Sleuth is a sideways glance at the city every week, it's the truth, but Sleuth's truth. He's several people all at once. Sleuth sometimes even gets serious @mcrsleuth
NEW RESTAURANT, NEW BAR, A CITY IN SHOCK
Blimey. Would you believe it? There's some new food and booze openings on the horizon.
Firstly, Sleuth sees Karina Jadhav, the former co-owner of Southern Eleven, Victor’s in Hale and Manchester’s most celeb-happy bar, Neighbourhood, is set to open a new million quid all-singing all-dancing 200-cover restaurant called Menagerie within the recently completed One New Bailey office block on the Salford side of Leftbank. Jadhav says the new opening will ‘provide a vital opportunity to introduce a new wave of experiential vibrant dining to Manchester’. Now Sleuth hasn’t the foggiest what ‘experiential vibrant dining’ is, but reckons Salford needs a slice of that. Sounds exciting doesn’t it? So what’s on the ‘experiential vibrant’ menu? ‘American cuisine’, Sleuth’s told. Ah, of course… vibrant indeed.
One New Bailey and the lost Mark Addy
One New Bailey and a new Mark Addy in happy computer land
Meanwhile, Sleuth dropped into a newly opened bar this week, one with no pretense, no flash opening party, no picky doormen or reality stars dancing on tables. It's called Wood & Company and has taken over the former 39 Steps restaurant site on South King Street (at the back of El Gato Negro). It's good, they serve drinks and the bartenders were nice to Sleuth. Plenty of spots to park your backside too. Simple as that. You should go. @Woodandcobar
Wood & Co.
Nice guys: Jack (or Luke) and Badly Drawn Boy
PUBMAGEDDON
There’s a campaign been started to save the Smiths Arms in Ancoats. This isolated and boarded up old pub is threatened with demolition to create the world’s first four dimensional quantum mechanics ropewalk and badminton courts. Given Ancoats pioneering history we believe this is an excellent idea so the Smiths must GO!
PUBMAGEDDON PART TWO
As if. The Smiths is going to make way – surprise surprise - for an apartment scheme with some commercial units on the ground floor. Sleuth almost fell asleep writing that. The building was an eighteenth century house and then a pub from 1827. The 1975 Manchester Pub Guide calls it ‘a pleasant place in which to enjoy a good pint’, a ‘welcome haven’, ‘very typical of its age, a must for students of public houses’. The 1988 CAMRA Guide says ‘the entrance lobby still has its wood and tile work’. The 2016 Planning Committee looks set to say ‘smash it down’. Sleuth agrees with Adam Prince that the place should be preserved to provide variety and context in the built environment. Click here for his Manchester Shield protest.
The Smith's Arms - thanks to these good folks for the pic
PUBMAGEDDON PART THREE
Sleuth knows that the group which drags most fans to Manchester is The Smiths – still. Sleuth thinks should the pub be rescued it has an inbuilt theme: The Smiths at The Smiths. This would be apt as the high-pitched voice on the song Bigmouth Strikes Again is credited to Ann Coates – a little Morrissey joke that one. But let’s pick another track for the pub singsong one that starts: ‘I was happy in the haze of a drunken hour but heaven knows I’m miserable now.’
UNRESTRICTED VIEWS
Joy on Cathedral Street. The druggys’ phone box outside Hanging Ditch wine merchants has been removed, and the temporary Cathedral/shack thing has been given to the Irish Centre in Cheetham Hill. Clear views at last. Hurrah.
The shack has gone
The shack being dismantled
THE MOST ITALIAN EXPERIENCE
After being sent to take images for Confidential's update of Manchester’s best drinking terraces and suntraps, Sleuth's colleague Deanna Thomas returned to the office with the telltale flush of alcohol on her cheeks. “I’ve just had the most genuinely Italian experience at Piccolinos” she gushed. She’d only planned to nip over but they weren’t quite ready. She took a seat at the bar and watched the owners and staff rush around the empty restaurant trying to set up the terrace, lay tables, stop for a quick bite to eat, embrace various visitors, and do a bit of exuberant faffing.
With a typical eye on style and aesthetics, when they were finally ready, she was obliged to stand in the middle of the road taking a hundred alternate shots: empty with canopy up, empty with canopy down, full of smiling staff with canopy up, staff looking casual with canopy up, canopy down again and so on. After thanking them and wishing them all luck, she was given a glass of champagne and a huge cheer. She’d only been there half an hour but ended up feeling like one of the family. Saluti, et Buona fortuna!
No staff...
...all the staff (casual)
...all the staff again (smiling)
DEAD SYPHILITIC WHORE
Sleuth was at the most beautiful buildings in Manchester, Chetham’s, last Saturday with a bumper group of Mancs and general tourists from over the world – there’s a free open-day this Saturday. Amongst other material, including a Third Folio of Shakespeare’s works, Michael Powell, the librarian, had lined up original William Hogarth’s engravings from 1732. These were the six panels of the Harlot’s Progress showing how an innocent girl arrives in London from the country, is corrupted and ends up, as Michael Powell described with a fine economy of language, ‘a dead syphilitic whore’.
WILLIAM ‘COKE’ HOGARTH
Brief panic ensued in the library when a woman in the group who was sat next to the Harlot’s Progress decided to reach for a can of diet Coca Cola. She placed it next to the almost 300-year-old engravings. “I’m not sure your drink would be very healthy for the Hogarths,” said Michael Powell hurriedly. Embarrassed the woman removed the drink from the table as the rest of us gasped; after all how does one remove a coke stain from an early eighteenth century work of art worth tens of thousands of pounds?
The group with the Hogarth's after CokeGate
MAN’S HEAD RUINS VIEW
Sleuth wanted to take a picture of the marvellous view from Holcombe Hill of Manchester and surroundings that occupies one whole wall of the new Brink beer bar on Bridge Street. As he was doing so photo-bombing Mr Domehead pounced.
Mr Domehead wins again
ROCK STAR TAUGHT A LESSON
This is the moment a local skateboarder and employee of Northern Quarter skateshop, NOTE, ‘truly got one over’ on former Oasis star and High Flying Birds frontman Noel Gallagher, by skating reasonably close to him in Northern Quarter. The ‘prank’, reported by The Mirror, was aimed at Noel after he said in an interview that the sport was for ‘fucking little idiots’. Yeah that’ll show him! Sleuth bets the multi-award winning multi-millionaire rock star is really riled now. Perhaps next time they could cycle by his house pulling a wheelie, sure that’d really get his back up.
GOD HATES BOOZERS
Sleuth had to chuckle this week. He'd always thought The Almighty was ok with booze, given the amount of wine quaffed in his house. Still, seems he's had enough. Merely minutes after Confidential published its ultimate guide to Manchester's best summer outdoor drinking spots, this happened... back inside folks.
Get outside...
Nope, back inside...
THE HAPPIEST MAN IN MANCHESTER
Sleuth is reviewing the Armenian Taverna in Albert Square for next week. The restaurant opened in 1968. Sleuth wishes his life was as fulfilling as this chap’s, one of the characters on the restaurant’s very engaging mural. Yippee!
Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
SLEUTH’S BUILDING DESIGN OF THE YEAR AWARD
Sleuth is still very fond of this adaptation of architect Will Alsop's suggestion for a new build in Great Northern Square. Come on, we could build this one and then maybe have an even taller one with the head of a giraffe, and if we ever get a market like Altrincham’s, it could have a piggy-wigs head out one end and a curly tail out the other. Let’s have some fun.
Llamachester
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