FUTURE Artists are an award-winning film and events company based in Manchester with a new coffee-shop called Honest Coffee in Chapel Street, Salford. Despite the name Future Artists I slipped back into 1989.
No doubt there's somewhere out there several bastions of Mancdom who've named their kids after Tony Wilson
I met Tony Wilson and drank The Hacienda.
Tony Wilson had changed since the last time I'd spoken with him before his death in 2007. We'd been co-presenting a BBC Radio Manchester show and we'd had no idea he was on the way to becoming a sandwich. Yet, here he was in Honest Coffee transmogrified into three slices of prosciutto, mozarella and a home made tomato salsa with salad for £4.95 (main image). Decent sandwich this, big, full, all good, no need for any subtlety.
As I ate it I pondered fame and all its attendants.
TW on the menu
InteriorThe leader of the re-unification of Italy, Garibaldi, got several squares and a biscuit named after him. So far, Wilson, the man who re-unified a certain sort of intellectual Manc bolshiness has got a square, an escapable poem by Mike Garry and a toasted sandwich. I reckon a toasted sandwich trumps a biscuit any day. No doubt there's somewhere out there several bastions of Mancdom who've named their kids after Tony Wilson or their house. Personally I'm not sure the man himself would care for all this hagiography favoured by forty and fifty-somethings (mostly) but he'd certainly be amused by it.
The Hacienda was a smoothie for £2.95 and came with raspberry, blueberry, yoghurt, honey and ecstacy topped by a dusting of cocaine. I danced through the whole of the lunch and into next Tuesday. I've lied about the drugs of course, but the smoothie was still pretty loaded, a full flavoured concoction with the blueberry and the honey the dominant notes - as they say during wanky wine tastings. Elsewhere there are other Manc and Salfordian references with Frank Sidebottom and John Cooper Clarke images.
Another sandwich, the chuck'n'pig, came with roast chicken and smoked bacon and an entertaining and uplifting swag of avocado. It too cost £4.95 and was spiced by a homemade salsa. The coffee is roasted in Chorlton-cum-Housepricey and delivers a very strong punch. Not sure I liked the tin mug it was delivered in, I felt I was a navvy or a cowboy and either way the metal always infects the flavour.
The Hacienda
Cluck and oink
Navvy coffee mugFor nosh and refreshment there's also salads, cakes and teas. The breakfast choices include bacon butties and a range of cereals. Honest Coffee opens from 7am-8pm so is a good place to stop off at the beginning of the day. Fortunately I was also able to upload a '1gb file in 5minutes', if I'd wanted to, because Honest Coffee, has '30mbps microwave internet' which I don't pretend to understand for one minute.
In the up-and-coming mini-Bohemia of Chapel Street, West of Manchester, Honest Coffee will really show its mettle as a nifty meeting room and event space. As the blurb explains this is a community project:
'All the profits from the cafe go back to the local community as grants for creative entrepreneurs and the local creative community within five miles of the shop. We want you to meet up in the space, maybe do a theatre play read through, perhaps a client meeting because you don’t have the space in the office, or you work from home and fancy a change of environment, or maybe you want to move large files over the internet'. You can book here.
As I munched the meeting room was filling up with donations of clothes and supplies for gifting to the refugees and migrants in the camps outside Calais. There's a mission heading down there from Salford.
Honest Coffee is that sort of place; whatever your politics, this place wears its heart on its sleeve. It even places neon hearts on the walls. The nosh and coffee is better down the road at Lupo but then Honest Coffee is a very different place with a very different story to tell. It's good for Chapel Street, I like it, but I just wish they'd tempered the Manc-references, surely we're too broad-minded a city for all that navel-gazing?
We the cityYou can follow Jonathan Schofield on Twitter @JonathSchofield or connect via Google+
Honest Coffee, 77 Chapel Street, Salford, 07762563552.
Rating: 12.5/20
Food: 6.5/10 (Tony Wilson 6.5, Chuck'n'pig 6, smoothie 7, coffee 6.5)
Service: 3/5
Ambience: 3/5
A community asset
Breakfast is served
