REVIEW | Brink Bar, Bridge Street

Confidentials 6 April 2016

I LIKE Brink.

I like it so much I'm going to buy them a mat. Then I'm going to rob it. The incident will be recorded as the Brink's Mat Robbery. It will.

Then I'm going to hide any ill-gotten proceeds (the mat, because nobody will want to buy it for anything like real money) in Panama. It's going to be proper shady.

I liked the old-fashioned 'drink' nature of Brink. I like the fact that drink and chat was the focus

Come on, that's the best joke you'll hear all week. Witty, topical, utterly inane.

Anyway I do like Brink. Very much.

It's a sweet tiny space in a basement on the other side of Bridge Street from Gaslamp, another basement bar. Brink isn't so much yang to Gaslamp's ying as both are very much yang: strong spaces, clearly defined, you could say 'male'.

Visually they are different. The Gaslamp is an old Edwardian basement complete with tiles whereas Brink is modern and bright with a superb four metre long photo of Manchester from 11 miles away. This was taken from the top of the Peel Memorial Tower high on Holcombe Hill above Ramsbottom and I think you'll find, 1,100 ft above sea level.

The bar carries handpumps and there are bottled beers galore. Wines too and spirits. Gareth Williams, the affable owner, plans to stock five cask and four keg ales from within 25 miles of the city centre. My friend and I tried four of the ales. Not one was a fail, it seems the owners know how to keep their beer.

Beer variety

Deeply Vale's DV8 beer was a chunky but subtle stout and a fine brew. Filling too, with a decent but not obscene strength of 4.8%. I distantly remember Deeply Vale as a music festival in the hills west of Rochdale, not so far from Holcombe Hill as it happens. My older brothers used to go with Frank Zappa haircuts and tell tales of girls who all apparently looked like Marianne Faithfull. The stout was anything but hippy, it was a brew the old mill workers in the ruined mills of Deeply Vale would have swigged.

Marianne Faithfull loves stout...maybe

The other stand out beer, was DOC, a fine First Chop pale - as pale gold as Marianne Faithfull's hair. First Chop beers are all about hops and this one is so hoppy you have to keep your hand over it to stop it falling of the table. Very refreshing though. Lovely.

My friend, who tends to creative insanity, decided that neither of these fine drinks would be complete without one of the world's most processed yet strangely beguiling foods, scampi fries. Thus we have the photo below. Perhaps one of the most entertaining five minutes in recent days for me has been enquiring of Mr Google (he's probs got some Panama accounts too) 'What are scampi fries made of?' Surprisingly 'old tyre rubber from HGVs' doesn't feature.

Pale, dark and a foodstuff of sorts

Food so far consists of the aforementioned bar snacks and allied acquaintances but also the homemade and rather beautiful Manchester egg, a pickled egg with a black pudding case, deep fried and charming. There will be more of these homemade products along soon to add variety.

Not that I mind that much.

I'm becoming a specialist in reviewing places that just sell eggs as my recent review of The Salisbury pub reveals. In fact I might start my own chain of outlets just called Egg.

Still I liked the old-fashioned 'drink' nature of Brink. I like the fact that drink and chat were the focus. It felt relaxed, a formula of what a good alternative for the traditional boozer might be. I think the 'whiteness' of the decor should be given colour but I liked the untreated look of the wooden fittings. All in all this is a comfortable place to pass an hour or two.

When I lived in Madrid bars were often around this size and were part of a 'tomar una caña' ('take a swig of beer') crawls. At each bar there'd be a morsel of tapas, a caña (roughly a third of a pint of beer) plus chat, laughter. Then it'd be off to the next bar within 20 minutes. With Manchester eggs and other snacks in the offing, maybe we could build a similar thing in this city. But with pints not tiny cañas, we're British after all.

Brink is good. Give it a go.

Brink, 65 Bridge Street, Manchester, M3 3BQ