‘Posh egg?’: Bar Shrimp, Manchester, reviewed

Reviewed by Meg Houghton-Gilmour

It’s a rare occurrence for me to end up on a dance floor, but when I do, I give it my all. There’s nothing worse than half-hearted dancing. I’d rather someone started aggressively flossing than awkwardly shuffling half a beat late.I’m not saying I’m good - I’m emphatically not - and my stamina now tops out at roughly one chorus. But if I’m going to dance, I may dance badly, yet I will not be outdone for effort.

The good people of the small village of Foggie, Aberdeenshire, learnt this at a recent Burns’ Night celebration in the local village hall - the sort of place with a parquet floor, folding chairs, and a terrifyingly efficient raffle. Despite having eaten a small mountain of haggis, neeps and tatties, followed by a similarly ambitious portion of sticky toffee pudding, half an hour later I was enthusiastically partaking in the ceilidh, stepping on toes and tripping people up like there was no tomorrow.

Approximately seven long hours south of Foggie, Bar Shrimp’s menu begins with ‘food that makes you feel like dancing’; which is a bold claim that suggests they’re using class A drugs as seasoning. But I was willing to give it a go, and so on a recent Saturday evening myself and three comrades spent two hours taking it in turns to say ‘what?’ and nodding as if we’d heard the answer.

But I’m here to review the food, not the music. We started with four oysters (£4 each) that had also made the recent journey down from Scotland, served with horseradish and lemon. I prefer my oysters with a mignonette or something even more interesting, certainly not horseradish, but I made do with a couple of drops of tabasco and a squeeze of lemon and it made for a refreshingly saline start. Though it was the accompanying After Hours cocktail (£14) that was far more likely to get my foot tapping, humming as it was with smoky mezcal and sea buckthorn. Missing only a spicy salt rim, the After Hours could well be an early contender for cocktail of the year.

Having been warned of their elusiveness when we sat down, we managed to bag the last two cured pork croquettes (£3 each). That a seafood bar had sold out of pork croquettes at only 7.15pm on a Saturday night suggests either phenomenal word-of-mouth marketing or a heroic misunderstanding of how Saturdays work, but I lean towards the former as they were good enough to give El Gato Negro a run for its money. 

Even better were the Arbroath smokie fritters (£3 each), which looked identical to the pork croquettes but were clearly trying to carve out an identity for themselves on the menu. The last time I had Arbroath smokie, I was geographically much closer to Arbroath – but these smoked fish had certainly not suffered from their drive down the M6 and their enveloping in a creamy bechamel and breadcrumbs. In fact it was the making of them.

Devilled eggs with brown trout and crab roe (£4.50) would likely be pulled up by the Advertising Standards Authority for false advertising: it was in fact devilled egg. One, halved, yolk hauled out and lovingly pureed with ample mustard before being reinstated and topped with roe. You can, if you try hard enough and you’re still only a couple of drinks down, get four bites out of half an egg, but it does require surgical precision. It was worth the careful division though, so that I might taste such an excellent example of the devilled egg more than just once. Ordering another was out of the question; by this point we’d already spent more than the petrol cost of a round-trip to Inverness.

Devilled eggs have well and truly come back into fashion in the last year or so, and if the table next to us was anything to go by, so have Steve Jobs and Cruella de Vil. Bar Shrimp is the kind of place where everyone has a cool job and is on top of the trends; they all look slightly odd but in about six months time you’ll realise they were just ahead of the curve. I challenge you to find anyone in there that doesn’t have a stick and poke tattoo.

Then, in a bid to feel like we’d actually eaten something; a cuttlefish sandwich with parsley mayonnaise (£15), a Dexter beef burger (£12.50), toast with caramelised onion butter (£3.50), and chips (£6).

Consider the cuttlefish; a remarkable creature. They can change colour for camouflage purposes faster than you can blink, despite being completely colourblind. They have three hearts, blue blood like crabs and studies suggest they dream while asleep. Amazing. When you stop to consider all that, no cuttlefish dish is going to seem like a worthy end, and the sandwich at Bar Shrimp is no exception. I couldn’t taste the cuttlefish, nor the parsley mayo, at all, over a creeping, unidentified sweetness. I thought it may be the brioche bun, but no – every nibble had me more convinced they’d mistaken sugar for salt.

The Dexter burger shows the reemergence of another trend; that of the fat, hefty beef burger. Gone are the days of the smash burger – it’s so 2025. The Dexter is more than enough to convince you that everyone has moved on and that it’s for the best, boasting as it was with rare beef juices and umami. They’d also slipped some kind of thin white purée in there (no that’s not an innuendo, get your mind out of the gutter) and though I couldn’t tell you what it was, I can tell you it was delicious.

The caramelised onion butter toast and the chips were a final yin and yang of the savoury offering; the former one of the most exquisite pieces of toast I’ve ever savoured my allocated quarter of, the latter would be shown up by McDonalds and Burger King in a blind taste test and were only marginally improved by an extra pot of parsley mayo which set me back a further 75p. I know times are hard for hospitality but COME ON.

All this had been washed down with white and orange wine by the glass (£11), and then a rum negroni (£14). By the time we’d gotten round to a rhubarb and custard soft serve, my first taste of rhubarb this year and a very nice one too, I was starting to sweat in anticipation of the bill.

So did I feel like dancing? No. But then again no one else in there was dancing, and not because they were all Gen Z - those youths wouldn’t be able to afford to drink even the tap water in Bar Shrimp. I left feeling hungry, tipsy and deeply concerned about the imminent overdraft warning from my bank. The snacks and drinks we had were good, but this is not somewhere to go for dinner unless you’ve got a Mounjaro habit and a trust fund. I don’t feel like dancin’, no sir, no dancin’ today.