On the sixth floor of the city-centre Urbis centre, a smart modern bar/brasserie – on the former site of Mont (RIP) – offering pleasant but unremarkable cooking, and a smart and discreet setting perhaps most obviously suited to a business lunch.
Well, it couldn’t be said we’re lagging on this one. We find ourselves sitting in the new sixth floor restaurant atop Manchester‘s city-centre Urbis centre on the very day that its review appears in that city’s ‘Evening News’. And handy that we happened upon the review just as we were concluding a lunch which seemed to us to be perfectly fine, but lacking anything which – in London at least – could be called distinction. As an ‘away’ team, we can therefore take some comfort for the fact that the MEN’s reviewer – presumably grounded in local standards – awarded the place the three (out of five) stars we might, on a good day, have awarded to a similar establishment in the capital.
One of the things they beat themselves up about in Manchester is the city’s failure to support a non-ethnic restaurant of any real note. Until recently, there were two pretenders, but both are now closed. The site of one of them, the former Establishment, is now home to a glitzy Indian. The other, Mont, a (would-be) Michelin-pleasing outfit, occupied the site we review today. In its new guise, the space is little-changed. Most tables still do not get a real view, thanks to the architect’s bizarre decision to occlude the sixth-floor vista with frosting. There are no tablecloths, now, though, just smart darkwood tables with simple china and glass. So this is now a pleasant modern brasserie-space. Its challenge is unchanged – to become a ‘destination’, albeit a more modestly-priced one than Mont was seeking to be.
Perhaps it’s the relative lack of other smart city-centre ‘modern British’ establishments, but the place did eventually become reasonably busy over lunch (a Friday lunch, admittedly). The food is good enough for a business meal, and the straightforward dishes – often using the local ingredients of which Lancastrians are rightly proud – were on our visit realised to an enjoyable standard, but not really anything more. Scallops were nicely presented, but marginally overcooked. A fish pie had plenty of salmon, but hardly any of the advertised pollock. Coffee was poor. And music showed a lack of balance: to play ‘My Way’ twice during lunch smacks of carelessness. Service, though, was efficient.
Overall, then, a useful place – especially for business – but it’s unclear to us whether it’s good enough to become a true ‘destination’.
• We did not get a chance to sample the fare at Grado, the new tapas bar/restaurant recently launched by local supremo Paul Heathcote. Its location, though – in New York Street, immediately behind Piccadilly Gardens – is undoubtedly very handy (not least for travellers through the city’s main railway station), and it looks very inviting from the outside.
• Another recent opening, similarly handy for Piccadilly Station, is Gastro. What struck us about Gastro is that it’s one of the very few new Manchester city-centre restaurants totally to have turned its back on the bar/nightclub aspirations which, to some extent, affect – or should that be afflict? – almost every establishment in town. On the ground floor, Gastro has a smart and well-stocked deli/café, where we enjoyed a breakfast of consistently good quality. Downstairs, there’s a plain but comfortable dining room, offering a menu that displays the attention to sourcing that’s evident in the retail operation above: if the quality of the cooking lives up, this could become one of the Manchester’s rare non-ethnic operations which is of more interest for its cuisine than its vibe.
