the other meats.
The roast potatoes were a let down, not because of the quality of the cooking but because of the nature of the spud. I'm aware farmers have had a nightmare twelve months because of the unending deluge across Britain, but Latham needs to re-source the spuds used here as they had a dryish, unappealing character. They dragged the dishes down half a point in the scoring.
Strangely though the chips that came with the twelve-year-old's burger were very good, as was the burger itself. Maybe a homemade ketchup would be better for kids with the burger rather than a collation of exotic piccalillis and coleslaw (although the latter was excellent). Good value children's meal this at £4.95.
Kids burger
A starter of duck and chicken liver pate was very coarse, very aggressively liver, but rewarding with the brioche and the chutney. It showed how Latham's mantra of preparing everything in the kitchen rather than buying in ready-made alternatives is being adhered to. A little more refinement would be welcome with the pate.
Pate and brioche
The same applied with the bluebeery cheescake and the apple and toffee crumble. Both were sturdy homemade creations, strong on flavour if lacking a little sweetness for some tastes.
What Latham needs to do with both the main roast dishes, and urgently with the desserts, is provide us with self-application materials. We need our own gravy boat with the mains and a jug of single cream for the puddings. The crumble with a cream in this case, not a custard, would be lifted a whole point in flavour.
3 Twenty One is on the first floor over The Deansgate pub which sits under the shadow of Beetham Tower. The first floor location allows the venue to make use of the light flooding in from the windows and also of a cute roof terrace. If you sit at the right table there's a grand view down the lively, once-upon-a-time Roman road of Deansgate.
The dining room with one of those comfortable seats
The dining room is smart, very classic British. The youngest among us suggested the firm leather-effect chairs were the most comfortable we'd enjoyed in a restaurant. Maybe. Certainly the use of wood, the tones on the walls all make for a very pleasant place in which to eat. Shame about the Manchester scenes in black and white on some walls which are essays in poor photography, there are many better prints out there. Change them 3 Twenty One.
Overall this restaurant appears already to be an excellent addition to city dining. It has all the solid virtues of the best mid-range British restaurants, good ingredients cooked carefully and timed well, a splash of innovation, strong presentation.
For once it seems - potatoes aside - a Sunday roast in a restaurant gets it right.
I look forward to having a go at the full a la carte in the weeks to come.
You can follow Jonathan Schofield on Twitter here @JonathSchofield or connect via Google+
ALL SCORED CONFIDENTIAL REVIEWS ARE IMPARTIAL AND PAID FOR BY THE MAGAZINE.
3 Twenty One, The Deansgate Pub, 321 Deansgate, City, M3 4LQ. 0871 978 8035
Rating: 14.5/20
Food: 7.5/10 (chicken roast 8, pork 7.5, beef 8, burger 7, pate 6.5, cheescake 7.5, crumble 7)
Service: 3.5
Ambience: 3.5
Cheesecake
Ugly black and white prints
The Deansgate pub downstairs
Flowers and Beetham on the roof terrace
View down Deansgate
Crumble
