Taste of Manchester Editor Neil Sowerby welcomes the wind of change in our food and drink habits.
NOW the dust has settled it’s time to take stock of the 2017 Manchester Food and Drink Awards, when Veganism and Stockport came of age, provoking a backlash from the unconverted or unconvinced. Backlash is a bit strong perhaps – reset to a certain muttering among the Michelin-starved fine dining fraternity.
Keep Calm, we say, and Relish the Diversity. The food and drink scene when the Manchester Food and Drink Festival launched 20 years ago was immeasurably different. Even then the Midland French’s Michelin star was a distant memory yet the stuffy formality that went with it lingered on – like those ancient waiters pushing bread trolleys around the restaurant.
Flash forward a few more years and the top gongs were handed out on a renewable cycle – last year’s Best Chef restaurant this year’s Best Restaurant restaurant etcetera. As predictable as the restricted shortlists. These have been reshuffled up of late. The move to create separate categories of Best Fine Dining and Best Casual Dining only serves to emphasise we’re nearly all casual now. Winner of the former, El Gato Negro, could easily be pigeonholed as the latter. Who cares when the overall experience is so good?
Certainly Restaurant of the Year Bundobust is so casual as to be horizontal. Craft beer and veggie snacks served in recyclable tubs with disposable forks? It left at least one veteran reviewer, accustomed to silver service for his suppers, aghast. Unsurprisingly, he didn’t understand how Matthew Nutter of Stockport’s Allotment came to be our Chef of the Year. Vegan, like most of the Bundobust menu too, so anathema! The reason Matt won was his vivid culinary imagination, taking plant-based dishes on to a new plane. With no wagyu and foie gras in sight.
In an equally casual setting the other side of Stockport Market Place Where The Light Gets In won Best Newcomer because there is nowhere else like it. Not always a perfect thing admittedly. Challenging and revelatory at times. Check out the kohlrabi and lardo ‘terrine’ dish pictured. The Guardian and The Sunday Times both scored it five stars. MFD Awards judges made their own mind up and concurred. Both these restaurants are the antithesis of formal – there is a theme developing here.
The actual Casual Restaurant of the Year? Baratxuri in Ramsbottom. Long before Stockport, this far-flung mill town was flying the flag for culinary brilliance beyond Manchester city centre. Joe Botham, whose Levanter won Best Neighbourhood Restaurant in 2016, has been upping the game at his adjacent pintxos bari, installing a traditional Spanish oven in the new Comedor dining room. It paid off with a double triumph this time – winning Casual Restaurant of the Year and Best Out of Town Venue.
The fact that a trio of fantastic and ambitious city centre restaurants – Manchester House, Adam Reid at The French and Rabbit In The Moon – failed to carry off a single prize this time is not because the Awards are ‘dumbing down’.
No, it’s testimony to the richness of our food and drink scene and a new generation of chefs and customers open to global street food, the new beer culture, natural wines and less emphasis on meat. It has all translated into the most exciting Awards I can remember. The dining is still fine, but it isn’t Fine Dining.
- Just in case you missed them here are the Awards in full.