FLAMING March and the idea was to do it al fresco.
I would have preferred that seabass to be £15 with sides thrown in. That would have felt better.
Zinc has a good terrace and since we've not reported on the restaurant for ages it suited the bill. We were looking forward to stretching out on the Corporation Street corner of Exchange Square and watching the world melt in the unseasonal heat.
The rest of Manchester had the same idea. The terrace outside Zinc was so full it was bulging at the seams. Plan B meant the cool of the interior.
Terrace of desire
If you know Zinc then you'll be familiar with its spic and span contemporary interior. This was part of the original owner, Sir Terence Conran's personal vision - updated Habitat and all that. Now the restaurant is owned by the Individual Restaurant Company - Restaurant Bar and Grill, Piccolino - and still carries a degree of sharpness to the decor.
The food is sharp too.
Two courses served us well for a lunch with sides chucked in.
My dish, the seabass with a tandoori glaze (£17.95), was another prime reason for the visit - main picture at the top of the page.
I had the same thing a couple of years ago, and certain food memories stick in the mind. Whenever I walk past the restaurant, Zinc's tandoori seabass floats through my mind and I alarm passers-by with an audible and hungry sigh.
It's the lifting tang and spice of the tandoori extra that adds substance and zing to a fish that's taken over the menus of every mid-market restaurant. The yoghurt on the plate could help, but I can take or leave it. It adds another Indian accent but can get in the way.
It's here that you hit a problem.
The seabass needs help if it's going to be an adequate meal. So I had to buy a pak choi, chilli and garlic side. The pak choi was timed wrongly, too tough to chew, but it was the expense that got to me - £3.95. So £17.95 + £3.95 = £21.90 for the full lunch time meal, or rather one course of it.
Pak Choi
Zinc is by no means alone in pricing things so high but it is emblematic of part of a larger problem. Dining out will narrow its audience in many parts of the country if you can't get out of a place for less than £30 with a drink or two (a large glass of harmless Chenin Blanc was £5.95) and essentially one course.
My dining partner was wiser. She wanted to keep it very light for lunch and had the smoked salmon with blinis and a clever bit of work on the side of the plate consisting of dried egg white and egg yolk in little piles, plus pepper corns and shallots.
Skillful but charming dish this, configured beautifully.
The salmon was described on the menu as being from the Severn and Wye. That's two separate rivers so it must have been a lively bugger or maybe it hadn't got Sat Nav, still at £7.50 it seemed the right price. With the blinis it was filling enough.
I'll have to try and remember that a pair of starters at Zinc is better priced than a smallish main with a side.
Clever salmon
Price aside this was a perfectly acceptable lunch for the type of place Zinc aspires to be, a notch or four up from Cafe Rouge over the road. The tandoori seabass is still a winner and the toilets are still so far away its best to wear sensible shoes when visiting the restaurant. Clearly that terrace is popular in the sunshine as well.
One welcome change from when Sir Terence Conran opened Zinc around a decade ago is that the London-weighted 12.5% service charge has been ditched.
Speaking of Sir T, the interview I conducted with him for City Life magazine all those years ago about why he was opening Zinc, included one of the most embarrassing errors of my writing career. This was in the old days when we had a printed listings magazine - remember them, an actual printed listings magazine.
Anyway I wrote the article and was supposed to add a caption under the picture of Sir Terence. I didn't get round to doing this and so it came back from the printers with the rather unwise default caption that City Life used. Under Sir T's pleasant face it read 'Blah Blah Blah'. His agent rang up aggrieved, "We thought the interview went well, we had no idea that you'd found Sir Terence so boring...."
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Zinc Bar & Grill, The Triangle,
Hanging Ditch, Manchester, M4 3TR
Rating: 14.5/20
Food: 7.5/10
Service: 3.5/5
Ambience: 3.5/5
Flaming March
