“SINCLAIR’s Oyster Bar, so you still sell oysters, don’t you?” I said, staring at a menu devoid of any hint of bivalve action.
Sinclair’s is a diminished and impoverished pub, an embarrassment given the number of tourists who think it looks perfect
“No. Well sometimes. Mainly summer. Around that time,” came the reply.
This was a tad unnerving, because traditionally that's exactly when you aren’t supposed to eat them. Remember the old mantra of eating seafood in every month with a 'r' in it. Although to be fair modern methods of farming oysters and so forth haver largely put paid to the old saw.
“It’s a bit misleading Sinclair's Oyster Bar, I suppose,” the barkeep added, who seemed like a nice lad.
I ordered a chicken and ham pie for £7.50 with mash included. Then I looked at the bar and a keg desert greeted me.
“There’s been a revolution in ale and craft beers you know,” I said. “How come you don’t serve cask ale?”
“We used to, but I suppose these are quicker to pour. When we get busy.”
The Samuel Smith’s keg bitter was £1.84, big on value, nutty but thin, generally characterless.
Kegfest The chicken and ham pie was authentic.
It was authentic food from a decades old motorway service station mingled with a hospital meal and a school dinner.
The pie had a loose cheesy filling with slivers of ham and chicken and a pastry that had been repeatedly runover on the M62 in 1984. The ‘buttered’ veg of broccoli, carrots and peas had been overcooked and were dry. The bitty gravy, in a separate mini-boat, helped moisten both the pie and the veg but could do little with the impenetrable mash. The latter resembled a Morecambe Bay mudbank but with a slightly thicker consistency and a somewhat potato-ey flavour. I couldn’t face a pudding after that.
Sinclair's Oyster BarIt’s a shock to be chucked back into the rotten days of British catering when the nation developed a reputation for careless food. Eating in Sinclair’s put me in mind, for some reason, of a trip in the seventies as a child to the top of Snowdon in Wales and to a cafe even my young brain could decipher as shockingly poor. It was a classic give-us-the-money-and-now-piss-off type of place. The message seemed to be that if you don’t have much cash then we can deliver crap and you won’t complain because we expect you don’t know any better.
The whole beigeness of food, the whole ‘offer’ as they say, came flooding back to me whilst sat in Sinclair’s. There is a casual disdain for the customer not from the staff from the owners, the brewery Samuel Smiths. The lack of handpumps was just the most obvious example of this. Currently we have more than 40 family and micro-breweries in Greater Manchester producing superb ales, but in this period pub in one of the most popular areas of the city centre, any notion of representing the city to the tourists who are drawn to the pub has been tossed aside for some quick-turnover short-term gain.
It's a shame because this should be a place of considerable charm. It is, after all, the oldest building offering continuous food and drink in the city. It began as a pub named after John Shaw in the 1730s before it became Sinclair’s and started to serve oysters in the nineteenth century.
The internal layout is enjoyably higgledy-piggledy, it feels olde worlde, despite this being a Manchester pub that does the pub crawl for you. After World War II it was lifted around 1.5m to match the plans for a new shopping centre and after the IRA bomb it was pulled apart and reassembled 40m down the road to accommodate New Cathedral Street.
Unharmed pie
Definitely not oystersAn entertaining story is that John Shaw’s punch (the drink, not his fist) was so strong, you could only drink one pint if alone or a quart if in company. The city has a tradition that this is the derivation of the expression ‘mind your Ps and Qs’. In the nineteenth century it was frequented by Lady Sarah Spittlewick, whose pleasure it was to consume at least 40 oysters each day. This habit continued until, in her advanced years, Lady Spittlewick was rushed to the Infirmary where she died. She’d choked on a pearl. Until British oyster beds became exhausted oysters were the poor man’s protein and anything but a luxury foodstuff. Lucky devils although unlucky Lady Sarah.
The John Shaw Club still survives, all the way down the years from the eighteenth century. Given the city’s much-vaunted radicalism, this club was the opposite, a centre for ‘King and Church’, the very measure of Conservatism. It was linked deeply with the charge of the Yeomanry into the people at the Peterloo Massacre in 1819.
Lady Sarah Spittlewick just before the incident with a pearl
Charming interiorIt’s all good stuff, history that goes to the heart of the city. Yorkshire brewery, Samuel Smith's, mocks this deep Manc resonance with this shambolic pub. Sinclair's is a diminished and impoverished boozer, an embarrassment for the city. On the first floor there's a grill across the bar at quiet times which clearly says to the customer we worry you might rob drink from us if we leave it unattended. This is essentially a very bad Wetherspoons with ten times worse beer and less imagination.
A welcoming sign on the door says: 'No tracksuits or tracksuit bottoms, no baseball caps or hoods, no workwear, no workboots, no hi-viz jackets, no beer choice, no point, no hope, no use, no, no, no.' Well, it says most of those things. Another signs warns how there may be 'random bag searches'. Again it hints that Sinclair's simply doesn't trust its own customers. The fact that this pub is populated by football fans before matches is no excuse. You never see similar signs in Continental bars or pubs.
As the Confidential article here reveals, according to Yelp, Sinclair's is the 77th best restaurant in the UK. That made me laugh. The message is clear, never believe any of these Yelp/ Trip Advisor lists, they're a mess of deception, a tissue of lies. Sinclair's is the 77th best pub in the city centre. Maybe.
No, no, NO
Welcome to SinclairsSinclair's Oyster Bar, 2 Cathedral Approach, Manchester M3 1SW
Rating 9/20
Food: 3/10
Ambience: 3/5
Service: 3/5
