MANCHESTER restaurant kingpins, Tim Bacon and Jeremy Roberts of the Living Ventures group, have reportedly secured the prestigious former-Room restaurant site - exactly two weeks after staff from the doomed venue found the doors to work chained shut.
A spokesperson for LV confirmed they expected the new restaurant to be open by October 2015.
On Tuesday 13 January, Confidential revealed that the Harrogate-based HRH Group - which runs multiple hotels, pubs and restaurants around Yorkshire - had finally given-up on 'the most beautiful space in Manchester dining' and scarpered with anything not nailed down - read here.
Not ones to hang about, Knutsford-based bar and restaurant group Living Ventures - which recently confirmed plans to open thirteen new restaurants in 2015 to add to their 32 sites across the UK - have pounced on the King Street location owned by Bruntwood.
Room
Grand Pacific
LV intend to turn the former Reform Club - opened by Prime Minister William Gladstone in 1871 as Manchester's Liberal club - into Pan Asian restaurant Grand Pacific.
A spokesperson for LV confirmed they expected the new restaurant to be open by October 2015.
If the name seems familiar, Grand Pacific is currently the diminutive café bar sibling of Australasia, tucked behind the Armani store on The Avenue in Spinningfields.
Grand Pacific's food menu (£5-£23) has always been a watered-down extension of the Australasia menu (none of the more expensive 'big plate' stuff), and we're told the new venue will 'not quite match the level of Australasia' but is likely to be 'a more inexpensive and accessible brand to roll-out down the line'.
Confidential wonders if this is good enough for the space. The glorious first floor room demands exception rather than roll-out. This is what happened when Reform Restaurant first opened a decade or so ago. The refurbishment and menu matched the ebullient interior - although things quickly went downhill in terms of running the door.
A reinvention of the former Reform Club, where Manchester's great and good once made decisions that had global ramifications on the markets, surely deserves something as distinctive as its first incarnation as a restaurant, albeit with better management systems.
