HERE's the Confidential Food and Drink Awards 2012.
The prize for all these lucky winners is a warm sense of fulfilment for a job well done (or weirdly done in the case of L'Entrecote, and quickly done in the case of Pizza Porto).
The awards were scientifically arrived at in true Confidential style over some Pol Roger and Krug one afternoon in Harvey Nichols' brasserie.
You can follow Jonathan Schofield on Twitter here @JonathSchofield. You can follow Gordo on Twitter here @GordoManchester
Restaurant of the Year: Grenache, Walkden, click here.
Gordo loves this place in the ultimate un-tourist location of Walkden. He wrote: 'Grenache deserves its award from the Good Food Guide as Best Restaurant in the North West. Mike Jennings (is) a chef with a point to prove and an attention to detail that will reward him with more accolades in time.' Grenache has service standards to match. It is a restaurant well worth watching in the New Year, and well worth a visit if you've not been. Our review.
Grenache and attention to detail
Pub of the Year: The Briton's Protection, Great Bridgewater Street, click here.
Pubs are about permanence: a stability of drinking life with atmosphere to match. So the BP with its real ales, hundreds of whiskies, gorgeous original features, darling back garden, and its regular events in its function room is a worthy winner. The Briton's always seems full, and always has a smattering of eccentrics. This is a proper boozer, putting people at ease and reeking of comfort.
Briton's Protection
Bar of the Year: Gorilla and Beagle, joint winners. Click here and here.
Gorilla, part of the Trof group, on Whitworth Street West, and Beagle, part of the Common Bar group, on Barlow Moor Road, Chorlton, are our cop-out joint winners in the most difficult of categories. Both do cracking food (Gorilla's half chicken, and Beagle's stovey, being real delights) and both have good drinking areas and great drinks ranges. Beagle's menu has been created with the help of the team behind Prestwich's award-winning restaurant, Aumbry. Gorilla sitting in the former Green Room site also has a huge 600 capacity auditorium, as well as a specialist gin room. Our reviews, here and here.
Gorilla
Steak adorned with bone marrow at Beagle
Newcomer of the Year: Solita, Back Turner Street, click here.
Innovative, interesting, exciting, Solita has that perfect city centre feel, as though anything might happen at any time. The menu is Americana-led (that's the fashion after all) but with a strong old world accent. There's top notch burgers, mac'n'cheese with pulled pork, deep fried coke and good drinks including a selection of interesting Sardinian wines. The spaces are intimate but the intentions are good.
Solita, Cabrelli's ice cream with bacon candy
Casual Dining of the Year: Home Sweet Home, Edge Street, click here.
Home Sweet Home is so Northern Quarter it almost sums the whole area up. This place is all vintage boho chic, delivered in a way to charm any self-respecting graphic designer with thick spectacle rims. As we wrote in our review: 'The food comes in heaps and is the very definition of one of those classic reviewing cliches - wholesome.' Milk shakes and toasties are signatures. Our review.
Toasties and 'wholesomeness'
Most Talked About: Almost Famous Burgers, High Street, click here.
AFB easily wins this award. The review we did in April was the most read food and drink review of the year - eventually the name of the restaurant became deeply ironic. The venue, teased, tantalised and made people want to eat proper zingy modern American burgers. Even finding the place was thrilling. We wrote: 'First locate an anonymous, unmarked, brown door. Push it open and take the long horror movie staircase. At the top of the stairs there's a riddle of cheap doors. Guess right and you enter one of the smoothest places in the city, one that carries the whiff of people knowing what they’re doing and getting it right.' Our review.
Almost Famous gets talked about
Best Mainstream Venue of the Year: TGI Fridays, The Royal Exchange, Cross Street, click here.
Maybe every city needs to say 'world's largest' over certain things. So clearly when we heard that this TGI Fridays was going to be the largest in the world, we thanked the Lord for it made our lives complete. Something like that anyway. But everybody who goes appreciates the vast venue's optimistic scale, its lush cocktails and its Stateside aura. One thing is certain with TGI Fridays, you won't leave hungry, unless you're a two ton bison. Our review.
TGI Friday's Manchester - bigger than Belgium
Late Night Speakeasy of the Year: The Liar's Club, The Square With No Name/aka Back Bridge Street, click here.
At some point nearly all the Confidential team have disgraced themselves in the Liar's Club. Commercial Director Helen Ramsbottom moved in for the whole month of October and has no idea what happened to her. Fortunately our own tough nun, health and beauty editor, Lynda Moyo, managed to remain clear headed enough to review the place and its fine range of drinks, see link below. We'd like to tell you what time the place closes on a weekend but by then we're always too legless to remember. Our review.
The Liar's Club - It's probably about 4am
Turn-around Of The Year of the Year: Livebait, Lloyd Street/Albert Square, click here.
Livebait used to be a byword for missed opportunity. Under new management and with a new kitchen it has improved immeasurably. It's still not as busy as it deserves to be but the standards of food have lurched upwards to such an extent that people are still trying to catch up. We were a little worried when genius Aussie chef David Spanner left recently, but his former second in command has picked up the reins marvellously well. Our review.
Livebait, yum fishy
Most Impressive Refurbishment of the Year: Albert Square Chop House and The Wharf. Click here and here.
The Albert Square Chop House (part of Roger Ward's Victorian Chop House group) has brought back to life Thomas Worthington’s fabulous Memorial Hall from 1866. One of Manchester's most subtle examples of cityscape had to be completely rebuilt internally to create the Albert Square Chop House and give it back a public use. Meanwhile down in Castlefield, perhaps the most useless example of eighties non-entity architecture has been splendidly revived by Brunning and Price. The Wharf, in a few months, went from ugly-duckling to swan, and the whole area has benefited. Great examples both of how to make the broken brilliant. Our articles here and here.
Albert Square Function Room
The Wharf refurbishment
Best Use Of Outdoor Space of the Year: The Terrace, The Restaurant Bar and Grill, John Dalton Street, click here.
It had to be this place. In the last couple of years the Restaurant Bar and Grill (RBG) had been outstripped by other 'grills' across the city, usually ones owned by intense rivals Living Ventures. But by cunningly, and surprisingly, inserting an all-weather terrace on a roofspace staring down at the hand-bag section of Adolfo Dominguez (and improving the food too), RBG has returned with a bang. There are plans next year to take this a step further, and do even stranger stuff even higher up. Our review.
RBG - The Terrace
Best Neighbourhood Venue of the Year: Banyan Tree, Ellesmere Street, Hulme (or if you're an estate agent, Castlefield), click here.
Beloved of the locals, serving a captive audience, yet in no way complacent, the Banyan Tree is a model neighbourhood bar/restaurant. The food is a fulfilling amalgamation of British and European food spiced with Eastern heat - the owners are Asian. The aloo saag tortilla is a typical delight. The bar reinforces its local agenda by having its own football team, Banyan Munich. Our review.
Suet pudding, chips, mushy peas - Trees can clearly cook
Tricky Menu of the Year: The Great Wall, Faulkner Street
We went one week and had the usual Chinese take-away in a restaurant experience. We went the next with a Chinatown local and were blown away by a second menu of glamour, intensity, beauty and thrill. There was cold jellyfish with translucent grean bean noodles, chicken strips, coriander and chilli and duck with wood ear fungus. It was delicious. We then had a rant about the naughty tactic of providing an 'us and them' menu for Chinese and British and felt much better. Our review here.
Great Wall quack quack
Weirdest Concept of the Year: L'Entrecote, King Street, click here.
Gordo likes this place, Schofield thinks it's weird - hence the award. At L'Entrecote you get an obligatory single starter, walnut salad, and single main, steak, at one price of £21. And after that non-choice you get a dessert menu with seventeen options. Work that one out. Service is old-school, or comedy, French, depending on your point of view. The wine list is limited. The building is nice. Try it, and see if you view it Gordo or Schofield style. Our review.
L'Entrecote's main event
The Here Today, Gone Tomorrow Venue of the Year: Pizza Porto, Albert Square.
Week one: opens. Week three: "Shall we review it now even though it looks like a YAFI (Yet another 'f**king Italian)." Week four: closed. Poor buggers. The curious thing about all this is that the corpse of Pizza Porto lies in a gem of a situation with a main terrace towards Albert Square - there's even a fully fitted kitchen. Hey, food entrepreneurs, any takers?
Pizza Porto, limited run
