#piemob

There is a new anarchistic culinary passtime going down in Manchester. Piemobs are impromptu twitter-organised outings to eat pie of a Friday lunchtime. Preferably with mash, peas and gravy.

Cup in the northern quarter gets a bit of a bad rep on the intertubes for lacklustre, disorganised and unfriendly service however they do do Pieminister pies which while not exactly made on the premises are always very passable. Sadly as a mob it was a bit of a mess as a number of people bailed out leaving only three of us.



A couple of weeks later a second sitting was organised at the Bay Horse, just a few doors down Thomas Street from Cup. This time our mob counted thirteen and the pub was even warned of our impending arrival by one of the twitterers. However come 1pm their pie selection had got rather limited. There was some kind of thai-fish pie and a vegetable pie. They may have been home made but neither were really up to the mark particularly when the blackboard had various interesting sounding gamey pie items on it which were not available to us. The food all came out very haphazardly, pies followed later by gravy followed by peas followed (once we'd pretty much eaten all the pies) by chips. The peas were really the only saving grace being minty and made of gently mushed garden peas rather than processed-to-death marrowfat ones.

The bar seriously needs raising here - so if anyone has any particularly good sources of pie in central Manchester please do leave a suggestion in the comments, or call it on Twitter using the #piemob hashtag. If we don't get any good ones we might have to abandon it all and have #falafelmob instead.

The Governor's House - AVOID

Yesterday I suggested we might go out to some kind of little festival type thing in Chorlton but instead we went for a rather poor pub lunch at the Governor's House in Cheadle Hulme. The food was seriously rubbish with horrendously overdone steak, nasty sauce with the children's spaghetti and meatballs (soundly rejected in favour of stolen chips) and was really not worth the cash. If we weren't hungry and they hadn't made us pay up front it would have been a walk-out job. Don't even bother going there.

Live from the Met

Didsbury isn't really my normal stomping ground but this Sunday afternoon (while recovering from an excellent and really quite silly party) I found myself in The Metropolitan, a very very large and exceedingly busy pub. For the lunchtime shift you have to negotiate your way past hoards of yummy mummies cooing sickeningly over their tiny spawn who are of course happily ensconced in their obligatory Bugaboos. It's that or bright young things being seen in the place to be seen - a balance which presumably tips more in their favour later in the evenings.

We were first told we'd have to wait a while for a table down at the back end of the place but miraculously a different one at the front became vacant and we pounced. Being crammed to the rafters this Sunday wasn't exactly making the staff happy - our initially rather surly waitress came and asked us if we wanted to order food and when we said "Yes" she wiped the table down and promptly took our menu away. Erm.... Helpful. However once our menus had been returned, a few other tables wiped down and the order had finally been taken and paid for (in advance mind) the time from kitchen to table was actually pretty quick. The menu clearly is carefully designed to make this an efficient ship.

The food is of typical pub variety but with a classy edge; soups, starters, roasts, burgers, and risottos (i.e. veg/pescetarian slops) each of which containing some kind of slightly fancy ingredient or other. The menu also has some "interesting" touches involving use of "quotations" like Sirloin of "Cheshire" beef and Risotto of "native" seafood. Quite where the seafood is "native" to was not mentioned and we tittered over the concept of mock-welsh lamb.

My burger was presented with a dollop of blue cheese, some tomato relish, a little salad and some much needed chips. Oh and the inevitable cocktail stick stabbed through its heart. The meat was perhaps a tad chewy but then this is supposed to be a posh burger made of nuggets of real meat and not factory scrapings. Steak hashé it ain't but it was just what I needed. It wasn't even over-cooked, with a bit of pink left in the centre - I hadn't specified or been asked how I wanted it doing though.

My fellow diners seemed pretty content with their selections and certainly very glad to be fed. With wallet ten pounds lighter and stomach much improved for being loaded back up I bade farewell to my ashen-faced companions, went back home and totally failed to get to sleep till 5am. Too much stuff churning in my head and general feelings of stressyness... waaaaa....

The Castle - return visit

Not content to go straight home I went down to the Castle again. I figure a good way to establish oneself in a community is to go to the pub a few times. Tonight I got as far as the back room and found the piano and a bunch of very very worse for wear welsh people with long hair. They were playing guitar very badly - only about three strings remained. According to the girl who was with them they had been totally fucked for about three days now. I suppose that's what passes for rock and roll. Sad. I was on my second half of Old Tom by the time they asked if anyone played the piano. I sheepishly raised my hand and tried to follow the three string chaos. We got some giggles from the bearded local biker types which was the best accolade available.

The piano is of course totally fucked as well. It's way out of tune and there are many many missing notes. Middle C was a great start being quite absent. I think some kind of piano restoration fund might be needed here. Still, limitation is probably the mother of invention and I enjoyed just going with it.

I might pop back for the open mic night next Monday - sounds like they are ok and it's so long since I've done anything like that. Could even prepare some little samples to go with if I get the time. I should sample the piano to get a hold on the tuning first.

Note: This is not an eatery, they do not do food.

Update April 09: The Castle has re-opened resplendent with new landlords and toilets. A piano restoration fund has been officially established and is doing well. Pay them a visit and follow them on twitter @thecastlehotel and do stick some pennies in the piano pot!