Promotion
On the ground floor of Tariff & Dale, is the bar where you’ll find booths, sofas, bar stools to perch at watching the theatrics of cocktail making and a DJ at weekends. They’ve converted the downstairs into an industrial chic restaurant area where diners can see into the open kitchen at one end. In full view, is their domed brick pizza oven where hundreds of stone baked pizzas are cooked to perfection every week.
Vally is keen to separate T&D’s menu from those of their Northern Quarter neighbours
We loved the very cheesy Air-Dried Ham and Ogden Cheddar pizza, but if you’re clever, you’ll rework your Fridays to fit around their #Giropizza offer between 12.30-2.30pm, where you can enjoy all-you-can-eat sourdough pizza and a soft drink for £7 – bet you can’t get through much more than one though.
In their first year of trading, Tariff and Dale have got quite a reputation for their sausage rolls. These come in four varieties; Pork and Pistachio, Black Pudding, Lamb and Rosemary and the vegetarian Mushroom and Lancashire Blue Cheese. These crisp, full-flavoured beauties are a world away from the flabby beige ones you’ll find in high street fast food bakeries, and they’re the ideal British snack to accompany drinks.
Tariff and Dale have been working closely with head chef Stuart Valentine (known to everyone as Vally) to create a homely yet professional style of cooking. Having come from some of Manchester’s better modern British venues (The Modern, Zinc, Albert’s Chophouse) Vally is keen to separate T&D’s menu from those of their Northern Quarter neighbours, who mostly churn out pulled pork and burgers as high as a teacher’s blood pressure at the end of term.
On the Main Menu you’ll find ‘Chef’s Plate’ dishes such as Poached Chicken Breast with Oxtail, Anya Potatoes and Mushroom, as well as the popular and well-priced Flat Iron Steak with an Ale Reduction and Confit Potatoes cooked in duck fat, but Vally has also added a weekly set price menu. This is where he can really use his skills by creating a parade of ever changing, great value dishes using the freshest seasonal ingredients sourced that week. The set menu is available Mon-Thurs from 12-7pm with 2/3 courses £14/£17, so ideal for a lazy lunch or for lining your stomach with some proper food before a mid-week session.
Vally also has ambitions for Tariff and Dale to be known as somewhere that makes the best Sunday lunch in Manchester with huge, billowing Yorkshire puds, proper gravy and joints you can carve at the table – like being at your mum’s without having to do the washing up. And with better wine. Keep your eye out for news as that develops.
Desserts are not an afterthought at Tariff and Dale, so make sure you leave room. Those on the pre fixe special market menu change weekly, but when we were there we tucked into a martini glass full of dark chocolate brownie, salted caramel, light chocolate mousse and dark chocolate biscuits topped with a wispy milk tuille, showing some real skill. From the a la carte menu we enjoyed a comfortingly fresh passion fruit and mango, white chocolate cheesecake with tiny melt in the mouth meringues.
So it turns out that there’s more to food and drink at Tariff and Dale than you may at first expect. This city centre urban hangout manages to morph into the kind of space which suits most needs; Sunday lunch with the family, beers, snacks and pool with the boys, or a decent lone lunch with the paper. A deeper layer of thought and care has been put into every aspect because they’re essentially a neighbourhood restaurant with heart.
Tariff & Dale, 2 Tariff Street, Manchester M1 2FN
Photo credit: Emma Golpys
Tariff & Dale from Manchester Confidential on Vimeo.
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