First look inside Higher Ground, one of the most…

First look inside Higher Ground, one of the most anticipated new restaurants in Manchester

Though the city’s hospitality scene is facing unprecedented challenges, there’s also a lot to get excited about. Like Higher Ground.

Originally a pop-up, it found three friends who met in New York (via London and Copenhagen) finally landing together in Manchester. All three had worked in some pretty dazzling restaurants.

Front-of-house man Richard Cossins had worked with three-star chef Simon Rogan at his restaurant at Claridge’s in London. Chef Joe Otway had been working at the Michelin-starred Relae in Copenhagen, and all three - wine expert Daniel Craig-Martin making up the trifecta - worked together at the (two star) Blue Hill at Stone Barns, just north of Manhattan.

Higher Ground opened up very briefly indeed at the bungalow venue opposite the Gay Village, now part of the Kampus development, but then the pandemic swiftly put paid to all those carefully-laid plans.

So instead, they opened Flawd in the interim, a wine-bar on New Islington Marina which had only the bare bones of a kitchen - a sandwich press and a pressure cooker.

Daniel Craig Martin, Richard Cossins and Joe Otway (Manchester Evening News)

All the while the three had begun developing their own market garden, called Cinderwood, in Nantwich, Cheshire, selling its seasonal produce to restaurants across the city. So naturally, the vegetables came out of the ground and onto the plate at Flawd - sometimes in a matter of hours.

“We’ve been waiting for a long time to be able to explore what we really wanted to do in the first place,” Joe told the Manchester Evening News. “It’s been a big journey. We never really intended to open Flawd, it came out of what was available for us at the time, and it turned into a really fun, creative, cool space to work in.”

Things at Higher Ground will be a bit different. They’ll have an actual kitchen for a start, not to mention the space and capacity to start using more meat, butchering whole animals for the menu.

“Now that we’re moving into this next phase, we’ve got a whole new exciting team to work with, and it’ll be a full exploration of what’s available to us. Grains, pulses, whole animal cookery and whole animal butchery, organic produce from Cinderwood,” Joe goes on.

Higher Ground is from the same team as Flawd (Manchester Evening News)

“We’ll use every single piece of the animal. It forces us to keep changing. We’ll still have a large offering of vegetarian dishes, but we’ll be exploring whole animals now that we have the capability.”

Though they fully expect things to change in the coming days, a sample menu for the new restaurant was unveiled on Instagram last week, featuring dishes like brown crab pappardelle, acorn reared pork belly, cured mullet, mussels, a pig’s head terrine and coal-baked celeriac and salted rhubarb.

A sharing menu will cost £45, with a selection of dishes arriving for the table, but you’ll also be able to order as much or as little as you like, with dishes ranging from £5 to £25.

The restaurant will be open Wednesdays and Thursdays for dinner from 5.30pm, and then for lunch on Friday and Saturday from 12.30pm to 2pm, and dinner from 5.30pm. The bar opens to 11.30pm on Wednesday and Thursday and until midnight on the weekend.

Bookings are being taken now. It opens on February 18.

Read more:

Read news from 100’s of titles, curated specifically for you.

Already a member? Sign in here