THE BLUE PIG is easy-going. You can lose an afternoon or evening in there.
Let's separate the ways of the comforting mood it creates: dark wood contrasted with matt red seating, fancy fandangles hanging from the ceiling, a generous bar packed with enticing bottles, a deli counter bowing out from one wall, and double-height windows to watch the Northern Quarter swing by.
Deli counter
The building is a nineteenth century warehouse and showroom. It's a beauty of brick, iron and stone. One of those perfect street enhancing Manchester structures that doesn't shout out 'look-at-me' but feels just right.
The Blue Pig and a Red Car
As for food, The Blue Pig idea is for a short seasonal menu called 333 (featuring three starters, three mains and three puddings). There's also, according to proprietor, Cleo Farman, "Continental breakfasts, stuffed croissants and homemade breads and an in-house deli featuring pâté, terrines, pickles, chutneys and dips all made by ourselves with meats and cheeses from the best suppliers both locally and on the Continent".
The 333 menu costs £20. You can buy each course individually as well, and that's the price in brackets you'll see after the dish title.
Of the starters, the Goose liver pâté (£6.95) with grape, chilli jam and toasted walnut bread was much better than the Sicilian style mussels (£5.95) even though the latter looked ten times better.
Thin broth
The mussels were tiny. I needed a magnifying glass to find most of the molluscs in the shell. The bits and pieces with them, the tomatoes, garlic, parsley and so forth were fine, but the broth itself was as thin as an Ethiopian long-distance runner.
Half fill the bowl with broth dear Blue Pig please, let me spoon it up after the mussels have been devoured. Let me lift the bowl to my lips and glug like a Victorian workhouse child after an afternoon unpicking dead men's shrouds.
The pâté looked like clay and was rugged and genuine, with a good jam that delivered nice edge, and was complemented by a grainy, textured rustic bread. Good dish that one. Exactly what I wanted The Blue Pig to deliver. There's something very earthy about pâté, the clay colour was fine, the flavour spot on.
Clever pate
We both had gilt head bream (£12.95) as a main because that's what tickled our fancy on the menu and we weren't willing to compromise with each other. This is the problem with the 333 menu - sometimes the choice isn't there for the punter, neither the lamb nor the risotto wooed us.
Fortunately the gilt head bream was fine, a skin-on tidy pair of fillets, full of exuberant fishiness, potatoes cooked properly and with - ooh baby - samphire. I'm a sucker for samphire. I could eat a bag of the stuff and then keel over salt poisoned.
On fire with samphire
Samphire is one of those coastal plants when in just one bite you're suddenly transported to some wild strand with breakers smashing against the rocks.
The pudding of blueberry panna cotta (£4.95) was nice. It was sweet and smooth and livened by the berries, but it's a bit hard to remember now. It was sort of functionally elegant but lacking in character, like a minor actor in a Downton Abbey scene. There was something of that about the food as a whole.
Panna cotta
The Blue Pig is a real charmer. A warm, friendly bar/restaurant that feels a bit like a Dutch 'brown cafe'.
The food is interesting enough if you're passing and you want an easy-going place in which to relax and chat. But it doesn't stand out from most of mid-range Manchester dining - although the pâté showed potential. Yet why should it have to stand out? There's a virtue to simplicity. Every kitchen and every chef trying to shout 'we're the best' and failing gives me a migraine.
The 333 idea is limited though.
There needs to be more choice for guests. 444 maybe. Even better 666, then everybody can make a Beast of themselves. That could be a devilishly clever menu, a revelation.
Certainly (and seriously), an upping of the range would offer more options for customers and allow more freedom in the kitchen.
Back to our visit. Sometimes dining out is about incidents.
Two Italian ladies came in as we were dining and sat down next to us. Turned out they'd brought a party of kids over from Naples to learn English in Manchester. They'd been surprised that the English spoken here wasn't exactly the same as the Cambridge Educational Language series they'd been listening to in the classroom back home.
"That 'u' in 'bus' and 'must' is so deep here," said one.
But they'd loved Manchester, even though they'd stayed in the Britannia Hotel. True, some of the kids had been reduced to tears when they'd gone to a City match and seen Balotelli, but for once at a City game they were tears of joy not frustration.
"What do think of this place?" I asked the ladies about The Blue Pig.
"It is so lovely, so very comfortable," the lady on the right below had said. "Nice place to spend time and take a coffee."
Italian visitors, with the best smiles in Manchester this year
We went for the wine - there's a good range of spirits, cocktails and beers too.
The Picpoul de Pinet at £8.10 a big glass, or £24 a bottle, was a clear-headed, full-of-itself darling, that was perfect with the fish.
It'd be nice one dark afternoon to take a bottle of Picpoul into one of those booths by the window and compose bad poetry with a leather bound notebook and an elegant fountain pen.
The Blue Pig feels that sort of place. It exudes comfort, even self-indulgence - the churros on the blackboards hint at that and I must have some next time. Gernerally though, the food is part of the experience, no more.
You can follow Jonathan Schofield on Twitter here @JonathSchofield
ALL SCORED CONFIDENTIAL REVIEWS ARE IMPARTIAL AND PAID FOR BY THE MAGAZINE.
The Blue Pig, 69 High Street, Northern Quarter, City
Rating: 13/20
Food: 6/10
Service: 3/5
Ambience: 4/5
The Blue Pig itself
The menu - annotated
The bar
Some specials
