THE Good Food Guide never gets us all steamed up in the way Michelin does. It’s been around 65 years, its entries championed in the first instance by its readers rather than being the sole preserve of professional inspectors. This is reflected in a companionable read – between the lines you can gauge if an establishment is falling from grace, but accentuate the positive is still the mantra for 2006.
With a perfect 10, Simon Rogan’s L’Enclume can only plummet from grace one day but there are no hints it might. Michelin-starved sibling the French (17th to L’Enclume’s 1st in the Top 50 restaurants) merits a mighty 8 here, the best score in Manchester by a way with the pertinent comment that the cooking is “getting better and better as time goes on.”
Biggest local change from last year is recognition of some excellent new wave Indian restaurants, Cheadle rivals Indian Tiffin Room and Aamchi Mumbai to join Ramsbottom’s Sanmini and Ashton’s Lily’s – Bollywood Masala (Punjab with pizazz) on Liverpool Road is more of a surprise since the GFG is usually straitlaced about pizazz and bling.
Hence the constant preference for gastropub stalwarts in the sticks such as The Waggon at Birtle (we’ve never made it out there – our loss?) and The White Hart at Lydgate (we have and it deserves to be in the Guide’s Top 50 pubs, main picture). Top of the Guide’s pub list for the entire country is the Freemason’s at Wiswell, near Whalley, where chef/proprietor Steve Smith is doing amazing things. If you have one country run out to dine this year make it here.
We were surprised Solita made it (score 1 ‘satisfying a primal need’), because editor Elizabeth Carter and her team don’t come across as dirty food aficionados; Hawksmoor is more their haunch of beef and scores 3; fellow newcomer Iberica is nowhere to be seen, but then none of its London branches are included either.
TOM has its chain reactions with the best of them but finds this inexplicable. And why no Brassica in Heaton Moor, which has just won its first Michelin Bib Gourmand?
The Good Food Guide 2016 (Waitrose, £17.99).