My first encounters with foreign food – not counting Vesta chow mein or ravioli in a tin – with Chinese (sweet and sour chicken, back of Anne Thomas’s car, Hindley, circa 1978), proper curry (lamb pathia, Oriental Grill, Southport, 1980) or Italian (penne amatriciana, Bolton Last Drop Village, 1981) were all life-changing moments; the realisation that eating could be fun, delicious and companionable, not just the joyless taking on of calorific fuel to ward off starvation. Over the last few years, though, British or more correctly English food has been fighting a rearguard action and re-asserting itself, thanks to some high profile restaurants and celebrity chefs.
Now, rather like the food critic, of whom more shortly, the celebrity chef is a tricky beast. I like good food but I have no desire to eat it beneath pictures of the proprietor sulking in a bandana, which is why I tend to avoid Marco Pierre White’s places. I agree with the singer Paul Heaton, who remarked recently, ‘women have been cooking for a thousand years and no one ever mentioned it. Men have been cooking for ten minutes and they never stop bloody going on about it’.
But they’re not all cut from this cloth, and some chefs have been robust in their championing and rehabilitation of British food. Gary Rhodes of the sticky up hair was the pioneer here, winning a Michelin star at The Greenhouse in London for his braised oxtail, fishcakes, faggots, and bread and butter pudding. Then St John in Clerkenwell made sucking on bone marrow trendy rather than disgusting. Steven Doherty, in various Cumbrian dining rooms, has continued the trend for good English food made with our own seasonal specialities – asparagus, rhubarb and cabbage in spring; salads, strawberries and peaches in summer; in autumn, mushrooms, figs and game; and, in winter, root veg, russet apples and venison.
During the height of Britpop, that slightly hysterical, speed-fuelled re-discovery of all things home-grown, there was a café in Camden that everyone on ‘the scene’ frequented. Most lunchtimes, you would find pale, dishevelled members of Menswear or Elastica in there, as well as journos like myself, getting over their hangovers with fish fingers, steak pie or jam roly-poly. It was known to all, in a deliberate reclamation of a maligned institution, as ‘School Dinners’, and it was loved partly out of nostalgia for childhood and partly because the food hit the spot. There are times when a spinach and ricotta parcel just will not do. ‘School Dinners’ was ahead of a coming curve. So it came to pass that the chalkboards of hip boozers throughout the land had their confits and roulades wiped away and fish finger sandwiches and bangers and mash chalked up. Or maybe even ‘crispy squirrel and Vimto trifle’.
That was the name of a cookbook written by Robert Owen Brown, the chef most associated in the north-west with the defiantly, deliberately quirky, embracing of the north’s curious food heritage. He is a pioneer of what became the foodie mantra of ‘top to toe eating’ – the kind of food that my iron-stomached Lancastrian grandmother would have revelled in: tripe and ‘lights’, lungs and testicles. He has also, for four years, served the most original pub grub in Manchester.
The pub’s called the Mark Addy, who you may recall as the genial, well-upholstered actor from The Full Monty. But he took his stage name from a famous Salford pub landlord and boatman of the Victorian era who was, it seems, always leaping in the filthy Irwell to save people from drowning. He saved 50 people, it’s said, and won the Albert Medal, the precursor to the George Cross. The pub named after him stands on the bank where Addy often launched himself into the river. In fact, you could be forgiven for thinking, at first glance, that it was a roadside pissoir, tucked away under an arch on a bridge across Manchester’s treacly parent river, the Irwell, or the Sewage Canal as it was jokingly once known.
Christmas is coming and there are skaters on the ice rink in Spinningfield, a scene that’s Rockefeller Plaza meets Brueghel, as we head across a glistening, frosty Manchester for something warming at the Mark Addy. Though Scrooges may cry ‘humbug’, it takes a hard heart not to enjoy the way that northern cities, indeed cities throughout Britain, have started to copy their continental neighbours as Christmas approaches. The crowds may be oppressive but having a Glühwein and a bratwurst in a chilly market square is surely a nicer way to spend the week before Christmas than queuing up for a dressing gown in Marks and Spencer’s.
There are tents like Inuit settlements in the centre of town, booming with smoke and laughter, and a huge shack of a bar that resembles an old arctic encampment at Spitsbergen. Inside, though, rather than bearded men in parkas (not counting the hipsters) with rime clinging to their whiskers and bloodied harpoons, there are girls dressed up to the nines, sipping champagne and hot cider by flaming braziers.
Walking along the icy river Irwell, this reborn city feels like Oslo or Copenhagen, modern, white, gleaming, cold, with a slightly sixties sense of urban optimism and space-age cool. Like the now stunning downtown Newcastle riverscape, 25 years ago, no sensible person would have wandered down here unless you wanted to score drugs, or women, or rob an abandoned boatyard. Nowadays, although it maintains an air of darkness and mystery, and will never be cosy like the Cotswolds, it is a place to wander and be impressed by both the civic and commercial renaissance of ‘Cottonopolis’. On one side, the great white edifice of the modern courthouse, guarded by pillars of light along the colonnades, and on the other, the great modernist cliff of Manchester’s only five-star hotel, the Lowry. When not painting his Berwick seascapes this is where the artist painted a different Salford, one of cripples and rickets and haunted ginnels. At the Lowry Hotel you can recline on a red leather chaise longue in your Mies van der Rohe style room and sip an Earl Grey martini from room service above the streets.
Down some steps that Lowry would have loved, wonky and crepuscular, and into the pub itself. One disgruntled online reviewer said that it smacked of a ‘1980s social club’ and I know what they mean; there is a certain faded quality to the interior, particularly the drab, municipal entrance, a relic indeed of the design-addled eighties. But the staff are as warm as the night and the Perspex receptions are cold. I order a bottle of Shiraz and he commends, ‘Good choice … would you like to taste it?’ Seeing that it’s a screw top, I say there’s no need, as it won’t be corked. ‘Oh I know, but some people like to test the temperature,’ and at this he rolls his eyes good-naturedly. I like this about northern waiters. Some people don’t think they’re obsequious and fawning enough, but their impish cheekiness adds a bit of seasoning to the dish, I think.
The food is, as I believe some people say, ‘to die for’. I go for everything that smacks of Brown’s signature spit-and-sawdust style, the ‘Manchester thingymabobs’ he’s become known for. One of these is crispy battered spam fritters, which are properly sensational. Yes, you can feel your arteries fur and thicken just by looking at them, but the memory of that crunching crust and that warm pink savoury slab of meat will remain with you as a wonderful memory in the hospital bed.
Then there is the Manchester egg, a creation of this city to rank with better known inventions. It was dreamed up in a pub on the other side of town, The Castle in the Northern Quarter when, while eating Seabrook’s salt and vinegar crisps and a pickled egg, web designer and amateur cook Ben Holden was inspired to create a distinctly northern riff on the slightly underwhelming picnic staple of the scotch egg; a pickled egg encased in black pudding, with crunched crisps as the shell, served warm with a liquescent yolk. I want one so much right now I would steal one from an old lady’s handbag if the occasion presented itself. I ordered a boxful once when the Manic Street Preachers played live on my last radio show from the Beeb’s old Oxford Road studio. They went in seconds in a flurry of hands and mouths. I think drummer Sean had six.
Hollywood A-lister Donnie Wahlberg loved these, and doubtless he also loved the Lancashire hotpot, ribeye steak with duck-fat chips, bread and butter pudding, if not the shabby carpet. Intimate and candlelit, with the odd adventurous rower or goose gliding by on the inky Irwell, I couldn’t help but notice that there were only two occupied tables, whic
h was criminal for food this good. That was just before Christmas 2013 and after the festive break it never re-opened. Robert Owen Brown decamped to a gourmet dining club in Didsbury and the contentious view about Manchester’s attitude to good food, i.e that it doesn’t appreciate it, gained more credence.
There’s a Manchester drinkers’ saying, oft repeated by the excellent Guy Garvey of Elbow, that goes ‘eating’s cheating’. Roughly, it means that it’s wrong to waste a moment of the evening’s boozing time on something as needless and potentially sobering as food. It’s a joke, of course, but at its heart it does seem to bear out a longstanding opinion of Manchester, namely that it loves its clothes, its football, its music and its partying, but it isn’t that fussed about food. While brethren cities like Birmingham have four Michelin-starred restaurants and Birkenhead, Sheffield and Newcastle have a smattering, Manchester – Britain’s second city, it likes to think – has none and hasn’t had one for 40 years. Nottingham has. Hunstanton has. Abergavenny has. Even the kind of northern town Manchester swaggeringly looks down on – Blackburn, Ilkley and Birkenhead, can take the wind out of pimp rolling, swaggering Manchester’s sails here. They’ve all got starred establishments. Cock of the north it may be, cook of the north it certainly isn’t.
It isn’t for want of trying. Raymond Blanc and Marco Pierre White both tried and failed, which must have made Marco even crosser than he looks in his promo shots. More recently, two of Britain’s best chefs have been fighting a very public battle, with each other and with the imperious, mysterious Michelin judges, to get that long lusted-after star.
Aiden Byrne is that rarity, a Scouser working for the good of Manchester (and, of course, for the good of his employers the powerful, glitzy Living Ventures whose bar and restaurant chain has colonised many a downtown space). Byrne’s restaurant is the self-consciously stylish Manchester House, located in a functional glass eyrie above the city centre. ‘It looks like a very normal city tower, but don’t be fooled. Inside lies a very special experience for both food lovers and lovers of a life with a view’ runs the blurb, a little meaninglessly. You can glean quite a bit of the restaurant’s outlook by the fact that the staff are almost exclusively drawn from the city’s elite MAWs, as they are known in the dismissive vernacular – model, actress, whatever – hired on the basis of youthful beauty rather than skill in shelling a langoustine, and that on opening night one of the starters seemed to be a kind of large edible white pill, presumably to remind the now mature and well-heeled diners of their youthful indiscretions on the dancefloor. (Manchester trades unashamedly and rather tackily on all this history. When the Haçienda nightclub, the city’s musical fulcrum in the 1980s and 90s, was turned into upscale city centre flats, a huge promotional poster adorning the building said ‘The Party’s Over, It’s Time To Come Home’ much to the groans of Manchester’s cooler residents.)
Byrne has had to reconcile this vibe of slightly gimmicky aspirational trendiness with his undoubted skills in the kitchen and the purism of his cooking. We know this because it was the subject of a TV show in 2014 called Restaurant Wars which pitted Byrne, a little contrivedly, against his rival in the race for Manchester’s first Michelin star, Simon Rogan.
Rogan is a boy from the south coast who has been helping improve the north’s reputation for food this past decade, starting with his restaurant L’Enclume in the tiny north Lancashire village of Cartmel. With two stars there, he was lured to Manchester for a new challenge, one he seemed to relish. ‘I have always loved Manchester – it’s like being in London, but on a smaller scale,’ he said, innocently risking the wrath of every proud Mancunian (except the ones who moved to London as soon as they could. You, and they, know who they are). ‘It’s trendy and dynamic, but very accessible and friendly. Overall, the Manchester dining scene has been quite casual and bar-driven, but this is a great opportunity to set the trend for luxury dining, and the city is definitely ready for it.’ Was it? Some weren’t sure and still aren’t.
Restaurant Wars found Rogan having taken over a city dining institution, The French restaurant at the Midland Hotel, and trying to drag it, and its stolid regular clientele, into the twenty-first century. When the very first Michelin guide was produced in the UK in 1974, The French was awarded a star. But not for long, and since then it is seen to have been left behind by changes in food fashion and styles, a place that is forever a boozy lunchtime in the late sixties, where Anthony Burgess, Bill Grundy and Matt Busby are finishing the turbot and chateaubriand and moving onto the port. In the TV series, Rogan was seen trying exasperatedly to win over both old staff and regulars such as Mr and Mrs Best, who have been coming every Wednesday for decades and spending about 25 grand a year. Mrs Best has only ever had the omelette and smoked salmon, which even by my mother’s standards is conservative. Rogan’s task is to get them to try a 12-course tasting menu with not a well-done steak or a coq au vin in sight.
Well, I tried it, Mrs Best. And I loved it. I have to be honest here and say that I can’t really recall much of what I ate, as my last clear memory of the evening seems to have been the prosecco I had in the lounge served by a very suave, accomplished, old-school maître d’-cum-waiter. That’s the way I like it. Call me old-fashioned but I don’t want to think that my waiter might leave at any moment to join Hollyoaks. Oh, and I remember the room too; the old sickly, ornate, mirrored dining room that felt like you were eating inside a giant meringue has been stripped down, with Skandi-style rustic green natural fabrics and wood. It’s more Ikea than the Ivy and it won’t be to everyone’s taste but I liked its crisp, relaxed informality.
The meal passed by in a fragrant and delicious blur of hake and foam and tiny balls of clotted stocks and fronds and drizzles and mouth-watering morsels of meat and vegetables (from other planets, I assume) that I couldn’t place but tasted insanely good. The canapés were mind-blowing: parsnip crisps with pork fat and smoked eel, a wooden tray of black pebbles that looked like something from a Shinto shrine but held two pickle-poached mussels on the half shell. There was some raw ox in coal oil, which sounds like something you’d eat in a ruined power plant after a nuclear war has destroyed civilisation, but was, in fact, wonderful.
If I’m a little vague, forgive me. It was a lovely night and I didn’t want to spoil it by scribbling throughout it. I should have taken notes I suppose but I didn’t want to look like a food critic. Restaurateurs live in fear of food critics and their reviews, bowing and scraping and doing their best to please them but secretly they despise them, think they know nothing about food and want to skewer them to the table with the fish knives and lobster picks. Well, that’s what I think anyway, even if Simon Rogan didn’t, actually, say this when I worked alongside him.
Yes, that’s right. I was Simon Rogan’s sous chef once. Just for a day; an insight into the backstage world of the kitchens as part of a stay and dinner at L’Enclume, a dinner that I helped prepare. It was a fascinating experience, not least because it exploded pretty much every myth that TV has helped to create and foster about chefs and kitchens these past couple of decades. If your experience of restaurant kitchens is limited to watching Gordon Ramsay through splayed fingers, you will imagine them to be a Fight Club held in an Inner Circle of Hell; a horrible bear pit of overcooked, saggy male egos, where a dislikeable, foulmouthed bully barks at younger men and reduces them to tears over a collapsed soufflé or lumpy coulis; a preening macho world of sweat and anger.
Well, take it from me, the sweat is all glycerine and the anger is as staged as an Albert Square Christmas dinner. The kitchen at L’Enclume was a model of well-ordered calm and efficiency, and for good reason: it’s a place of work not a boxing ring. Simon told me, while making me the best omelette I’d ever had, that you simply could not run a decent restaurant in the odious, grandstanding way that the Ramsays and Whites ham up for the cameras.
‘See that guy there,’ said Simon, indicating a young blond man julienning a courgette. ‘He’s been with me four years and I’m tra
ining him up to be my second in command. I’ve invested a lot in him, and he with me. If I spent my time screaming and f-ing and blinding at my staff, the food would be shit because people don’t work well under those conditions, and my staff turnover would be phenomenal. I’d lose good staff like him as they’d be coming and going all the time. Shouting at people … it’s all macho bollocks for the telly.’ He added that in Ferran Adrià’s elBulli in Spain, for many years the world’s greatest restaurant and a place still spoken of with reverence by gourmets, there were highly prized tables downstairs in the kitchen, and from these you could see the staff glide around in silence and Zen-like calm under Adrià’s patient but critical eye. ‘It was like a bloody temple.’
I deconstructed a tequila sunrise dessert and helped with the smoking, billowing flasks of liquid nitrogen. I skinned some cow tongues – that wasn’t that great to be honest – and I filled the hypodermic syringes with the egg yolk mixture that, later that evening, diners would, with childlike glee, squirt into their hot clear Chinese soup and would instantly become a noodle. ‘Isn’t this great?’ I wanted to shout across the dining room, ‘I filled those syringes,’ thrilled to be part of the whole theatrical experience.
I also got an insight into how patient and forgiving a restaurateur must be with diners. When the cheese trolley arrived, laden with a hundred or so local cheeses of every flavour and hue and texture, a loud and very blokey bloke at the next table boomed, ‘Got any Cheddar? I’m not into all this fancy stuff,’ hoping that his regular guy ‘bantz’ would impress the ladies at the table. An intense wave of misery descended and time expanded sideways. The ladies looked like they wanted to crawl under the table and weep.
The Pie At Night: In Search of the North at Play Page 19
