David Adamson reports back from goingson in the city and beyond
In his editor’s diary, David Adamson gives his thoughts from his travels around the city and beyond.
When putting together my previous diary I thought about the arrival of Spring and how it felt as if I’d emerged from a bunker, blinking into the sunlight and feeling the sun on my face for what felt like the first time in six months.
It was maybe slightly premature, because now it seems things truly are in full swing. The daffodils are up, the blossom is on the breeze and Stephenson Square is lemming central once again.
Coming over the horizon are plenty of reasons to both stick around in the city (Manchester Jazz Festival, MIF25) and some perfect excuses to flee like it’s the Fall of Saigon (Rockstar Energy presents Pondlife, for instance). So ahead of some much-needed sun, here’s what I’ve been up to since coming out of hibernation.
Open house
The Firehouse Spring Supper Club
I had tickets with my two siblings to go and see American comic Tom Segura at the AO Arena, and we needed somewhere to eat beforehand that was nearby. While my brother and I are still enjoying the endless adolescence of being twentysomething (him) and thirtyodd (me), my sister is a mum (a cool mom not a regular mom), so obviously eats to a toddler’s time schedule of 5.30pm.
Add to that the fact I’m never sure when gigs actually start. Doors at 7pm is a pretty standard affair, but when the headliner will walk on stage is anyone’s guess. So you’re needing somewhere nearby should you need to pay the bill and be out the door sharpish. I would definitely recommend The Firehouse, it has efficient and speedy service but fast food it is not.
It’s a high quality, simple but brilliantly executed menu, an exercise in not overstretching yourself. At 5.30pm it was already busy with post-work drinks, friends meeting for a mid-week meal, dates and everything in between, which speaks to the success Firehouse and Ramona is enjoying. You can’t please all the people all the time, but you can offer something for everyone.
Yer Mam’s House
Tom Segura live at the AO Arena
It’s not The Frog and Bucket, but the AO Arena is surprisingly good for staging comedy. Acts move fast up the ladder these days, so odds are that by the time you get the chance to see your new favourite comic they’ve already got too big for the clubs. A pity, and maybe somewhere can do for comics what Albert Hall does for bands, but in the meantime you can definitely do a lot worse than the AO.
The tall screens either side of the act are helpful for making the space feel smaller, and the sound system carries well, there’s just one thing for the AO to take note of. Comedy crowds love a drink. Really love a drink. So staff more bars and you won’t be able to pour them quick enough.
A bloom of Northern nostalgia
Pip at Treehouse Hotel
In the first of a three-fold rolling banquet of new menus that Hayden and I were kindly invited to try out, we headed down Deansgate to the newly opened Treehouse Hotel and its ground floor, low-waste restaurant headed up by Mary-Ellen McTague - the economically named Pip.
After tustling with why it might be called that, Hayden decided it was the seed that the rest of the ‘Treehouse’ grows out of. I agreed and ordered a lager.
What first gets your attention is the effort put into the decor of the place; it’s laid out with a deep feeling of nostalgia, not by adorning the walls with Dennis the Menace cartoons and the like, but just by creating a warm, worn and homemade atmosphere that feels, well, a bit like a treehouse would have felt as a child. I didn’t have one but always desperately wanted one, and to be honest would still take one now if offered.
The menu has a similarly quaint feel to it but not at the cost of the dishes themselves, which were beautifully simple in their execution and presentation. We started with Old Winchester Cheese Gougères (good with a lager), Hayden started with the trout and I decided on the opaquely-named Squab ham, mustard leaf and lemon thyme granita.
I was helpfully informed that what would arrive would not be ham but in fact pigeon. I’m open-minded, and assumed it would be more the cooing wood variety than the ones you shoo away in Lincoln Square. I can confirm it was the rural type, beautifully cured to the tune of almost tasting like bacon, but with a gamey rich undertow. The trout looked similarly delicious. Hayden then had a take on chicken pie and I the fish of the day (hake) with cockle broth. All simple, all excellent.
As for the location on that end of Deansgate, I’m hoping it pulls the surroundings into line and we bookend one of Manchester’s main arterial roads with two excellent hotels and a reason to enjoy that end of town.
A dining room fit for Fitzgerald
New menu at tender by Niall Keating
Off to the Stock Exchange Hotel, then, and the lavish surroundings of tender by Niall Keating. Named after its former life as a hotbed of trading, it always makes me think of the Blur song, then F Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, and in turn John Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale. I’m sure part-owner and poet Ryan Giggs does the same.
The dinner menu has taken on a new form and I’m right behind it. It still has small plates - you can’t turn the oil tanker of Manchester restaurants’ menus round that quickly - but now the other side of the menu is ‘Large Plates - perfect for two’. And these are big whacking classics of the sort you could imagine F Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway eating before going on a three day bender. Moules frites, whole line caught seabass, salt-aged chateaubriand, lobster with garlic and parsley butter. The oldies are the best.
All this very twentieth century grandeur pulls it in line much more satisfyingly with the room, which is extravagant in all the right ways; banquettes, marbled tables, soft lighting and a big fuckoff clock for you to ignore on a four-hour literary lunch.
I can see the city going this way more generally; the return to dining rooms. It seems the types of restaurants we leaned into during the last ten years of austerity and COVID (dirty burgers, neapolitan pizza, Japanese, viral dishes, baked goods and sweet treats) have lost their sheen. I can see returning the allure of putting your best outfit on, having some cocktails and ‘a fancy meal’ and pretending the world outside isn’t sliding into the abyss, something Fitzgerald and Hemingway knew a thing or two about.
A Taste of Spring
New lunch menu at Fold Bistro and Bottle Shop, Marple Bridge
Finally to Marple Bridge, a place which if you offered me the opportunity to live there in years to come I’d bite your hand off. But rolling hills and Robinsons pubs won’t quite cut it; every place needs restaurants to regularly visit. Fortunately there is just that in Fold Bistro and Bottle Shop.
When Hayden and I went it was my second visit. Now manned by onetime sous-chef Jake Rossington, it’s a neighbourhood restaurant in the proper mould. Both comforting and impressive, a very well-judged balance of familiar and intriguing, Jake’s take on turning produce into something exciting is to be commended.
We ate from the ‘A Taste of Spring’ menu (£32pp for three courses) and had some added extras from the a la carte. Beignets made with Manchester IPA and covered in frazzles seasoning, Norfolk crab, cured trout with pickles and an apple salad, wild garlic and parmesan hash browns, herdwick lamb rump with mint salsa. More than plenty of invention with ingredients you’re familiar with spun into something altogether different. Did I mention the frazzles seasoning?
An Institution of Firsts (on First Street)
Pizza Express turns 60
The week that Pizza Express opened on Wardour Street in Soho, ‘The Last Time’ by The Rolling Stones was no.1 in the charts, The Soviet Union undertook its first Space Walk, and The Undertaker was born in Houston, Texas. It really was a busy week.
In the interim of 60 years Russia has mutated into the flexing aggro-cokehead spoiling the party, the Stones now only bother the charts of their Harley Street physicians and The Undertaker has retired from piledriving. But Pizza Express is still standing. And it’s looking good for 60; much more Mads Mikkelsen (22 November) than Charlie Sheen (3 September). It knows what works and why you’ve booked a table. The wheel doesn’t need reinventing.
Along with some additions to the menu (the hot Calabrian was a winner) they’ve also added a splash of fun to their birthday celebrations through their clothing collaboration with AGRO Studio and made a characterful collection including, with plenty of sense of humour, a cross-body dough ball bag.
It has to be said the competition has been stiff, especially in the last ten years. The trend towards Neopolitan, and with it a gallery of pizza places acting like they invented the things, has threatened to leave this grand old dame of dough balls in the shade.
But the golden age prizefighter of pizza is still going strong. It has modernised where it needs it, but crucially it’s stayed just enough the same place at which you had your first teenage birthday party, your first date, your first Peroni.
Mick and Keith apparently wrote The Last Time in fifteen minutes in their kitchen, and it still stands up as a great single. Pizza Express do something very similar.
You never know
10 Years of Sprechen Records exhibition, Refuge at Kimpton Clocktower
Thursday (3 April) saw the launch of a new exhibition at Refuge in the stupendously grand surroundings of the Klimpton Clocktower.
Ein Null: 10 Years of Sprechen celebrates a decade of the Mancunian record label and its distinctive approach to its record covers, whereby artists are encouraged to inject their own personalities into the covers and let their interpretations of the music take a visual form.
Sprechen founder Chris Massey said: “I'm thrilled to be showcasing the last 10 years of artwork and celebrating the designers who have been integral to making Sprechen a respected source of underground electronic music from Manchester and across the world.”
Artist and longtime collaborator Alex Berg, whose covers feature in the exhibition, said: “When I was a kid I was always obsessed with music and art, going to the local record shop with my parents every weekend was a tradition and something that’s stayed with me ever since.
"I’ve been lucky enough to work for Skint Records, Paul Weller and a host of independent bands and artists creating the designs for their music releases. I count Sprechen as one of the most enjoyable experiences of my career - here’s to the next 10 years of music and art!”
All this struck me as proof that starting something with your mates and seeing where it takes you can be worth a thousand grad schemes.
The free exhibition is on at Refuge until 31 May.
Header image credit: @renaemcr / Instagram
Overheard...
Overheard, outside Junction at Manchester Central
“Down there the rat race is just so much worse. Here it’s like, ‘enough is enough, let’s go on the lash.’”
Overheard, Princess Street.
“It was the fact he shit himself in the restaurant.”
“Yeah. Bad, that.”
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