So there are good restaurants and bad restaurants when you have a baby, and which ones turn out which way is often a surprise. The Three Fishes in Mitton seemed like a good idea for a baby-friendly outing - a country gastropub run by the Northcote Manor folks. We've been before and liked the food. But with a kid we didn't feel welcome. Ended up shoved into a noisy table by the door, and our server got majorly pissy when asked to keep my food warm while I fed the bambino. He was so rude about it that a woman at a nearby table actually complained. And now I don't really want to go back there, like, ever.
But now that the wonderful Food by Breda Murphy has opened just down the road in Whalley, I'll be hitting that instead when I'm in the Ribble Valley. We had a really good meal there last weekend. My chicken salad had generous pieces of perfectly cooked Goosnargh bird with grapefruit, cashews and an interesting selection of greens and herbs. They also do a mean orange cake.
I was a little worried about our dinner with some visiting family at The Market - I adore the restaurant (above), but wondered how the somewhat fancy place would react to an 8-week old baby. We were treated like royalty - seated at a table in a quiet corner, cheerfully supplied with a pitcher of hot water to warm our bottle and even a cloth so we didn't get our table wet lifting it out. They kept dinner warm without being asked, and were generally lovely about the baby - made us feel like they were glad we had brought her in. They've started opening for Sunday lunch, by the way.
Love Saves the Day has opened a third outpost on Dale Street. It's in that weird, smallish concrete building right next to the Piccadilly Basin car park. It's tiny, but quite nice and stocked with plenty of goodies, a bit more like their Deansgate deli than the minimalist one on Thomas Street (which is soon to get a refit, I hear.)
The long-awaited (okay, at least by me) bagel place in the Arndale Centre has opened. Hilariously, it's called Bagel Nash. Yeah, like Nash Bridges. It's probably too late to tell them the right way to spell nosh. Haven't tried it yet, but they seem to have about a hundred different kinds of bagel sandwich going on.
Oh, and Jay Rayner actually gave a Manchester restaurant a positive review in Sunday's Observer. He really liked The Modern, the new place at Urbis.
