THURSDAY is the new Friday, or so it seemed last night with the launch of four new bars and restaurants in the city centre.
The night began on Princess Street in the city's new New York-style loft dining space, Urban Cookhouse.
A packed house quaffed cod cheek canapes alongside whiskey & bacon cocktails (bacon... bacon?) over at the open-plan, ultra-modern former-shipping warehouse on the edge of the Gay Village; and though the new venue from young Salford entrepreneur, Tim Coulston, teeters on the edge of the bedlam of Canal Street, Urban Cookhouse oozes a more serene style that gives the whole place a certain Spinningfields element.
Urban Cookhouse opens to the public on Friday 27 March.
Next up on the night came Northern Quarter's latest basement drinking den, The Blue Brick Club, on Oldham Street.
The new late-night cocktail bar in the girthy undercroft of one of NQ's original bars, Dry Bar (first opened by the band New Order over 25 years ago - doesn't get much cooler than that), has had a real going over. Once, as one Confidential employee recalled, 'a damp, sweaty, smelly, flea pit', the new subterranean establishment is now looking very handsome indeed with dive bar-brand neon lights, orange girders, intimate corners and polished concrete (easy to wipe clean, you see).
Blue Brick's live DJs kept the mojo workin' later into the night, while a round or two of their signature pear caprioskas - as sharp as a whip - picked Confidential up right'n'true. Onwards...
Blue Brick Club open at 28 Oldham Street now...
Northern Quarter's long-awaited PLY pizza bar and restaurant held another launch party last night.
The new 5,500 sq ft Stevenson Square space from the team behind NQ's award-winning Kosmonaut outfit welcomed punters into their whopping new light, airy and plywood-heavy venue. The new space is a mindful step away from many of the city's new identikit bars, looking like, as one Confidential writer put it, 'the converted warehouse apartment of a Stockholm architect called Sven.'
Pizza, cocktails and sitting down were the order of the evening at PLY (good job too), with streams of Neapolitan sourdough pizza - pulled from what has to be the biggest, campest pizza oven even constructed - shored up by more free-flowing cocktails and a slightly more civilized atmosphere. Still, there was one more launch to be had...
PLY opens Friday 27 March...
Finally came a veteran of the Manchester bar and club scene, Panacea.
The luxe John Dalton Street club - a favourite of celebs, footballers, and those looking to snag one - has relaunched following an extensive near-£1m refurbishment. Confidential is told it's 'the second coming', the 'dawn of a new era', we're not so sure about all the hyperbole, but the decade old establishment has certainly lost none of its pulling power. The new rich, deep, dark, red interior was rammed with the sharp-suited and shiny-shoed, quaffing, as expected of a true Panacea patron, more bubbles than a white party on Puff Daddy's yacht.
We were spent. A big welcome to all the city's new ventures, but it was bedtime for us...
The all-new Panacea at 14 John Dalton Street is open now...
