SLEUTH | New Café | New Hotel | New Restaurant | Dead Fish

Confidentials 4 December 2015

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 CAFE, HOTEL & RESTAURANT

Only three new openings from Sleuth this week as a respected Northern Quarter operator moves into the Town Hall, a soon-to-open boutique hotel reveals a new bar and restaurant, and there's a meaty rebirth on Mount Street.

First up, Thomas Street tea and cake merchants, Teacup, co-owned by DJ and tea evangelist Mr Scruff, who – not content with a recent move into Manchester Museum and a stake in Proper Tea – are now planning a move into Manchester Town Hall. Details are scarce at the minute, but what Sleuth does know is that Teacup will be a permanent addition and take up a space at the rear of the Town Hall Extension on the ground floor of the media centre – beneath the arches facing Two St Peter’s Square. There's whispers of a grab-n-go deli and an outdoor area on the square too. Sleuth loves everything about the St Peter's Square redevelopment, so somewhere to perch and breathe it all in over a wedge of Battenberg gets Sleuth's backing. Sleuth expects a Spring 2016 opening.

Teacup and a smudge

Next up is the long coming King Street Townhouse, Eclectic Hotels’ soon-to-open Grade II-listed ‘baby grand hotel’ on Booth Street, that is, Sleuth can assure you, absolutely and unequivocally not on King Street. Regardless, Sleuth hears the hotel, which is making a fair song and dance of a rooftop Infinity Spa Pool with views over Albert Square, will welcome its first guests next week. Sleuth also hears the hotel will debut a new bar and restaurant, the King Street Tavern, which Sleuth’s told will be ‘a stylish yet relaxed bar and restaurant to suit all occasions’ serving ‘high quality produce and the finest fresh ingredients in a unique surrounding’. Distinct.

King Street Townhouse

Finally, round the corner, over the square and onto Mount Street where Didsbury’s newish meat and hard liquor restaurant, Bourbon and Black, have quietly opened in the seemingly doomed former Inland Revenue offices at the Lawrence Buildings – an unhappy home in recent years to Beluga, Citrus and Velvet Central. Sleuth reckons this lot must have been doping their builders, so quick has been the turnaround - perhaps we should reassign them to that gaping wound in Mancunian Way.

The new Bourbon & Black on Mount Street

DEANSGATE MESS

You may have spotted this week that Manchester has beaten off competition from 34 other UK cities to win a £10m Government grant to become the world leader in ‘smart city’ technology - read here. The CityVerve project includes plans for smart lamp posts, ‘talkative bus stops’ and sensors in park benches ‘encouraging people to do more physical activity’ - if you’re anything like Sleuth you’re imagining benches tipping folk off and shouting “RUN FATTY!”

But ‘talkative bus stops’, Sleuth wonders what that involves? Sleuth hopes it means that, should some scallywag smash the glass of a bus stop on one of Manchester’s busiest roads, the bus stop might talk to Transport for Greater Manchester to get it cleaned up quick-sharp – unlike the mess Sleuth found this week on Deansgate which took over 24 hours to sort out.

Deansgate mess

Over 24 hours later

SLEUTH’S DISH OF THE WEEK

Snails, oh snails. Sleuth was in 63 Degrees on Thursday and ate this work of art. An absolute beautiful dish of snails, pancetta, in a tuile basket with a parsley foam that was fluffiness defined. It was £11.

Snails and parsley foam delight

SLEUTH’S GREAT PHILOSOPHICAL QUESTION OF 2016

Where have all the Jehovah’s Witnesses come from? They’re packing out the stations and streets like a clone invasion.

Clone invasion?

BIOSPHERIC BLOWS UP AND RUMOURS OF DEAD FISH

Sleuth is a bit upset about the death of the Biospheric project (see the Youtube clip below for a fully explanation of what this was all about). The provocative but fine Salford Star, a necessary part of the regional Fourth Estate, has revealed here that ‘the Community Interest Company which ran the Biospheric Project has gone bust with debts of over £100,000’. The Salford Star are keen to point out a broke Salford Council had given the ‘vertical farm’ led by MMU postgraduate Vincent Walsh, £300,000. Despite these sums Sleuth thinks the initiative, which was part of Manchester International Festival 2013 (and also received £100,000 from the latter), was perhaps underfunded from the beginning, too ambitious in its aim of providing sustainable urban farm produce and jobs for a deprived part of Salford.

Walsh always seemed way out of his depth and is brutally criticised in the Star. Sleuth is particular upset by reports that a lack of husbandry in the Biospheric in the latter months led to the deaths of fish and chickens kept on the site. That’s very naughty. Dreams sometimes can be deadly and very expensive thinks Sleuth.

Vincent Walsh in sunnier times

SORE SLEUTH

Sleuth was at the launch of Sadler’s Yard last night, where an animated man in a trilby hat was waxing lyrical to a bunch of folks behind Sleuth in the beer line how he’d been commissioned to create the logos for both Sadler’s Yard and NOMA.

Sleuth’s still sore they turned down his submissions…

Winning Sadler's logo

Sleuth's attempt

Winning NOMA logo

Sleuth's attempt

SLEUTH’S QUICK REVIEW OF THE WEEK: BRITANNIA HOTEL BARS

Sleuth found himself in Crompton's Bar in the Britannia Hotel, aka The Parallel Universe Hotel. The bar in the hotel, a theoretically splendid former textile warehouse from 1857, is one of the most curious survivals in Manchester. The prices and range of drinks are pure eighties - bottle of house white, £6.95, sort of thing. Keg Carlsbergs and crap smooth ales are everywhere. Still, at least the marvellous mahogany fixtures and fittings from a Stockport tobacconist's shop are something to behold, the brass dog and horse, well, not so much. It gets worse in the other hotel bar, the one called Bar Rogue which cannot even be bothered selling any cask ales or even bottled ales and seems to have completely blanked out anything to do with food and drink trends since 1991.

The stairs are rank here with years of encrusted filth. Bar Rogue seems a fitting name for a hotel group which let the London Road Fire Station moulder for so long. Meanwhile amateurishly printed A4 sheets announce the hotel's Wi-Fi password. This is H0tel999. Eh? 999. Quick dial it, it's an emergency. Call the design police. Or maybe Adam Prince and the London Road Fire Station campaigners can start another campaign?