‘A moveable feast’: Cardinal Rule, Tariff Street, reviewed

Squeezing in dinner around a few Friday drinks can be a chore. After finishing work at 5pm the last thing on your mind is probably a big bowl of pasta, but skip it altogether and you risk waking up the next day in a landfill with no phone and someone else’s socks on. 

So for that reason bars that have a kitchen informally nestled inside have been a welcome addition to the food and drink universe. Often they pop up for a few months then pop back down, another kitchen takes its place, and if you visit the bar regularly enough you bear witness to a sort of Mr Benn style dressing up box of different global cuisines.   

On Friday night, onetime Confidentials colleague Jake and I found ourselves, via Tariff Street’s Northern Monk Refectory, in Virginia.

Cardinal Rule is a more than slightly opaque name for somewhere serving food, but hey, at least there’s more than one word in it and the vowels are still intact. It refers to the one rule that shouldn’t be broken, and the crimson-plumed cardinal is the state bird of Virginia, where owners Gab and Dustin hail from. 

Anyway, they sell fried chicken sandwiches but crucially the bookends are biscuits. Not garibaldis or custard creams, but American savoury biscuits that are sort of scone-adjacent but, as their Instagram explains “not a f#*king scone”. Nothing gens up interest like a contested transatlantic disagreement around language.

Northern Monk Refectory is in many ways the ideal setting for Cardinal Rule. It’s not a van on a street corner or a hatch by the back bins of a pub, but a handsome, airy and inviting space where the vibe remains much the same whether there’s food circulating or not. This makes for just the right amount of formality in my book. You’re not queuing up with a tray for your food but then you’re not sat around a white table cloth either. With this less formal approach comes a more straightforward appreciation of the food on offer I would argue. Yes it’s to accompany some beers, but that shouldn’t mean it can only ever be pub grub.

The menu is slight and straightforward. There’s six ‘fried chicken biscuit sandwiches’ to choose from, each seemingly speaking to a different combination; Miss Honey you can guess, The Hot Take much the same, The Hometown has pickles aplenty and the vegan biscuit is as you’d guess. 

I however went for The Cowboy (£10), because who can resist a sandwich called that. ‘Fried buttermilk chicken breast, bacon, Texas-style barbecue sauce and cowboy candied jalapenos’, all of which sounds to me like the perfect combination. 

The thing with sandwiches is that if each of the components aren’t of a certain quality it drags the whole thing down into a mulshy mess, but this was certainly not the case here, with each ingredient doing itself proud. 

The chicken was thigh meat and therefore tender, avoiding that bounciness you can sometimes get from breast meat, and the batter was that popcorn-coloured covering; a more than ample amount of well-seasoned coating but not at the expense of the chicken itself - no teeth-snapping batter here. The bacon was that molasses black colour around the edges, which suggests to me it’d been practically stewed in something like maple syrup before getting a serious grilling. A great crispy counterpoint to the tender chicken. 

The barbeque sauce was a sweet and addictive addition to the sandwich, keeping things interesting and balancing out the saltier flavours of the bacon. All you then have to add to strike a nice balance is something pickled or spicy, or both. The candied jalapenos, which aren’t an overly spicy chilli pepper necessarily, were given an extra dimension by being candied, and rounded off the muscular notes of the sandwich well.

The sides on offer are also slight and manageable; cajun spiced fries with ketchup (£3.50), potato salad (£3.50) and the ‘cowboy caviar corn salad’ of corn, black eyed peas, green peppers and coriander (£3.50). There’s an offer to combine a main and a side for £12.50 which I find to be very reasonable. 

Jake insisted on potato salad, I’ve personally never seen the appeal. I don’t know if it’s the sheer amount of mayonnaise or the fact it’s meant to be cold, but it just doesn’t do it for me. That said, of course I tried some for our dear readers and if you’re into potato salad I’m pretty certain you’ll like this; the potatoes were properly boiled to the point where they start to fluff inside and the spring onions gave a floral, earthy note. Apparently it’s a southern American tradition so who am I to say otherwise.

All this with some spiced honey sauce on the side (£0.75) - for pouring, mopping or dipping - and you’ve got an ideal Friday night food for when you’re in need of something substantial without either breaking the bank or the momentum of your evening. 

Jake and I were on one of the benches, and so got into a chat with the table of workmates next to us (finance I think). Not all foods and dining experiences lend themselves to a natter with strangers, in fact many don’t. But above all Northern Monk Refectory is a bar and an easygoing one at that. This end of the Northern Quarter is, I would argue, not enjoying the weekend hoards like it did a decade ago, such is the pull towards Stephenson Square, Oldham Street and Ancoats. But it deserves its share, and Northern Monk having a loose and moveable patronage of local kitchens on their way up is one way to stay interesting. 

We probably sat down at Cardinal Rule about 8.15pm, late enough to have had a few but still there to be pulled back from the brink by a good fried chicken sandwich, and that it did. It’s unpretentious but still interesting, flavourful without whacking your palate with unnecessary additions for the sake of it, and let’s not forget quite novel. 

It may be that another kitchen crops up in Cardinal Rule’s place, but if it doesn’t and this charming take on a staple stays for longer than expected I wouldn’t mind one bit. 

Cardinal Rule, Northern Monk Refectory, 10 Tariff St, M1 2FF