Manchester Restaurant Guide

2023 Review: This “family fave” has assembled a greatest hits of East Asian cuisine, from satay skewers, spring rolls and gyoza dumplings to nasi goreng, pad Thai, ramen and laksa. They’re “geared up for a great family experience with a top attitude towards children” – who will always find something to eat on the menu. There are now three branches in Manchester and one in London. Top Tip – “love the secret off-menu chicken options!”.

2023 Review: “A superior mainstream Chinese” – this large, modern Cantonese in the city centre is eighteen years old and fans say it “shows just how familiar dishes should be done”, and with “excellent service” too.

2022 Review: This celebration of Basque cuisine in a Lancashire former mill town is a sibling to Levanter a few doors away, and the two “brilliant” venues effectively operate as one, offering diners the option of Hispanic bar-hopping. The wood-fired Pereruela oven allows for larger dishes to be served, such as sirloin on the bone from 10-year-old Galician oxen, to go with the smaller pintxos and tapas.

As culinary icons go, this fine, Grade II space at the heart of Manchester’s most famous ‘dowager’ hotel is certainly up there – an impressive, high-ceilinged chamber where Mr Rolls met Mr Royce on the road to creating the UK’s most famous industrial company in 1904; and until 1957 an early recipient of the city’s first Michelin star. In recent times, Great British Menu winner, Adam Reid, has done his damndest to regain its premier ranking and some fans agree that his “excellent cooking deserves some special recognition as it is stronger than some Michelin star places”. All the menus here are in a tasting format and highly ambitious – there’s the twelve-course ‘Tipsy’ menu for £145 per person or a longer ‘Signature’ menu at £215 per person. The odd reporter considers it “expensive” but custom doesn’t seem to be in short supply. With its “bangin’ soundtrack”, moody lighting, 1970s-metal album menu typography and pared down table settings the seeming aim is to do everything possible to crush the idea that you’re eating somewhere stuffy.

Simon Shaw’s “vibrant” flagship tapas bar is “always buzzing” thanks to “very welcoming staff” and spot-on food – 20 years after opening in Ripponden, Yorkshire, where it set a new standard for Hispanic cuisine in the North, and 10 years since transferring to central Manchester. Shaw has diversified in recent times, with a trio of Black Cat Club shuffleboard bars in Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool.

This “great lively place” is certainly something a bit “different”: a Bavarian-style beer hall where the food (bacon kroissants with a ‘k’, schnitzel, spätzle and funky pretzel donuts) is more reminiscent of something you’d get up the Alps than in Manchester city centre. Much like an après-ski bar, it’s also all about entertainment, with regular cabaret and DJ nights amplified by further insanity during Oktoberfest. The local Mission Mars group who run it now has outposts in Birmingham, Liverpool and (as of early 2024) a ‘600-cover pleasure palace’, as an impressed Grace Dent put it in the Guardian, on London’s Leicester Square, which has taken over the old Rainforest Café site.

2022 Review: Multi-Michelin-starred Barcelona chef Paco Pérez was the marquee signing for Pep Guardiola, Txiki Begiristain and Ferran Soriano, the trio behind Manchester City’s success, when they launched their upscale Catalan restaurant three years ago. The cool interiors – industrial chic for communal eating on the ground floor, minimalist glamour upstairs – are designed to throw a focus on the food, served as ‘tastets’ (small plates with more complexity than tapas). The verdict? definitely Premier League (in both quality and prices), if not yet a Champions League winner.

“Affordable fine dining” – say fans – makes these Fitzrovia and Canary Wharf venues (from Nico Simeone’s Glasgow-based national chain) “good for date nights” and “real value-for-money”. “The tasting menu changes regularly, so it’s a different experience every time” – the formula being “no mystery: you get to taste small samples of delicious food all related to a specific, changing theme”. (“We’ve been twice this year – more themes have caught our eye without the window of opportunity to try them. It’s not filling, but a really enjoyable eat”). There is, though, an alternative jaundiced view, which is that they offer “style over substance – you’ll leave still feeling hungry and the venue is noisy, like being in a canteen”.

“Always delivers and you can rely on excellence every time!” – the Deansgate outpost of this super-successful steakhouse chain occupies a late-Victorian former courthouse, next to Spinningfields, and is celebrating its tenth year in the city in 2025. As at all its siblings – which are increasingly international with the expansion of the group – its core offering is a mouthwatering variety of well-matured, top cuts from grass-fed beef sourced around the world, all expertly prepared and washed down with the “varied and interesting, if pricey” selection of wines and cocktails. It’s a reliable way to spoil yourself, but “the evening can get very expensive”. Top Tip – “Set lunch on a Monday when you can bring your own wine for £5 represents excellent value”.

2022 Review: The former Deansgate branch of Zizzi – an elegant, Grade II-listed space with 8-metre high ceilings – is set in late 2021 to be home to what is often touted as ‘the world's best pizza’, as made famous by Julia Roberts in Eat, Pray, Love. The city prides itself on knowing its way around a slice – it will be interesting to see how this newcomer stacks up.

2022 Review: Grand Pacific's sibling enjoys an impressively posh setting (replete with glamorous cocktail bar) in a basement off Deansgate, making it perfectly “designed for a date”. The food – Aussie/pan-Asian sharing plates – “ranges from average to excellent”, with a shout-out for the “beautiful” bento-box dessert.