Archives for “Manchester” tag

Blink and you could miss it. There is no signage apart from a neon burger, three floors up. The nondescript building, sandwiched between the bars Socio Rehab and Keko Muko in the Northern Quarter, is Manchester’s newest restaurant. Behind a boring brown door, up some very steep stairs, is a loft apartment space converted into a wonderland of burgers and booze.

The venue has a wackiness about it, which makes your senses overload. The walls are inscribed with Charlie Sheen’s infamous rant, slap bang next to huge portraits, a jukebox and skateboards. The bar is brightly lit, but the rest of the rooms are disguised in a spider’s web of low lighting. Leaving an air of mystery; photography is not allowed (it was hard to not constantly snap away).

The food will make your mouth water. Like me and my friends, you will want to devour this small, yet amazing, menu. With names like Triple Nom and Animal, they make you smile with delight. There are fries covered in chilli and cheese, and must try the Suicide wings, they will make your mouth tingle with joy. Don’t worry; they won’t blow your head off!

The cocktail menu is a must. I recommend the silly titled Bitch Juice with its delicious mix of sloe gin and fruit juices. Don’t expect beautiful glasses, they all come in jam jars.  It’s a marvellous receptacle and great recycling!

Manchester is a wet city. You know that, we know that. It’s one of those things we all know. So what is the best thing to help you get warm? Yes, that’s right. Soup.

Soup Kitchen is in the heart of the northern quarter tucked on the edge of Stevenson Square. You can walk past it and miss it, but please don’t. This bar has a warm feeling. The setup of the bar is communal benches, so when there are a lot of people in there it has an amazing close feel to it.

With a great selection of beers and ciders on draught, which constantly changes, you can always try something new and local to the area.

The menu is simplistic and service is reasonably quick to serve as you wait in queue while it is prepared. The combination of soups, sandwiches and salads are to die for. I love the ham hock, cheese and onion marmalade sandwich (£ 4.50).

Check out the website for the gigs that happen in the club downstairs. Both local and touring bands appear so you should get a great selection of talent passing through. The venue itself is a 300-400 capacity venue so it is perfect for those new up and coming bands. This could possibly be one of my favourite venues in the city.

After recently visiting Brussels, home to a plethora of Belgian chocolate shops, on returning home my chocoholic tendencies were in a state of deprivation until I heard on the grapevine of a new chocolate shop having opened in Didsbury. Reassuringly bucking the trend of vendors shutting up shop to sell online, the owner of Cocoacobana found her website so popular that she decided to open up a ‘real’ store.

Selling a saliva-inducing selection of handmade white, milk and dark chocolates, it is chocolate-lovers heaven, with all items beautifully wrapped, making them look almost too good to eat. Only almost though!

With late night opening on Thursday’s until 21:00 I have no excuse not to nip down and get my chocolate fix (naturally justifying it as being for Christmas or birthday presents!). I’m particularly partial to the orange flavoured chocolates, but there are also more adventurous options to try such as basil flavoured truffles, all out on display making it very hard to resist!

Named after the late local historian, the Fletcher Moss is one of the few consistent pubs in the area, and by this I mean it always provides friendly, efficient service, drinks are reasonably priced and it retains the traditional English pub feel to it. I also like the fact that where most pubs have a target clientele which they deliberately appeal to, the Fletcher Moss always has a wide cross-section of customers from students and young professionals to families and retired locals (and even the occasional dog has been known to make an appearance).

Being a ‘proper’ pub and being owned by Hydes brewery, they serve ‘proper’ drinks such as cask ale, as well as the more mainstream beer, lager, cider and wine. The only downside is that it doesn’t serve food (though this is probably what has enabled it to retain it’s ‘pub’ status instead of being coerced into joining the current ‘gastropub’ trend), so a lukewarm Pukka pie and a packet of pork scratchings are about as exciting as it gets on the sustenance front.

The pub holds regular events such a pub quizzes, acoustic evenings and race nights. What I really like though is the fact that they have board games available to play and it’s not unusual to see a group of punters engrossed in a game of Scrabble…….though personally I’m more of a ‘Mouse Trap’ kinda girl.

For an alternative perspective of Manchester, the underground tour offers an unusual opportunity to see what lies beneath the well-trodden streets. Accompanied by an informative guide and an eager tour group, we all trundled in unison through the secret doorway which led to a seemingly never-ending stone staircase.

Lit only by the flicker of light offered by our torches, we descended into the depths of the city before emerging into a large, slightly sinister chamber. The sound of our voices echoed eerily, and the cold chill of the Autumnal air seemed somewhat poignant now having plunged into a new Manchester I had not witnessed before. This appeared to accentuate our sudden departure from the hustle-bustle of everyday life going on in the streets above.

An enlightening insight into the history of Manchester and the tunnels ensued as the tour guided us through tunnel after tunnel, each offering a new story, an interesting fact or a fascinating anecdote. After a thorough exploration of the tunnels the tour continued by returning to street-level, which evoked a feeling I imagine to be analogous to stepping out of a time machine.

Acclimatising once again to 21st century life and the realisation that what I had just witnessed wasn’t merely an illusion, I followed the tour guide as we now traced the tunnels from street level. Once again this was punctuated with historical updates and little-known nuggets of information before the tour concluded – a two hour Manchester enlightenment for me!