I recently posted a review of ‘Common’ on Manchester’s Edge Street and mentioned ‘Home Sweet Home’ next door. I’d walked past the place dozens of times, only recently taking the plunge and going in.

Inside it’s decorated in a sort of country kitchen/bohemian style. It’s as cosy as these places can get, when one wall is plate glass and facing the street. Tables are small, designed for two people, more would be crowded. There’s free WiFi, both provided by the café and by Manchester’s new public WiFi ‘cloud’, but the clientele are laptop, rather than Macbook users.

There is background music, but it’s unremarkable, and while there’s an impressive selection of bottled beers, hot beverages and exotic shakes, the only draught beer is Red Stripe.

The menu is small, but imaginative, comprising breakfasts, burgers, sandwiches, Chilli and Pulled Pork. The Chicken Chilli – served in a hollowed out roll looks interesting, while the pulled pork is, by all accounts, cooked overnight as the oven cools.

It’s served either in a sandwich or, as I’ve enjoyed it, as a ‘pile-up’ – piled on a bed of sweet potato fries, with sliced jalapenos, coleslaw and salad.

I’m sure it’s a great please to meet friends for a coffee and a chat, but for me it’s just a little too snug.

So, it’s a nice enough place, serving great pulled pork, it’s just not for me. If they would deliver their pulled pork next door, with its great selection of beers, life for me would be perfect.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

I had never tried pulled pork until I started my sojourn in Manchester last year. I can now name half a dozen restaurants within a ten minute walk of my hotel that serve pulled pork, some better than others, and some very, very good.

Southern Eleven is located on Hardman Street in the chic Spinningfields area of central Manchester, at the southern end of Deansgate. It takes its name from the eleven southern United States that make up the American ‘barbecue belt’ (Alabama, Arkansas, the Carolinas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia). If you’re a fan of the American diner programmes on the food channel you’ll know what to expect.

The starters are interesting, deep fried pickles loaded nachos and so on, and while they’re delicious they detract from the excellent main courses.

Sharing Nachos

As to the main courses, while there are vegetarian options (salads, the now ubiquitous mac & cheese) on the menu, the meat is undoubtedly the star of the show here. It’s said to be outdoor reared and sourced from Greaves & Sons, well respected local butchers. Meat that good deserves respect and it’s all cooked (if you’ll excuse the pun) with tender loving care. I’ve been a few times now and my personal favourite is the Southern tasting platter, comprising (18 hour smoked)- pulled pork, beef brisket, and succulent pork belly ribs, served with skinny parmesan/truffle fries although to date I’ve never managed to eat the fries. There’s that much meat! And that tasting platter costs an astonishing £12.95 – incredible value for money.

Southern Tasting Platter

Drinks wise there’s an extensive range of cocktails, many of which are served ‘mix yourself’ – ideal if you’ve had a few pre-dinner drinks in the nearby ‘Alchemist’ cocktail bar – the selection of beers is a little disappointing, but don’t let that detract from an otherwise excellent dining experience.

I don’t do desserts, and have struggled to finish the main courses, so can’t comment on them.

The staff are knowledgeable and friendly, and on Tuesday evening there’s an all you can eat chicken and ribs deal for £14.95 – including a beer, what’s not to like?

Man vs Food at Southern11

My tip – skip the starters.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

While I would never profess to be a lover of classic or haute cuisine, I try to eat well. Sometimes though, you just want something, well, dirty. And I’m not talking the modern artful ‘dirty’ as practiced in Manchester by places like ‘Almost Famous Burgers’ or their sister venture ‘LLLB’, I mean something surreptitious, something you’re almost ashamed to admit to. And then, Hunters is the place to go.

It’s located on the edge of the Northern Quarter, at the junction of Thomas Street and High Street, and is easy to spot by its lurid yellow signage. Inside it’s, to be honest, scruffy; there are a half a dozen booths with Formica tables and vinyl benches that have clearly seen better days, but heck, you’re not there for the ambiance, right?

The menu is quite comprehensive, ranging from Fish & Chips, Chicken and Lamb Kebabs (both doner and tikka), Pizza, the local ‘Rice and Three’ speciality, and a reasonable range of Indian meals.

A personal favourite is their spicy Chicken Biryani, served with extra chilli sauce.

Hunters Chicken Biryani

For six quid it’s a mighty plateful of spicy, ricey chickeny guilt.

I’ve mentioned to my work colleagues that I sometimes sneak into Hunters and they’ve expressed astonishment that I go in there while sober. It’s a Manchester tradition to grab a Hunters after an evening’s drinking, and accordingly I suspect they’re open until just before dawn.

Let’s be clear, it’s not sophisticated, but when you just want to grab something to eat, Hunters fits the bill.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Yesterday (March 20^th 2013) saw the untimely passing of James Herbert, one of Britain’s foremost authors.

Aged just sixty nine, he was taken too soon.

James burst onto the literary scene in 1974 with ‘The Rats’, published in paperback by the New English library.

I was seventeen at the time and James’ books quickly became required reading among British teenage males in the seventies. His horror was rooted in real life, not Victorian gran guignol, we could relate to it.

I later discovered Stephen King and my personal loyalties shifted. Anybody who quotes Bruce Springsteen is all right by me.

It was perhaps inevitable that, as a teenage boy, Gaz (our son) also became a James Herbert fan. And when, in late 1984,  I learned that James was to be holding a book signing near my office, I requested a full, signed, back catalogue for Gaz’s eighteenth birthday. James very kindly obliged.

The first few volumes were signed ‘To Gaz, best wishes, James’ while later books were dedicated ‘To Gaz, glad you like the books, James’ or ‘To Gaz, keep reading! James’. Of course these precious volumes were never read, they were sealed safely in plastic while Gaz bought unsigned copies to actually read.

A few years later, for Gaz’s 21^st, I invited James to dinner, figuring it was the only way to top a signed collection, and while the invitation was declined, Gaz received a letter apologising for the writer’s shyness.

Since then, over the past nearly thirty years, whenever a new James Herbert book was published I would send James a brief update on Gaz’s life and career, enclosing a copy of the new volume for signing.

On each occasion they were returned within a matter of days, duly dedicated.

Okay, in the grand scheme of literary things it’s hardly ‘84 Charing Cross Road’, but ‘Jim’ – as he later signed the covering letters – wasn’t obliged to sign the books. But sign them he did, he took the trouble, and made one avid fan very happy, and I respected him for that.

If you’ll excuse the pun, he was all right, in my book, and I’ll miss our occasional exchanges.

‘Common’ is a bar that is located on Edge Street in Manchester’s Northern Quarter.

Edge Street runs parallel and to the north of to the busier and trendier Thomas Street but is still host to a couple of interesting bars, including ‘Terrace’ which runs between Thomas Street and Edge Street.

I guess the easiest way to describe ‘Common’ is ‘6th Form Common Room Chic’. The décor is deliberately 6^th form, although the artwork on the walls and windows is updated frequently, a bit like changing your PC’s desktop theme. It might look different but it’s essentially the same underneath.

As you might determine from the picture above, ‘Common’ seems to be growing, extending along Edge Street to nestle up to ‘Home Sweet Home’ – of which more another time.

My understanding is that ‘Common’ is owned and operated by the same team that run the excellent Port Street Beer House, of which more another time. This means that for all its grungy bohemian atmosphere, it does stock some excellent beers, there are about ten beer taps, which is more than most pubs.

It’s not uncommon (no pun intended) to see beers from brewers like Thornbridge, Red Willow and Kernel on tap, although they do have an irritating policy of serving the (ahem) more ‘robust’ brews in half pints. Okay, for younger punters I can understand, but I’m in my mid fifties for heaven’s sake, I know what I’m doing if I order a seven per cent beer.

The food is pretty good, they serve a reasonable selection of burgers, well cooked, and I have heard good reports of their Falafel, but cannot confirm this.

There’s music, although my experience on my visits it that it tends to be trancey stuff that seems to be written by the yard, but doubtless it caters to its core clientele. A clientele that is, for the most part, bohemian and trendy, many dressing ten or fifteen years younger than they probably ought.

There are a number of online and webby companies in the surrounding streets, so there’s WiFi in the bar, but heaven forfend anybody taking in a laptop that doesn’t have a glowing apple logo in its lid. The horror!

Common host live DJ’s at weekends (or so I understand), and a quiz on alternate Wednesdays. And while I enjoy quizzes, I once witnessed a round of “seventies and eighties children’s TV themes” and wouldn’t have scored a single point.

So while I am fully aware that I am NOT part of Common’s target audience, I find it a good place to stop off; the food’s good and, as I mentioned earlier, they usually have a good selection of interesting beers.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Luck, Lust, Liquor & Burn is a new venture in Manchester’s Northern Quarter from Beau Myers and the team behind Almost Famous Burgers. It occupyies the site that was formerly the ‘Socio Rehab’ cocktail bar and the first floor above. The bar downstairs retains a cocktail bar ambience, permeated with the distinct minty scent of mojitos; but downstairs is very much the appetiser, the main course is the restaurant upstairs.

The staircase up is less intimidating than that of ‘Almost Famous’, but once upstairs the style is very similar; bare brick walls, eclectic artwork, steel furniture, it’s all painfully hip. And dark at night, the lighting required me to fire up a torch (flashlight) app on my phone. The menu is unashamedly ‘dirty’ the sort of food you feel guilty for enjoying. Almost.

I started with the ‘Chicken Blasts’, five delicious, moist strips of breaded chicken in a spicy hot sauce; imagine ‘Buffalo Wings’ but with more meat and less fiddling. These are served with celery batons and the smoothest, mellowest Blue Cheese dip around.

The overall menu is comprehensive, tacos, burritos, chilli there’s even a chimighanga lurking there somewhere. This is probably the most stylish Tex-Mex, (actually it describes itself as ‘Calexico’ – California/Mexican rather than Texan/Mexican) you will encounter here in Blighty.

For my main I had the ‘Jailbreak Beef Chilli’ – a hearty bowlful of really mellow beef chilli, made with slow cooked brisket and chorizo, a subtle blend of meaty flavours that weren’t overpowered by the Chilli sauce. The bowl was topped off with melted cheese and pickled jalapenos, and a sizable pile of tortilla chips. There is a bottle of chilli sauce on the table for those that feel the need for heat, but frankly I wallowed in the mellowness of the dish.

I couldn’t resists a side order of delicious ‘mac & cheese’ – the first time I’ve had this as a side dish – lightly sprinkled with crispy bacon and crab-meat.

I couldn’t finish my main course, admitted defeat and resisted the tempting desserts. This made me feel decidedly lightweight when I saw two guys take on and beat the restaurant’s signature ”Tapout Burrito’.

The ‘Tapout Burrito’ is a thirty quid, fourteen inch monster stuffed with crispy beef, BBQ pulled Pork, shredded beer can chicken, served with skin on potato fries, cheese, spicy rice, grilled onions & salad ‘lubed with secret taco sauce’. This beast must total three to four thousand calories. The couple at the table next to me tucked into one between them (hence the photo), a better option than a ‘Man Vs Food challenge’,  in my opinion.

On other visits I’ve tried the Sloppy Juan Burger, and the ‘Dirty Chicken’Burrito; there are other nice touches on the menu the guacamole is mashed (or more accurately, ‘muddled’) at the table, while other starters served in lettuce leaves sound interesting (a hint of the oriental).

As you would expect for a restaurant on the site of an iconic cocktail bar, the cocktail list looks like fun, as does the selection of bottled beers, including Dos Equis and Goose Island IPA. The ‘Lagerita is interesting, Tequila, Lime, Triple Sec and lager!

Without a doubt this was the best Tex-Mex/Cal-Mex I’ve enjoyed for many a long year.

As with Almost Famous Burgers next door, there will be queues.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

I’d visited the Manchester Hard Rock Café a few times before this particular sojourn in the ‘Rainy City’ and decided to lunch there after my interview for the role that takes me up there each week.

The owners of the Hard Rock Café brand (the Seminole nation) are pretty ruthless in closing cafés that don’t make the grade. In the past there have been (and I have visited)Cafes in Birmingham, Guadalajara, Kowloon, Leeds, Newport Beach and Nottingham.

All gone now, so the Manchester café would appear to be keeping its fiscal head above water.

The Manchester HRC is housed within ‘The Printworks’ a dining/leisure complex housed in what was once a massive newspaper plant in central Manchester, adjacent to ‘Exchange Square’. In its day it was responsible for printing the northern editions of the Times, the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Sketch.

The Printworks now houses some fifteen bars and restaurants, a gym and 20 screen cinema.

I should perhaps declare a (non-pecuniary) interest. I’m a fan of Hard Rock Cafés. As you’ll see from my ‘Been There, Done That’ pages, I’ve visited some 32 of them since I first visited the London café in 1971 as a callow teenager. The way I figure it, they’re clean, safe and, pretty much anywhere in the world, you’re assured a decent western meal and some rock music. What’s not to like?

The Manchester HRC seats over one hundred people downstairs, with an exclusive terrace lounge area with room for another fifty. The spacious bar area has some bar stools, and as I’m usually dining alone I’ll grab one of those rather than a table in the dining area. The walls are festooned with the usual array of rock memorabilia, albeit with an emphasis on local Manchester bands – mainly Oasis.

The menu is pretty much the same as other western HRC’s steaks, burgers, salads… the ‘local’ special burger features, I understand, Lancashire cheese – so not very special then. My personal favourite of late is their ‘Texan’ pulled pork sandwich. I’m fast becoming a fan of pulled pork, and this one comes topped with cheese, shoestring fried onions and deep fried slices of Jalapeno chilli.

This one, however, is their S.O.B. Burger.

Prices aren’t cheap, some of the trendier diners in the Northern Quarter serve (dare I say it) better and more imaginative burgers at better prices, I guess there’s a ‘global brand’ premium in play here, got to keep the Seminoles away!

The staff are friendly enough, and have been known to dress in fancy dress for occasions such as ‘Halloween’. Although it must be said, the bar staff sometimes need to be ‘encouraged’ to serve a full pint.

Overall, as I said earlier, you know what you’re going to get in a Hard Rock Café, and this one doesn’t disappoint.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Almost Famous Burgers are interesting, painfully hip and trendy, but serve excellent food.

Launched amidst a blaze of un-publicity towards the end of the summer of 2012, they occupy the top floor of an anonymous building on High Street, at the western end of Manchester’s Northern Quarter.

The concept had been trialled as a ‘pop up’ earlier in the summer, and I’d spotted queues.

Then one warm summer evening I spotted that the wooden door was open, and a doorman standing guard. It was a ‘soft launch’ evening, but I managed to blag my way upstairs and enjoyed a memorable meal.

The menu comprises chicken wings, burgers, hot dogs and fries, but unlike anything I’ve experienced anywhere else. The burgers, nestling in a semi-sweet brioche bun are simply the base, on which AFB pile pulled pork, bacon, cheese or whatever in vast quantities. Trailer Trash Fries are slathered with a cheesey mustard dressing.

Drinks are restricted to a small selection of bottled beers, or a wide range of exotic cocktails, served in jam-jars. Don’t be surprised to find a Haribo sweet lurking in the bottom of your alcoholic milk-shake.

AFB – Drinks (from Manchester Confidential)

Everything is served in dishwasher friendly plastic trays and the napkins consist of a roll of paper kitchen towel per table.

That said, the food is delicious, a real guilty pleasure. Unashamedly so, AFB revels in ‘dirty’ food, and regularly produce specials – their ‘Fifty Shades of Bacon burger’ included bacon cooked in at least four different ways. Again, delicious but dirty. In a good way.

Their fifty quid Christmas burger was perhaps a little over the top.

I’ve returned on several occasions, and if I have any criticism, it’s that their burgers are becoming overlooked. And overcooked. What was once pink and juicy is now well-done, and while there’s plenty of juicy, meaty deliciousness to distract you, surely it should be about the burgers?

These days the word has got around, and Almost Famous are now famous in their own right; the founder ‘Beau Myers’ won two awards at October 2012’s Manchester Food and Drink Festival – ‘Food Pioneer’ and ‘Food Hero’.

It’s not uncommon to see dozens of people queuing in the rain or sub-zero temperatures to get in, the doorman outside the wooden door standing resolute, counting them in and counting them out.

The menu and AFB website clearly states: NO PRESS, NO PHOTOGRAPHY, NO BLOGGERS, NO BLAGGERS, NO KETCHUP, EVERYTHING ELSE GOES.

Whoops! I think I’m guilty of at least two of the above.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

The drink picture is from ‘Manchester Confidential’ – always a good source of information about what’s happening in the ‘Rainy City’. There’s a review of the pre-release ‘pop-up’ AFB here.

I confess I have neglected this site of late – sometimes real life gets in the way of an on-line life.

And I’ve resisted turning it into another food and restaurant review site, but after some ten months living half my life in Manchester’s ‘Northern Quarter’ I figure I am qualified to offer my personal opinions on some of the places I’ve enjoyed, or not.

And, as it’s possible that I’ll be in Manchester for a while longer, I figure, why not?

If somebody stumbles across this site and tries somewhere different as a result of my suggestions, then everybody wins.

Before I become (although I hope this won’t happen) ‘just another food and drink blogger’, I would like to add my two penn’orth about the state of the UK high street.

In recent months we have seen the demise of Republic (a fashion chain), HMV, Jessops, Blockbuster Video, JJB Sports and Comet. Before that it was Woolworths, Habitat and Blacks Leisure. I’ll exclude Clinton Cards from the list as they’ve been resurrected and my views on the whole debacle are probably libellous.

A few years ago, as a Town Councillor I attended my local statutory Annual Town Meeting. These are an opportunity for the Council to blow its own trumpet to those residents who bother to attend, and for those residents who do attend to complain to ‘the council’ – that amorphous tier of government that is responsible for everything that goes wrong.

On this particular occasion a resident bemoaned the number of empty shops in the Town Centre and asked ‘why doesn’t “The Council’ do something about it?”. I won’t go into the various tiers of administration that actually make up ‘The Council’ or the responsibilities and restrictions placed on each, but the short answer is that ‘The Council’ couldn’t do anything about it. They didn’t (and don’t) own the shop units in question and if a retailer wasn’t interested in a town of some 4,000 homes – below the viability level for many shop chains – then the stores wouldn’t come.

It was at this point that an elderly gentleman stood up and requested permission to address the meeting. He said that he had spent much of his working life in retailing and observed that the model of retailing had changed since the town was designed and built in the 1980’s. In those days the town had a bookshop, a couple of record stores and a number of thriving independent retailers. These days, the gentleman suggested, we don’t need bookshops or record stores, as most of us purchase our media online. And indeed since this meeting the trend in music has moved further away towards downloads.

In recent visits to the BlueWater shopping mall in Kent I’ve noticed a trend towards empty retail units reopening as coffee shops or cafés. This is retailing as leisure, the coffee shops hopefully lulling the visitor to spend something, somewhere.

Which brings us back to HMV.

Anyone who knows me will know I’m a media junkie. One of the earliest questions I can remember, at the age of about three, asking my parents (while looking at a ‘top twenty’ board outside a record shop on East Ham high street) was whether there were records that weren’t in the top twenty. Since then I have acquired a reasonable collection of music and movies in various formats (vinyl, cassette, CD, VHS, DVD, BluRay). I used to love the clack, clack, clack of browsing CD racks, and before that poring over the serried ranks of album covers.

But over the past month I have visited the HMV store in central Manchester on three separate occasions, spending up to twenty minutes at a time browsing, and come out empty handed. There was nothing that engaged me sufficiently to spend my hard earned cash, I already had it, wasn’t interested, or couldn’t justify the purchase to myself.

It’s sad.

Given that ‘high street’ stores have to pay staff and premises costs they will never be able to compete with the online behemoths, this means that they will have to justify their existence another way.  My suggestion is that the retailers need to add value, to differentiate themselves from the online retailers. Had there been signed copies of albums, or ‘limited edition’ sets with additional content that might not be available online then I might have been tempted.

Okay, this would require engagement and commitment from the artists themselves, actually venturing out and being seen, but it’s something that would surely benefit everybody. That’s what the bookshops do, especially as Christmas approaches.

Otherwise our high streets will continue to decline and become increasingly irrelevant.

I am conscious that I have been somewhat remiss of late in updating this site, partly because I am wary and sceptical of the ‘noise’ generated by twitter and blogging in general, partly because I haven’t had much to say and partly because my life has been busy! As I type this I am working in Manchester which necessitates a semi-nomadic existence, travelling  two hundred miles north and spending three nights a week in hotels. But as Terry Pratchett famously observed (about journalism) “It’s indoor work, with no heavy lifting”.

As I have related to friends, I feel sure that when I get to the ‘Pearly Gates’, Saint Peter is going to tell me I’ve spent too much of my life living in cheap hotels.

I have a strange relationship with the City of Manchester; until the April of this year I had been through Manchester many times, but rarely stopped. When I first met Val I had flown from Manchester airport, and Phill and I travelled home to Sheffield by train from Manchester Piccadilly. In the early days of my relationship with Val I  travelled through Manchester on many occasions, and then first saw Bruce Springsteenlive at Manchester Apollo in May of 1981.

I mention Springsteen because I will be seeing him live again in a couple of weeks; when we first saw him in 1981 it was his first visit for six years and we diehard fans could only dream of times when he would tour every couple of years. Indeed since 1981 I have seen ‘The Boss’ on six occasions, so it could hardly be described as frequently. When we saw him at The Emirates Stadium (in May 2008) Val observed that I was somewhat emotional when he played ‘Jungleland’, to which I replied that it had occurred to me that it might be the last time I see him play live. Little could I have dreamed that a year later, at Hyde Park, he would play a simply magical rendition of the song, just as the sun was setting. The gig was obviously important to him as well, as it was subsequently released on DVD. You can just make out my panama hat, in the crowd, bottom left of centre, after Clarence’s moving saxophone solo.

That’s not to say we’re complacent, Bruce has now lost two members of the band, and plays a three hour set that defies his sixty three years. My mate Tom and I have an agreement that we will endeavour to see Bruce whenever he visits London, because one day it will be his last tour.

And that will be a shame.