Daddy or Chips?

Food critic Andrew Shanahan reviews a Mancunian restaurant that, in his opinion, we should all visit once a week

If you want an insight into the perils of running a fine dining restaurant in the Greater Manchester area, consider this thought from Altrincham-escapee Paul Kitching (now of the feted Scottish venue 21212): ‘How often do I get customers in Juniper asking for chips? Every week.’ Let’s leave aside the debate about whether this denotes the zenith of culinary philistinism or simply a fanatical but harmless spud worship, and instead spare a thought for Ian Matfin. As executive chef at Michael Caines at ABode Manchester, Matfin has the responsibility for the ultimate balancing act – producing a fine dining menu that can sate the haughty appetites of Jay Rayner whilst still offering something to Mancunian chip-a-holics.

Fortunately for Manchester, Matfin is clearly adept at walking fine lines. ABode has been open a little over a year and has comfortably settled into its role as Manchester’s best restaurant. Indicative of this is the service that has been refined from a classic fine-dining approach (where a trip to the loo would mean your napkin would be removed, steam-washed, dried with the breath of kittens and returned to your lap) to a more relaxed but still suitably-deferential offering. Fortunately, there’s no dumbing-down of the three menus (grazing, à la carte and tasting) which quite simply showcase incredible ingredients, local where appropriate, cooked in a way that is furrow-your-brow, draw-a-sharp-intake-of-breath, how-does-he-do-that excellent.

For maximum exposure we went for the grazing menu and tried nearly every one of the twelve dishes that ran from a terrine of vegetables to Cheshire sirloin steak (ranging in price from £5.50 to £12.50). The menu has an understandable modern French influence that hints at Matfin’s stints at Le Manoir and Gidleigh Park (where he teamed up with Caines), but are twinned with some global influences – the Cheshire steak is served with dauphinoise potatoes and a shitake stir fry, for instance. Laudably, despite some globe trotting touches, none of the dishes suffer from jet lag and everything is composed with a fine sense of balance.

With the grazing menu feast split by our waiter into three waves of food, the sommelier performed a neat trick of matching wines by course so that they complemented dishes as disparate as pan-fried scallops with butternut squash (£7.95) and foie gras with a smoked bacon confit (£7.50). OK, so he cheated on that one and brought us two glasses – a punchy, glossy Sauternes and a Wittmann Riesling Trocken with a dry mineral taste and a lightly sparkling texture that made it seem like it was quietly excited about something. Another sensible nod to Mancunian values was the sommelier’s practice of splitting glasses between our party of three, reducing costs and allowing full exposure to the different wines he was rightfully delighted by.

If you wanted to look for negatives you could find them. Others have grumbled at the restaurant’s chthonic location, but I prefer slightly murkier dining rooms to antiseptic stark white and clean line restaurants. During dinner a round of cocktails was missed from the order, but as soon as the mistake was realised they were added as a complimentary extra – the perfect response. Happily, the only weak link in the food came from a parsnip veloute (£6), a deliciously frothed and creamy sauce but with the slight seasonal mistiming resulting in a muting of flavours so evident elsewhere. Dishes like the ravioli of crab (£6.50) – a single dense parcel of seashore flavours – and the cod cheeks and crispy pork belly undercut with the slightly aniseed quality of fennel (£6.50) all hinting at a superior sourcing of ingredients. The final wave of food saw a dessert of lemon cheesecake complete with little cubes of chilli jelly so exquisitely created that the heat of the chilli rose slowly in the mouth as it was being simultaneously doused with thick cream cheese.

It seems characteristically neurotic to worry about losing Matfin, but surely Kitching’s experience at the hands of Mr Chips must make us worry that ultimately he might be poached by a city whose motto isn’t ‘chips with everything’. For now though, perhaps we should just be glad we’ve got him and attempt to visit on a weekly basis.

Andrew Shanahan is an award-winning freelance writer whose work ranges from journalism with The Guardian, The Independent and national magazine titles to scriptwriting with the BBC. He has also developed a series of innovative writing projects for the internet with Moving Audio.

No related posts.