Medlock Canteen, 5 Owen Street, Manchester M15 4YB (0161 723 3394). Starters £4-£13, mains £10-£45, desserts £8-£12, wines (500ml) from £18
Towards the bottom of the main course options at Medlock Canteen in Manchester is a dish that reads “staff dinner (limited availability)”. It costs £10. I ask our waiter what it is. “Exactly what it sounds like,” Tom says, cheerily. “The staff food is so much better here than I’m used to. Usually, it’s chicken nuggets. Not here. Today it was a pea risotto. We’ve had leek and bacon pie, and a cottage pie. It’s great.” They just happen to make enough to sell a few portions to the punters, too, though today they’ve already run out. No worries. There are other things worth ordering.
It is a quiet and sweet way by which to make a statement. A lot of restaurants have abused the language of egalitarianism over the years, to signpost that they are democratising the whole socially stratified business of eating out, when their gilded ambitions and appetites are very much elsewhere. Marco Pierre White’s second restaurant was a place called the Canteen, when it was nothing of the sort. It opened in the 90s and was co-owned by Michael Caine, because the god of British film stars wanted somewhere to eat. It won a Michelin star for a humble menu of oysters with champagne sabayon and escalope of seabass with a parsley crust. Likewise, the equally starred River Café is many delightful things, but a caff it is not.
The Medlock Canteen, named after the river overlooked by the Deansgate Square development of which it is a part, is also not a greasy spoon. But there really is something thoroughly come-one-come-all about its “morning-noon-night” proposition. It’s there in the tea towels for napkins and the wipe-clean tables, the concrete shell of a room with its midcentury modern wood cladding and the furniture. The room has a smart, utilitarian look, aided by the light green floor, the colour of chocolate lime sweets, which hints gently at the institutional. The oxblood leather banquettes remind me of the cherished 12-hole DMs I wore when I was a flat-footed youth.
Mostly, though, it lies in the menu. You can come here for beans on toast and a “bottomless batch brew” first thing. You can stay for a steak sandwich or something bigger from the rotisserie. What you will not get are gimmicks or spins or, God help us, twists. Nothing is twisted. Nothing is spun. There’s nothing intrinsically special about the offering at the Medlock Canteen and that’s what makes it so special. What you read on the menu is exactly what you get: a set of appealing, familiar dishes that are the best versions of themselves.
It’s a departure for chef Sam Grainger. At Belzan and Madre in Liverpool, he offers complexity and whizz-bangery. His team in the kitchen here worked previously at Manteca in London, doing bold and radical things to Roman classics. Now they are proving that, while restless flights of imagination can be great, simple, good taste and technique can be better. We have perfectly made duck rillettes with a heap of pickled vegetables heavy with tarragon, alongside a well-oiled slab of sourdough toast. There are fat, salty anchovies to be coiled on to bread and potato croquettes, at £3 each, perched on a dollop of truffled mayo, showered with nutty Alpine cheese and sprinkled with chives.
We move on to half a rotisserie chicken for £14 and it is everything those words promise and don’t always deliver. No special rubs or sauces. Just roast chicken, rested long enough for the meat to start shrugging itself off the bones. The skin is crisp and salty. But what makes it is what they call chicken jus and what I’m going to call gravy, what with this being Manchester and all. It is dark and sticky and deeply savoury. It is tip-the-platter-and-spoon-it-away good. It is sipping gravy, which is the best kind of gravy. Even if you don’t order any chicken, order that and pour it over everything. Pour it over a friend.
There’s a charcoal-grilled fish of the day, which this evening is a whole lemon sole for £24. It’s a seriously skilled piece of fish grilling. The lightly gelatinous skin on the darker side, where the thicker fillets are, has been gently grilled so the pearlescent flesh comes away easily. The white side has been given a spanking from the flames and is dark and blistered. We have a pot of salsa verde to go with it, which is salty and sharp and the perfect foil to the fish. Alongside, there is a pillow of mash flavoured with beurre noisette, and carrots glazed with honey and grain mustard, a burst of Christmas amid the whisper of spring. The sides also include fried eggs “served all day”. For all your fried egg needs.
A rhubarb pie arrives hot from the deep fryer, crusted with rhubarb-flavoured sugar. It floats in the middle of a thick, frothy marsh of custard. It is a school dinner pudding, raised to a place of glory and wonder. You could easily get yourself through double maths thinking it. There’s a pistachio frangipane tart, deep-filled and with a crisp surface that gives way to squidgy depths. On the side is a dollop of granny smith purée. Across the top is a white quilt of crème fraîche. It is balanced and very satisfying.
Medlock describes itself as a cross between a French bistro and an American diner. The references are smart. Take a seat at the counter and, in the falling light of a Manchester dusk, you could easily form a tableau that the painter Edward Hopper, the chronicler of the diner, would recognise. Or head to the entirely French wine list, with a strong offering by the 500ml carafe, and you could act out the Parisian part with a glass of sauvignon from Bordeaux.
Manchester has been in the grip of a building boom for a while now, which has divided local opinion. The way the priapic tower blocks pierce the cloud-quilted skies encourages questions about what exactly these property moguls are compensating for. Sharp, modern complexes like this aren’t exactly warm and inviting. The space occupied by Medlock Canteen is so over-engineered that, unless you put your back into it, you might find pulling open the huge glass door tricky. Often staff scuttled forwards to finish the job for baffled customers. Rest assured, even if the area doesn’t feel finished, even if it lacks anything approaching human scale, there is at least the thoroughly humane embrace of the Medlock Canteen.
News bites
Birmingham-based chef Brad Carter, who closed his flagship restaurant Carters of Moseley last year with plans to relocate into central Birmingham, has announced a new project. This summer he is opening Undercroft, a restaurant in the crypt of Saint George’s, a church in London’s Mayfair. Dishes will include wild garlic chicken toast to start, followed by Tamworth pork with creamed snails and BBQ aged duck. Meanwhile, the rest of his team are running a venture inside 103 Colmore Row, a private members’ club in Birmingham.
It has become a tradition that this column announces the start each year of the Streetsmart campaign which, in the run-up to Christmas, raises funds to tackle homelessness across the UK by putting a voluntary £1 levy on the bill of every table at hundreds of participating restaurants. It’s delightful to report that for the first time in its 25-year history the most recent campaign raised more than £1m. It is, of course, also depressing that such a campaign is needed at all. Visit streetsmart.org.uk.
Early tickets have gone on sale for the Dorset Seafood Festival, which takes place this year across the weekend of 7 and 8 September on the Weymouth Peninsula. The event will raise funds for the Fishermen’s Mission and will include a mixture of food stalls, chefs’ demos and hands-on cooking workshops. At dorsetseafood.co.uk.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on X @jayrayner1
