TV chef’s Lucky Cat restaurant brings opulent Asian-inspired private dining experiences to King Street
Following on from its successful opening on 1 June, Lucky Cat Manchester has announced the latest offering from the multi-Michelin-starred chef.
As well as the spectacular former banking hall of the Midland Bank on the ground floor and the handsome mezzanine above, there's a special space in the basement. This is the former strongroom and vault which is now being cunningly renamed 'The Vault' and launched as a private dining experience. The building, by the way, was designed by celebrated architect Sir Edwin Lutyens and completed in 1935
The former strongroom and vault has now being cunningly renamed as 'The Vault'
The steel-clad vault sports an Art Deco interior with light reflecting back from a series of doors for safety deposit boxes. The Vault seats up to 12 guests. There are two other private dining areas in Lucky Cat with a capacity of eight guests per area as well. For grander events, there’s the opportunity to hire the entire restaurant for private use, catering for up to 250 guests at a time.
The vault was a well-used space adding lustre to the former occupant of the splendid building Jamie Oliver's otherwise lacklustre Italian restaurant. Oliver departed rapidly in 2019 as his company went bust.
Back when it had opened in 2012, and as we've written before, the vault was at the centre of a parable of internet babble and journalistic foolishness that created its own myth.
On Valentine's Day that year the Holy Moly website misread this Confidential story and claimed that master tapes for Joy Division and New Order songs had been found in the building.
The NME then thought, nice one, and slapped the bad facts up without checking them. Then The Metro followed suit and then TNT and the story was out of control and flowing world-wide.
In our story we had reported how £1.1m of assorted valuables (and a gun) had been left behind in the safety deposit boxes. But we never said anything about Joy Division master tapes being left there.
We’d put: ‘For each box there were two keys both of which had to be used to unlock the box. The person who rented the box had one key and the bank manager kept the other. All sorts were stored down there from diamonds and gold to the master tapes of Joy Division and New Order. When the bank was decommissioned prior to the restaurant refit a problem became apparent. Some of the boxes hadn't been emptied.’
This is how the NME put it.
‘The new restaurant, which is being built in a former branch of Midland bank, was being excavated when the tapes were found, alongside guns, gold and jewellery. Oliver has since given everything found in the basement to the treasury.’
The headline was ‘Jamie Oliver finds Joy Division and New Order master tapes in restaurant basement’.
Confidentials.com couldn’t help mocking the lack of that most basic of journalistic essentials displayed by these organs, the total dismissal of any notion of checking the facts.
We wrote: ‘Aside from the fact Oliver wasn’t even present and nor were the master tapes and that the new restaurant wasn’t being ‘built’ into the building and also that the basement had not needed ‘excavating’ and that Oliver had not ‘given everything found in the basement to the Treasury’ the NME got it all right.
‘Confidentials would like the press across the country to publish any or all of this as the absolute truth. Jamie found in the Vault these items. An elephant, a Viking ship, Kylie Minogue’s golden hotpants, Jack Wilshere, Manchester’s transport policy, the Magna Carta, an angry horse, a tin of Creamola Rice, a complete set of white lines from the middle of the road, Lounge Ten Restaurant, toasting forks, Matthew Williamson’s first wax designer crayon (red), dust, a spare set of David Beckham’s eyebrows and a belt buckle engraved ‘I love you NME, I just wish I could believe all you say’.'
You can book in for a private dining experience at the Lucky Cat by Gordon Ramsay by visiting their website.
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