The Crown is the Manchester city centre pub that everybody forgot.
Other menu items will include crispy tripe with Lancashire shaved pickled onions.
Bang in the traditional business quarter, yet a skip from Manchester Art Gallery and Chinatown, it occupies the ground floor of a dowdy eighties office block. For years The Crown has been a lonely bastion in this area of the hard drinking pub in terminal decline.
Now it's to be transformed by the New Moon Pub Company. These boys are well-known in the north west for their sprucing up of moribund boozers in Cheshire, such as the former Red Cow, now the Old Sessions House in Knutsford.
Old Sessions House
The Crown will re-open in mid-March 2014 after what one of the company bosses, Dave Mooney, calls: "A complete smartening up."
"The Crown," he continues, "will be unrecognisable after we've finished with it. Everything will go, the bar, the kitchens, the internal layout. The front windows and the entrance areas will be transformed with a whole re-working of the signage. People will be so transfixed by the ground floor they won't even notice the offices above."
But what about the name? Won't people associate the Crown with an old, dowdy and failing business?
"Of course they will, that's why we're changing it," says Mooney. "It's going to be called the Beef and Pudding. This is a reference to a cartoon from the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 with one of the militia saying we're sending the people back to their beef and pudding. In our pub we'll be bringing the Beef and Pudding back to the people in the old Crown pub."
The unusual inspiration for a pub name
Marketing eh? A massacre as inspiration. Weird. In a peculiar twist of fate the Waterhouse pub, a one minute crawl down Fountain Street, was the former offices of Slater Heelis solicitors who represented the militia after Peterloo.
Still the name will help embed the pub in the city. And as Mooney says, "I was born in the old St Mary's Hospital, opposite the Palace Theatre. I love Manchester and its history. I wanted to reflect that in the name, especially as it marks my return to Manchester."
And the food?
"Our chef is Nic Duncan," says Mooney. "She used to work at Parlour on Beech Road, Chorlton, and is Harvey Nics trained. She'll be delivering a frequently changing menu of good quality, British food. Of course we'll have a beef-pudding, one with our own horse radish. There'll also be fish and chips and a signature dish of steak with black-eyed peas. Other menu items will include crispy tripe with Lancashire shaved pickled onions."
Crispy tripe. Now the man's talking sense.
There'll be a strong winelist, a decent spirit range and three cask ales including an in-house Tatton Ales brewed pint. The restaurant area of Beef and Pudding will seat ninety and the pub area forty.
In the week that we learnt the Mark Addy was closing this is very good news. There's always room for a good pub operator bringing a good chef and creating jobs in the city centre. The more food and drink options the better.
The Crown - soon to be Beef and Pudding
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