Red N Hot, Chinatown

Manchester's Chinatown is a slightly daunting place with restaurants, supermarkets and a hundred and one associated emporiums crammed in a few blocks of tall northern brickwork. Making a decision as to where to go can be pretty tough.

One of my favourites which I found pretty early on in my wanderings is Red N Hot an authentic Szechuan restaurant, tucked away up a flight of stairs on Faulkner Street. The restaurant has been refurbished recently and taken on a much more stylish appearance with it, before this it was pretty basic feeling but consistently packed with Chinese people tucking in to all manner of peculiar things. I've rarely seen many western faces in there, perhaps because the stairs and the fact that you can't see in from the street puts off the less intrepid visitors.

So how brave are you? A must is the hotpot - you are delivered a cauldron of boiling stock (normally divided into spicy and not-spicy segments) and a tray of raw ingredients which you cook yourself in the pot. The selection of fish, meat, noodles, veg, mushrooms and other bits can of course tailored to your dietary needs - though it's likely the stock isn't of purest vegetable origin... Chuck a few things in and fish them out when you're happy with how they're done. Take your time. They have recently replaced the gas burners and bottles in the tables which really hampered legroom, the new electric hotplates being way more sensible.



The regular dishes can be just as daring - fancy a plate of "Duck tongues" or "Pigs ears"? I tried them both at the same time which was a bit much. If you're in for a bit of a banquet they do a marvellous pork hock which is devilishly huge - the manager described it along the lines of "In Chinese families it's the dish we cook when the prodigal children come home from the big city".

Update: Apart from the upgraded tables (edited in above) they have also introduced ordering via laptop - which seems like a bit of a gimmick but somehow managed to deliver our starters phenomenally quickly. In combination with the hotplates I suspect we may find that the laptops have nice melty edges after a while...

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....

Meat defeat at Pau Brazil

It's another Northern Quarter Novelty Eatery... Pau Brazil is on the corner of Lever Street and Great Ancoats and is open from noon-til-midnight every day.

The fatal mistake to make is to think it's like a Chinese buffet and load up your plate with heaps of stuff from the central counter. There are lovely stews there (melty oxtail mmmm) but by filling yourself too quickly there is the danger that you'll miss out on the main event. It's a drink and graze kind of place, not a big fat heap of food on your plate and stuff it all in job.

The "churrascaria" concept exemplified here is that you sit down, get some drinks and perhaps a bit of salad and the waiters will meander around the restaurant with large bits of meat on spikes and slice some chunks off for you as they pass. You are also given a set of coloured discs with which you can control the waiters' attention traffic-light style. Green for "more meat", red for "leave us alone". It took us quite a long time to figure this out - by which point we were very very full.

The meat on spikes thing - I think you can afford to be a little fussy with... don't be shy to send a cut of meat away if it looks a little dry, there will be another one along in a minute. Saying which bit you want - "I want that nice juicy fatty bit from the top please" is perfectly acceptable form.

For £22.50 a head (fixed price, not including drinks) it's really not a cheap dinner, but it is good fun and certainly memorable. Again it does get busy and is worth booking ahead. Hopefully if I can find a suitable meat-eater to accompany me I'll get to try Manchester's other (and marginally cheaper) Brazilian offering, Tropeiro. Oh and next time I'll prepare myself for taking it all very very slowly.

Did I say - don't try taking vegetarians out here. You'll look very stupid okay!

Ning nang nong

It's been over a year though I've not been missing out on lunches, dinners or otherwise in the meantime... Just missing out on passing them around the gentle readers of this blog. A few recent encounters with fellow mancloggers though has given me the strength to pick up the ailing laptop and hit the keys. Let's just damn well get it out there. Thanks folks.

So... What's been happening? I'm living in a nice little flat somewhere in central Manchester (no longer time-sharing with my mum) and having a complicated old time dealing with the changes in my domestic life.

So where have I gone when things go wrong? To Ning (nang nong) on Oldham Street - which is a most wonderfully excellent Malay / Thai / Indonesian restaurant suitably bedecked with fancy wallpaper and lightfittings. I've been there a bunch of times with friends (and not easy-to-please ones at that) and apart from being conveniently near my flat is an absolutely guaranteed crowd pleaser.

Hitting the slightly-non-standard oriental boxes while being accessible (offal is in short supply here) they manage to conjure up very flavoursome food packed with more peanuts than a Marathon bar and enough chilli to make your brains explode a few times over the course of the night (not in a constant way like a vindaloo mind - contrast is the thing here).

It's popular - if you're going there on a weekend really make sure you book. I've been turned away on several occasions and squeezed in begrudgingly on a few others. On a weekday there is a bit more slack but really it's a plan worth executing with some forethought.

My favourites here, starters being a major temptation; the Gado Gado salad, the "street style" fritters (real name escapes me but they are amazing!) nicely cooked calamari, and actually just pick things at random that you've never heard of and you really can't go wrong. Vegetarians can just about get by here and they seem happy and able to do vegetarian versions of many dishes, fish and meat eaters will be very happy bunnies.

And if you really want to get stuck in they do cookery classes - the perfect gift for any special chef in your life.... I'd like a special chef...

Red Chilli

Here's one that got away - and a very nice one at that. We're back in Chinatown on Portland Street. Reassuringly Red Chilli seems to use a one-stream approach to chinese quisine so no need (as Neil Sowerby sort of said) to go for off-menu macho jackass behaviour. And best of all it's not just boring old Cantonese. When I was in there it was heaving with happy diners, mostly oriental. A good sign. Sweet Mandarin by contrast was totally British though I suppose in a very different catchment area.

For starters I had "beijing dumplings" which I have fond memories of eating far too many of when my dad's friend Chen cooked for us back home in Lancaster when I was about 7. Never seen them at a restaurant before.

Then I think for the main I had some kind of bird-nest-fish-basket thing which was pretty spicy as I remember. It was fine but I was already creaking under the weight of all those dumplings. Perhaps I should have read the rest of Neil's review and had the Lamb dish. Well worth a visit and definitely to be returned to at some point.

The Orangery

The Orangery is a very pleasant wine bar in leafy Heaton Moor with a big stained-glass roof over the back-section of the restaurant and little terraces to front and rear for sunny days and smokers. The decor feels nice and light, the coffee and cakes are wonderful. And the food while often a little slow to come (it says so on the menu too) makes up for itself by being unfailingly very good.

I've been here loads either bringing friends and relations for a nice bite or in less happy moments used to use it as a bit of a bolt-hole, going in there for a coffee after seeing the doctor in Heaton Moor while waiting for the pharmacy to sort out my citalopram hydrobromide - that kind of thing. Glad I'm not on that stuff any more, it was giving me lock-jaw.

Today the menu seemed pretty different from how it had been back in the summer. I had the seafood pancakes which came served rather like canellonni - in a creamy bachemael and the thing was f**king gorgeous. Goopy, fishy, cheesy, yum. After a very unpleasant morning it was exactly what I needed and made me feel able to brave the rain and the train ride back to the flat.

The service was very pleasant and I felt like they were attending to me well considering it was reasonably busy. There was one time that the girl serving us didn't know what Prosecco was, but hey this is Stockport...

Sweet Mandarin

I went to a very glass-fronted place in the northern quarter (opposite the previously reviewed TNQ) called Sweet Mandarin. It looked nice enough - quite modern with nice wall-size photos of rice in fields and origami cranes instead of the washed-out paintings of pagodas and those funny gold cats with the waving arm.

The service was pretty slow. They were quite busy but not exactly heaving so not really an excuse. The food certainly passable. I started with a wanton soup which was fine - quite heavy on the sesame oil - but tasty and really not bad at all. The main course was sweet and sour king prawns. The menu enticed me with fancy names thinking that this might be a little different from your average S&SP but really it wasn't anything special. Ultimately I felt a little fobbed off by the flowery descriptions.

This didn't come cheap - but to add insult, at the end they managed to get my bill wrong to the tune of a tenner. I was not best pleased and in my ire refused to pay the service charge once they had worked it out properly.

Update: A return visit recently revealed little new of note. I went with a couple of friends and while the food was certainly passable it wasn't in the same league as the star attractions of Chinatown.