Stop what you’re doing… Manchester has a new ‘sovsebar’ (except it doesn’t)

‘We should all start flocking there ASAP to fill our mouths with the deliciously hot gloopy goodness.’

Woah now, slow down tiger. Keep it clean eh? There’s children reading this. Maybe.

And no, this isn’t a line from a dodgy porno, but from reputable London rag and George Osborne’s new nine-to-fiver (or is that brekkie to elevenses?), The Evening Standard, which appears to have fallen hook, line and sinker for a very well-executed Manchester jape.

And they’re not the only ones, The Huffington Post and The Metro have also published pieces on Manchester’s proposed new ‘deluxe cuisinery’ - devoted entirely to that most northern of meat lube: gravy.

Gravy Bar Hoax
The Evening Standard falls for it...

The Huff said: ‘In one of the best things to happen on 2017 so far, a gravy restaurant is opening in Manchester.’

Whilst The Metro, stamping its foot, said the lack of a clear opening date ‘…is totally unfair because we’re all very excited about a bar filled with gravy.’

The news has even made it as far as Denmark, where news site nyheder.tv2.dk became very giddy about the world’s first ‘sovsebar’ (sauce bar, we’re guessing):

‘You have probably heard of wine bars and coffee shops,’ reads the article, ‘but you appear to be a fairly large sauce enthusiast to go on sovsebar… are the initiators full of confidence and belief in their sovsebar’.

Lost in Google translation, that one. But very funny.

The menu states that the bar’s partner microbrewery is called ‘Penweiss'

Alas, we’re afraid the ‘belief’ in Manchester’s sovsebar is (almost definitely) misplaced, and little more than a Twitter parody account (@gravybarmcr) poking fun at the current hipster-fuelled obsession with mono-menus (cereal, featherblade… isn’t there a hummus place in London?), plus anything sneezed across wood or stuffed into a jam jar.

But, you say, a gravy bar opening in Northern Quarter (where else?) is not entirely inconceivable, is it? After all, there’s a cereal café and a cat café nearby. True. But we put to you this:

  • The Twitter account was actually created over two years ago in January 2015 (go on, check it), and yet we’ve not heard a peep until March 2017?
  • There is no mention of an address or even an opening date (though there is a pretty snazzy website, to be fair).
  • This Saturday is April Fool's Day.
  • The menu states that the bar’s partner microbrewery is called ‘Penweiss’. *applause*
  • They actually placed three oxo cubes on a bit of wood, poked a cheque through an onion and took a photo (pictured bottom).

But the best of the lot? As if to hammer home the sheer preposterousness of it all, one Twitter user, seemingly without artifice or irony, asks: ‘…and will there be vegan options?’ Ha. It’s pulverised dead animal you pillock. Oh do beam me up, Nathan Barley.

 

Now watch the bastards open one...