‘Delivers on its promise’: Stow, Bridge Street, reviewed

Since Stow – the newest resident on Bridge Street, replacing Juice Bar – announced their opening, I’ve been intrigued. There is no big personality, no ostentatiously name-dropped backer, or celeb chef fuelling the opening; it’s not a spin-off or expansion of a pre-existing restaurant, it’s not a change of chef masquerading as a launch or rebrand.

I search for details about who or what they are, but the promotional blurb is clean and limited: ‘food by fire / cocktails & wine / nice people.’ That’s three things that sound extremely up my street; can they follow through?

I am a strong believer in the ability of bread and butter to tell you far more about a restaurant than most other things can. From the get-go it feels like Stow are doing something a little different to their contemporaries, and their milk bread and burnt onion butter set the tone. 

The bread is the antithesis of the sourdough you find everywhere else: pale and fine crumbed, soft and luscious, and near-nostalgic in its sweetness. But then, once baked, it is blackened – truly, properly, shockingly blackened – in the pizza oven, balancing the bread’s inherent sweetness with smoke and bitterness. 

The burnt onion butter plays with similar contradictions of flavour, the burn on the sweet onion balancing, seasoning, reframing the flavours. It’s both familiar and unusual, it’s skillfully executed, and it’s delightful.

Stow is small, with the kitchen dominating much of the restaurant, and a chef’s table bar stool-seated area directly in front of the pass. Cooking over fire is something many restaurants purport to do since the Basque restaurant Asador Etxebarri paved the way, and was regularly voted in the top five restaurants in the world. It sounds good, right? Fire! Danger! Macho! But cooking exclusively over fire – inside – is hard work, often dangerous, and always technically and physically difficult. Few achieve it with more than lip service, but Stow appears to be the real deal.

The kitchen is flanked by a Gozney domed oven on one side, and a Big Green Egg on the other; you feel the heat as you sit down at the stools, and chefs walk past with huge bags of charcoal lifted onto shoulders mid-service. They really do cook exclusively over open fire, and do so with quiet panache: flame is used as a tool, a technique, a seasoning, a flavour as important as any of the ingredients. It’s applied expertly, lovingly even, with light touches and great big ballsy flashes. This isn’t timid cooking – and that’s exciting.

The menu, too, is compact: a child’s handful of small plates, three mains, three sides, three puddings. We follow the bread with overnight coal-cooked beets served on whipped ricotta and smoked honey, and a little dish of tender borlotti beans, drenched in olive oil, and punctuated with flakes of salt and sprigs of sage. The beetroot is fork-tender, with a kiss of smoke; the beans skate the line of too salty, too oily, too saucy – always just coming down on the correct, compulsively delicious side.

Ratte potatoes, sliced longways and cooked until burnished bronze, are fantastic, topped with a blizzard of Cora Linn (a Scottish sheep’s milk cheese) that melts and crisps from the residual heat of the flame-roasted potatoes. Crown prince squash is slow roasted, and then finished over fire, the skin blistered, the flesh char-marked and yielding. None of this is groundbreaking cooking; I’ve had these dishes – or versions of these dishes – at countless restaurants in Manchester and beyond. But it’s delightfully done, the composition is thoughtful, each a complete idea.

The main event, the monkfish – available in two sizes – is a showstopper of a dish. Cooked on the bone, and then carved before serving, it is presented with the bone standing proudly in the middle of the plate, ripe for the greedier diners to carefully pick clean once the fillets are a recent memory. The fish is dressed in a classic beurre blanc, scattered prettily with fronds of dill, and a host of translucent, terracotta trout roe. Our waiter arrives with two spoons – ‘the sauce is so good that I don’t want you to miss out on it’ - and I think, yes, this is my kind of dining. He’s right, by the way, the sauce is absolutely good enough to spoon solo.

The smoked cream tart we order for pudding has an oaty biscuit base, a little like a cheesecake, but then the filling is unusual, unlike anything I’ve eaten before. It’s made similarly to a custard tart, using the smoked cream, but then is cooked at an obscenely high temperature. It’s pitch black – so black it looks like it must be a mistake, but it isn’t. It’s chewy, caramelly, almost savoury. It’s reminiscent of a blondie, a Basque cheesecake and a treacle tart all at once, and simultaneously very much its own thing. 

The ‘rum plum’ it is served with is soft, almost collapsing, glossy and boozy and exactly the right counterpart for the sweet, bossy tart. The chocolate cremeux dish is serene by comparison, smooth, soft and unassuming, but made memorable by the dots of spiced date purée and a reckless flurry of fresh nutmeg which conspire to make it quietly Christmassy, and completely delicious.

So that’s the fire; what about the cocktails and nice people? Well, our drinks are confident and consummate, and each one a delight: a martinez poured at the table from an icy gin bottle, a frosted tankard holding a Hazy Paleoma (a paloma-style based topped up with hazy pale ale; I’m a sucker for a good pun), and a perfect off-menu boulevardier. The bar is separate from the restaurant, so is filled with a clutch of people at the beginning or end of their night, bookending their dining, or just popping in for a drink. It feels like Stow have achieved the unthinkable: a neighbourhood bar in the heart of Deansgate. 

And from the moment we walked through the door to when we reluctantly left, the service was some of the most charming, assured and welcoming I’ve experienced in an age. It doesn’t matter whether it’s front of house, bar manager, chefs or service staff, to a man they are knowledgeable, self-effacing, and just-the-right-amount of solicitous. Oh look! There’s the third arm of their formula: nice people.

Stow absolutely deliver on what they promise: they’re just nice people, cooking with fire, and serving great cocktails. I love them, and I can’t wait to go back.

Stow, 62 Bridge St, Manchester M3 3BW