Eating local in Ramsbottom

Over the past few months, two tired old pubs have reopened under new ownership, all shiny and newly kitted out, with food of a quality to create a stir around my 'hood of Ramsbottom. I'm talking about The Eagle and Child and Hearth of the Ram. Both are doing the same kind of thing: enlightened updates of the sort of hearty fare that Lancashire mill workers would have eaten. If you're a fan of the food at Nigel Haworth's Ribble Valley Inns, or Robert Owen Brown's cooking at The Mark Addy, you'll know just what to expect. Inventive uses of black pudding? Check. Offal? Check. Local producers namechecked on menu? Check. Old school puddings? Check. It's crowd-pleasing stuff.

I was impressed by The Eagle and Child, just a short walk up the hill from Ramsbottom centre in the village of Shuttleworth. It's got all the earmarks of a great local, a comfortable but not fussy interior with nice views over the valley and fireplaces for chilly days, and a family-friendly atmosphere. Impressively, they've worked with the Incredible Edible Ramsbottom group to create an edible beer garden behind the pub which will grow food for the kitchens, and there is an innovative apprenticeship programme in place.

The food was very good, with generous portions served in a pleasantly relaxed fashion. My starter, a salad of new peas, broad beans, nuts and goats cheese in a light, sweet dressing was fresh-tasting and moreish. The perfect foil to my burger, a toothsome mouthful on a foccacia bun. It was a traditional British approach to the burger (season the beef and cook it through) rather than the American one I prefer, but pretty good for all that. The Lancashire cheese and tomato relish in there was a nice touch. Extra points for near-perfect onion rings.

My friend's fish pie tasted amazing but proved tricky to eat as it was so liquid it threatened to cross the border into souptown. For dessert, we demolished a plant pot full of tiramisu. With a few leaves stuck in the top layer of chocolate biscuit crumbs it was almost too adorable to eat, but not quite.We left full and happy.

Just down the hill near the banks of the Irwell is Hearth of the Ram. This pub has a different feel about it. It's more of an adult atmosphere, and I wouldn't be in a hurry to take kids here. I really like the interior, which is warm and stylish but a few shades more salvage-chic fashionable than the Eagle. When we went to celebrate a friend's birthday on a Friday night it was absolutely rammed, but some of the congestion should ease when a dining room opens upstairs. I was told it has the latest license in Ramsbottom (2:30 am, night owls) and definitely had an after hours vibe going on with some good James Brown on the stereo and lots of people drinking cocktails out of jam jars.

As you'd expect from the higher spec interior, the food is a more cheffily ambitious version of what we had at the Eagle, with microgreens, reductions and purple vegetables entering into proceedings. I ate from the a la carte menu. They offer another, lighter menu with burgers and the like at other times, but we weren't allowed to order from this menu, which seemed odd (and unfortunately prevented me from doing a burger-to-burger taste test). But I didn't really mind, as my pork cheeks were full of flavour and beautifully matched up with butternut squash and potato terrine, and the very large glass of Pinot Noir was excellent, though pretty expensive at £8. I stole a few bites of a friend's tasty rabbit and black pudding sausages, which I'll order next time. A dessert of berry baked Alaska was good but not great. The service was good, and we all enjoyed ourselves so much we ended up lingering over drinks into the wee hours. I'm really looking forward to my next visit.

A small rant: Weirdly, neither of these restaurants has prices on their menus online. It's just ridiculous not to give people some idea what they can expect to pay, especially when you're charging quite a bit more than the previous tenants for food. This is especially true at Hearth, where everything was priced just a couple of pounds higher than I thought it really needed to be. I understand they are trying to do a more ambitious thing with the food, and quality costs. But sadly, the price point means this will probably be a place I save for special occasions. The Eagle might see us more often. Nevertheless, both are extremely welcome additions to Rammy's dining scene. And with the similarly reinvented Shoulder of Mutton up Holcombe Hill apparently serving up cracking food too (though I haven't made it there yet to see for myself) this place is fast turning into gastro-pub heaven. Something the army of walkers, day trippers and steam train aficionados who descend on the town every weekend will surely appreciate.

Images: Hearth of the Ram, top, by Robert Wade via Flickr. All other images courtesy of The Eagle and Child.

Indian Summer

With two big festivals I'm involved in — Creative Tourist's Manchester Weekender and The Manchester Literature Festival — right around the corner, I've been insanely busy and never seem to have the time to pootle around the city the way I used to. Yes, there's been a complete absence of pootling, not much pottering and certainly no meandering for as long as I can remember. But with the insane Indian Summer we had going on last Friday I gave myself an afternoon and evening for some good old fashioned moseying around Manchester. First I went to my favourite city centre park: St. John's Gardens. You know Piccadilly Gardens? It's pretty much the opposite of that. Clean, green and leafy, quiet — and in Friday's heat, kinda sleepy. I lay down on the grass listening to music and almost fell asleep.

Then I went to The Book Barge. It's a floating bookshop shoehorned into a narrowboat that has been moored at Castle Quay for a few days. I was imagining a musty, dusty floating cabinet of curiosities. But it is nothing like that: clean and light, with a clever use of space and an immaculate stock of intelligently curated new books, serendipitous seconhand ones, a thoughfully-selected children's section and the sort of ephemera that book lovers drool over (Penguin tote bags, unjustly obscure magazines, bunting.) I ran into Adrian from The Art of Fiction. And I picked up a Puffin of Joan Aiken's The Whispering Mountain for £1. So I was happy.

I spoke with proprietor Sarah Henshaw about The Book Barge in this audioboo: The Book Barge comes to Manchester (mp3)

After a lovely few days in our city The Book Barge is now chugging away from Manchester to Skipton for the weekend. You can follow them on Twitter at @thebookbarge


From Castlefield I walked over to the opening of Asia Triennial Manchester, one of the nicest launches I've been to in a long time. Had a good chat with artist NS Harsha about his Spiritual Garlands comissioned by the amazing John Rylands Library. The garlands are intricate chains of individually-sculpted heads visitors to the library can wear around their necks, the chains emphasizing the way that ideas and knowledge pass from one person to another via books. I wished I could have gone on to Cornerhouse to see Rashid Rana but will have to save that for another time.

Then some very important business. Namely, barbecue. Our city recently became home to two new barbecue joints and after hearing good things from a number of people I headed over to Southern Eleven at Spinningfields. My first impressions weren't great. Too many hard shiny surfaces, which in addition to seeming uncomfortably trendy also meant it was loud. But we were able to sit on the patio. The staff were absolutely wonderful — they really took care of us. And the other thing I want to emphasize about this place is it's an amazing deal: low prices and big portions. We didn't leave feeling like we'd just been mugged, as is so often the case when dining out in Manchester.

I do love my barbecue, so I'm happy to report that the food was good. Pork belly ribs came with a brush-on pot of barbecue sauce and were nicely executed, though would have been better if a little more of the fat had been rendered on mine. Mac n' cheese was mighty fine. Onion rings and fries were both overseasoned; the first with chilli, the second with a superfluous combo of parmesan and truffle oil (and unfortunate that they were the pale, weedy kind instead of the skin-on, dark brown artisan variety that seem to be all the the rage in the USA these days.) Jalapeno cornbread tasted good but was a bit too fine and cakey in texture. And the Tennessee Rose cocktail I had was tall, pink, icy and flowery - just the drink for such a tropical evening. I forgot to take any pictures, but The Greedy Girl has just reviewed it as well and has some lovely pics on her site, so pop over there if looking at 'cue is what you wanna do.

NS Harsha Thought Mala image courtesy Asia Triennial Manchester

Fress to impress

Aloha, shalom and Happy New Year. I'm back from my maternal sabbatical to return to regular, or at least, regularly intermittent, blogging service. And I'm here to talk about food.

First, I'd like to call your attention to the resurgence of the foodie blogging scene in Manchester. Erstwhile Mancunian Foodie Sarah has cooked up a tasty little google map with all the food bloggers in the north of England plotted on it. Thanks Sarah! I'm adding the foodie bloggers in the Manchester area to my blogroll - quite a haul including Denton duo Eat Out Eat In, Stockport's Cookbook goodness, Foodographic in Chorlton and Mancfoodian.

A bit more digging revealed a few more new additions to the food blogging category: buttered crumpet, beccabakescakes and curry fiends Flavours of Manchester. Also, I'm not sure if The Greedy Girl is based in Manchester or just a frequent visitor to our delicious city, but I'm adding her anyway. Missed anyone? Let me know.

In other foodie news, the supper club trend hasn't missed Manchester, but most of the action has been taking place in twitterland. First, Gastro Club has been making a few fressers of my acquaintance very happy indeed. If you haven't heard about it before (you might have read this excellent summary on Inside the M60) it's a growing group of hungry folk who meet on the second Tuesday of the month for a themed dinner at a city restaurant. Some nice photos of past events here including the picture above by Samscam.

It was also on twitter that I also heard about Spice Club, a monthly Indian supperclub run by Monica from her Manchester home. She blogs about cooking at Monica's Spice Diary. Nice to have some off-menu culinary action in the city. More please.

Seoul Kimchi and Bubble Cafe

Where can you get the best dumplings in Manchester? Until recently the answer to that question would have been easy: Red Chilli, where the Beijing dumplings have long reigned supreme. But a new contender has emerged: Seoul Kimchi, a tiny grocery and restaurant on Upper Brook Street that serves up Korean home cooking. Many of the Asian restaurants in Manchester don't bother to make their own dumplings and seem content to serve frozen ones shipped from thousands of miles away. So the gyoza at Seoul Kimchi are a revelation: crisp on the outside, bursting with flavour inside, you can tell from the first bite that they're the real thing.

The japchae, a fried noodle dish, and bibimbap, a rice-based dish, were also excellent. Don't leave without sampling the kimchi, the spicy pickled cabbage that Koreans eat with practically everything. And there are lots of choices for veggies. It's nice to finally have an alternative to Koreana, which is much more formal (and more expensive). Unfortunately Upper Brook Street isn't really convenient to anywhere, but you can take the 50 bus right there from Spring Gardens. There are only three or four tables, and if it's full, well, Red Chilli have opened a new location nearby on Oxford Road.

These are good times to be a foodie in Manchester. We may not have any Michelin-starred restaurants, but on the casual/ethnic side we're doing pretty well. During my time living in New York I got swept into the city's amazing foodie subculture. There are thousands of people who comb the five boroughs for the ultimate felafel, soba noodles or corned beef hash, and cultishly track the movements of favourite street food vendors on Chowhound ("The Arepa Lady is back on Roosevelt Ave!") One of my favourite foodie haunts was Sau Voi Corp, a Vietnamese record store on Lafayette Street in Chinatown with a lucrative sideline in banh mi, unbelievably addictive Vietnamese sandwiches filled with meat and veggies.

When I moved here seven years ago, not being able to get banh mi in Manchester got me down; it was like some kind of litmus test. Well, I'm happy to report that you can now get these sandwiches here. The recently opened Bubble Cafe on Portland Street sells bubble iced tea and a selection of Vietnamese snacks including pho, noodle soup and banh mi sandwiches (Bubble's Sandwich). On the day I went, they were out of pate, a grievous omission, but the baguette had ham, sliced pork, grated carrot and coriander. Instead of the usual sweet and spicy sauce, though, it was topped with some kind of weird mayonaise - not an improvement. Still, it was good, and at £3.80 for a giant sandwich it's a solid lunch option.

Shaken and stirred to do list

1. Anyone who had tickets for the Vampire Weekend gig tonight at the Academy is SOL: they've pulled a sickie. But they ask us to "please send positive health vibes our way." Consider it done.

2. The Viva film festival, featuring the freshest cinema from Spain and Latin America, hits Cornerhouse next week. Have seen some great films there over the years that I'd otherwise have been completely ignorant of. Get your tickets early as each film only screens a couple of times and it's usually quite deservedly mobbed. And don't sit in front of me and talk to your friend or check your texts.

3. Ever wondered about those shadowy figures writing for Manchester's literary journals? You know you have. You can see some of them for real at a mega reading event featuring way too many writers from Ugly Tree, Lamport Court and Parameter, and enjoy the cool malty tipples of the ever-reliable Briton's Protection at the same time. Monday night 6:30 for 7.

4. Got a bike, unicycle or frankenwheelie? Grease it up and join the hordes for Manchester Critical Mass on Friday. Meets at 6pm at the Central Library.

5. If you're the least bit obsessed with the Obama-Clinton primary (and may I say, what's wrong with you people? I at least have the excuse of being a US voter) you might get a kick out of watching this campaign commercial that's currently airing in my home state of Vermont, which votes on Tuesday. Hear that heart-stirring theme swelling up in the background? Remind you of anything? Aww. It's amazing how close you can get to the West Wing music without actually playing it.

6. The ill-advised Manchester supercasino has once-and-for-all bit the big one. But maybe we'll get some more money as a consolation prize. And did anyone read this Jonathan Jones piece in the Guardian about public art and, specifically, the B of the Bang?

"...it's bad art; in fact I think the word "art" overpraises it. It's a piece of design, like a decoration devised for a shopping centre. There's something planned and corporate about it."

I couldn't agree more. What say we keep that money in East Manc and use it to fund a groundbreaking project that would recycle B of the Bang into another totally different artwork that neither quietly crushes your soul nor threatens passersby with grievous bodily harm? Schematic proposals on a postcard please.

7. As a follow up to the bewilderingly popular post about Manchester restaurants, I ate at Isinglass in Urmston for the first time last night. Everyone says how good it is. It was good. It's also a lovely place, with very atmospheric lighting and branches on the walls for decoration. I tried rabbit pie and venison but they had a smoked eel and beetroot tart on the menu too which I faintly regret not getting. If you haven't been, maybe you should go sometime.

Rayner: Manchester restaurants "not quite"

"What is it with Manchester? Why, when it comes to restaurants, is it always so nearly, but not quite? Why does every restaurant I visit fail to deliver? Is it me? Do they hate me so much that they decide to show me such a mediocre time I won't return? Or is it the city? It's a big buzzy place, Manchester, full of interesting-looking people, and there are lots of Mancunians with money - exactly what you need for a thriving restaurant scene. And yet almost every time I eat here, I return home wallowing in disappointment, as though a little bit of me has died."

That's the lede of Jay Rayner's review of Grado, Paul Heathcote's new Spanish place on New York Street, in yesterday's Observer.

Rayner is one of the few national restaurant critics I have much time for. He's down to earth and clearly loves food, but never takes it too seriously. He seems like the kind of guy you wouldn't mind sitting down to eat with yourself, unlike most of the pretentious, self-worshipping windbags sharpening their steak knives on restaurants these days. And most of all, he's fun to read. ("It's all very well to source Iberico ham, but to then machine-cut it is an insult to the pig. To cut it thick and serve it fridge-cold is to jump on the pig's grave while howling at the moon.") I've always wondered why he doesn't review more Mancunian eateries, and I guess now I know why.

To be fair, Rayner goes on to praise my beloved Red Chilli to the skies. But his indictment of the city's dining scene is pretty damning. And in a way, I think he's got a point. Not neccessarily about Grado (I haven't been there yet, mostly because Heathcotes places are, in my experience, kinda boring) but about the standard of eating here.

I don't have a huge eating out budget; I love food and seek out good restaurants when I can. But in the five years I've lived here, I've found that lots of places the local press made much of (The Bridge, The Ox, Yang Sing, Obsidian) didn't live up to the hype, while others (Le Mont, Establishment) never appealed enough to try. I haven't been to the Michelin-starred Juniper yet, but am dutifully trotting over there before Paul Kitching leaves. Like most people, I'm happy to stick to my less-exalted favourites in the city: This n' That, Red Chilli, or the wonderful Market if I have some extra cash. Still, for a rock-solid special occasion meal, I'll usually be heading into the surrounding bits of Lancs and Yorks, which isn't what I would have expected before moving here.

Rayner speculates that Manchester's culinary shortcomings are down to the calibre of cooks in the city's kitchens, which could well be. For my part, I think too much time and money goes into creating a restaurant that looks flash, while less attention is paid to what comes out of the kitchen - and with an increasingly savvy dining public up here this tendency is starting to seem out of place.

Northern Quarter coffee wars

What's with all the coffee? There's a new caffenero/starbucks/costa on practically every street, and we're even finally getting some more good independents. Two opened recently in the Northern Quarter, and I went and checked them out:

CUP is very nice indeed... a big, light and airy storefront cafe on Thomas Street with previous occupants Vox Pop records crammed into the back. The place reminded me a bit of the much-missed Suburb, but quirkier. Cup's menu had a small but fairly nice selection of soups and sarnies - I had scrambled eggs and fake bacon on a bagel, which hit the spot. And they sell Tunnock's teacakes there, so I was happy. Forgot to ask if they have wireless though.

This place is going to be deservedly popular, so I'd suggest swapping a few tables of merchandise for eating tables; the five they had in there the day I visited with Mancubist didn't cut it. And as much as I love designy china sets, I love smoothies named after Iggy Pop more. (photo courtesy Flickr user Marky1969.)

Interestingly, right next door is the newest incarnation of Love Saves the Day, competing for your Latte alliegance. You'll remember the original one in Tib Street became the massive one on Oldham Street which then closed. And what makes it interesting is that, for a while, LSTD was running a cafe concession in Vox Pop, which is now CUP.

Whatever. It's the same lovely people serving the same lovely drinks and snacks in a joint that's considerably more stripped-down and cosy than their last digs on Oldham Street. And unlike the one on Deansgate, you can actually sit down in there without worrying about barking your shins on a rip-roaringly expensive vat of single estate olive oil. And along with Odd and Trof there are now four or five places to caff up on Thomas Street that weren't there a year or two ago. Good stuff.

Burnt to the Ground report

Burnt to the Ground was a lovely afternoon out, very chilled and pleasant. I heard a few people saying how much it was like D.Percussion used to be, before it was overrun with menacing scallies and scarily wasted people. Plus when you paid your donation you got a nifty orange sticker that said "Are you the God of Hell Fire?", which I loved.

The few bands I saw were good, though the DJ area (with one bloke doggedly dancing solo) was too close to the main stage, Stevie Square not being all that big really, and if you hung out in the middle your ears were hurt by clashing-music-din. And watching the skateboarders take turns on the ramp trucked in by SkateMCR was strangely mesmerising.

There were older people, younger people, and even plenty of kids there. Loads of kids, in fact. In the middle of Broke n'£nglish's set of full-on Manc rap there was a tiny little boy sitting on the ground in the middle of the bouncing crowd filling a notebook with painstaking drawings of superheroes and video game characters. It was the kind of place where that could happen, and it would be okay. Though after talking to my friend Hazel, I'm half-convinced that the only reason some people bring their kids to these things is so they can smuggle in contraband beer in the stroller (apparently they never check 'em.)

Sadly, I missed out on Arthur Brown's performance, because I was eating what I now firmly believe to be the best dim sum in Manchester over at Pacific. But yes, he did bring his awesome flaming helmet. Wish I'd seen it! The above picture comes from laptoppingpong. Spinneyhead has loads up too.