Manchester, Spanish Restaurant Guide

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.

“Wherever you sit – the downstairs bar, the rooftop terrace (lovely on the top floor in summer), one of the booths – you can hardly go wrong and the tapas remain excellent” at Simon Shaw’s happening multi-level townhouse, which remains one of the more high-profile locations in the city. “It’s hard to criticise anything, everything is just done really well”, and it helps that “staff are well informed”.

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.

This Deansgate-based quartet offers a “great selection of tapas”, after two decades at the forefront of Hispanic cuisine in Manchester. The excitement level has fallen off a little in recent years, but there’s little to suggest that standards have greatly declined. The original is now joined by branches in the Northern Quarter, Knutsford and Altrincham.

2022 Review: “Gorgeous tapas dishes, wine and decor” – it’s “worth the struggle to get a table in this popular little place”, tucked away in a “quaint location in the hip suburb of Chorlton” and a hit for more than a decade.