REVIEW | Mustard, Sale

SHAME. That’s not something you expect from a food review, but it’s something I often feel when photographing food. It’s something to do with whipping out a camera in a darkened room and trying to get a furtive snap of succulent meat or a stack of dripping pancakes that makes one feel a little grubby. There’s something not quite right about trying to get a bit of extra light on your starter when all you want to do is start. It’s a quintessential first-world problem.

bacon battered, deep fried and served with marmite aioli sounds like something Homer Simpson came up with

With the rise of Instagram and its slew of amateur food photographers sharing their every meal, it’s actually quite surprising that food trends still take quite a long time to filter out to the suburbs. Take the Americana craze, which feels like it has been going since forever (i.e. since around 1776, when the Founding Fathers presented the first Independence Burger to the Continental Congress. With a side of Freedom fries, naturally). Actually, Almost Famous, a handy yardstick for this sort of thing, opened in early 2012. Mustard, a new burger ‘n’ beer joint in Sale, opened a few weeks ago. That’s four years to travel six miles. It’s owned by Gavin and Jane Gosnell, who also ran Oca at Sale’s Waterside Arts Centre, and looks-wise they’ve got it right.

While they might be late to the party, they’ve certainly got all the trend boxes ticked: wooden floors, exposed brickwork, staff straight out of friendly-happy-northerner school. The menu is relatively restrained, concentrating on burgers and their various accompaniments, with a couple of token steaks thrown in for no reason whatsoever. If you don’t want a burger, you have no reason to be in this place.

Those wings

Even though we did want burgers thank you very much, we were keen to get a good sampling of things other than burgers, so we ordered widely from the sides as well. First dish to arrive was the Buffalo chicken wings (£7) which were a standout. Now these wings were rule breakers in several ways, but I didn’t care. However, since I’m a proud owner of The Complete Book of Chicken Wings (Revised Edition), let me tell you all about the ways these wings were wrong: 1) buffalo wings are customarily not breadcrumbed 2) the traditional blue cheese sauce is served on the side so you can apply at your own leisure (or eat with a spoon, if that is your preference) and 3) it comes served with sticks of raw celery. Lord knows why because I’m pretty sure no-one eats the devil’s stalk.

But, wrong though they may be, these wings had my heart. The buttermilk-tender chicken, the crunch of the inappropriately crumbed exterior, the acidic tang of the pre-applied blue cheese sauce, the lack of celery - it was all so so good. Best wings I’ve had outside of New York State.

Unfortunately I had broken a rule myself, which is never to gorge yourself on the first dish, no matter how succulent, how wanton, how grease-dripping-down-to-your-elbows tasty. So I was feeling a little unenthused about the burgers when they’d arrived. We’d ordered a standard cheeseburger (£8.50) and the more avant-garde raclette and mushroom burger (£8.50). Both were good quality meat, cooked well, with soft yet robust buns (how many of us can say the same?). The only flaw I could pick out was that the flavour of the pickle was too strong. The scent lingering on the hands the next day kind of too strong. Even the flavour of the raclette, a normally fairly stinky cheese, was drowned out. Other than that these were commendable burgers, but after the naughty thrills of the chicken they were a little too present and correct. The regular French fries (£3) weirdly tasted a lot like McDonald’s, which works a lot better with a burger than some of the pimped-out versions you often see.

Homer Simpson bacon

As for the rest of the sides, the ox cheek mac & cheese (£4.50) was an interesting variant on this diner standard, the grains of slow-cooked cheek infusing the dish with a dark, meaty richness – the kind of thing you could imagine in a school dinner, if school dinners were actually edible and even approaching tasty. The tempura bacon (£4) was a must-order, simply for the concept of bacon battered, deep fried and served with marmite aioli, which sounds like something Homer Simpson came up with. I like that they’ve tried to subtly influence you away from this conclusion by naming this tasty morsel ‘tempura’, but what it really tastes like is deep-fried Frazzles, which is more Glasgow than Tokyo to my mind.

I’ve barely touched on the drinks – lots of Home Sweet Home-esque boozy milkshakes, which can hardly fail to be flipping delicious, or the intriguingly named Alexis Carrington (a variant on a pornstar martini, I have to say I like this name a lot better). And though any of those drinks would have done for dessert in themselves, I also managed to sample the apple pie (£5) which was decent but not out of this world. I should also mention that the beer seems pretty keenly priced (£4 for two/thirds of a pint). Mustard doesn’t have all the bells and whistles and porno branding of some of the more established burger places. Perhaps this is the watering down of the Americana trend as it moves from city centre to ‘burbs, but it is a fad that needs a bit of dilution and simplification.

So, though you thought that Manchester couldn’t possibly support one more burger joint (or one more burger joint review), it turns out Mustard is a good addition to Sale. I popped my head in the Sunday morning after I visited and the brunch session was filling rapidly with families. And if any of then were slyly pulling out phones to photograph their food I couldn’t see it. They were too busy enjoying themselves.

Mustard, 23 Northenden Road, Sale, M33 2DH

Ox cheek mac & cheese

Apple pie

The obligatory burger

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