The Stock Exchange Hotel is teaming up with The Hallé for a one-day autumn afternoon tea in its tender restaurant on Saturday 10 October, with Hallé musicians playing live from 1pm to 4pm. The menu includes fruit and white chocolate scones, a prawn marie rose brioche roll and the restaurant’s pork and pistachio sausage roll, followed by black forest mousse and a lemon and black sesame tart. Prices start at £40pp, with cocktails and bubbles available as extras.

A meal full of marvellous moments that you’ll be talking about for months afterwards.

My word, Dahlia Stereo sounds good. Literally. An obscene number of man-hours have gone into making this new Northern Quarter bar-restaurant an audiophile’s dream.

Balance Taroom is a genteel space, full of millennials keen to sup interesting booze away from all that city centre frenzy. And if that floats your boat, this is the best of the small-scale batch.

They could do with fixing the soundtrack, but, regardless, Schofield’s Bar is one of the good ones. If Manchester’s going to earn (or maintain) a reputation as a world-class city, it needs bars like this.

Stuzzi on Leeds’ Merrion Street has brought back its Sunday roasts, giving British classics an Italian do-over in the restaurant’s family-style sharing format. Four to choose from: roast beef sirloin with a beef shin and ‘nduja croquette, ‘nduja and fennel seed porchetta, roast celeriac with caper, olive and pine nut stuffing, or the doppia carne (both meats under ossobuco gravy). Every roast comes with Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes and seasonal veg, served on Sundays from 12pm to 6pm.

Sister Ray, the cocktail and vinyl bar near Liverpool’s Wolstenholme Square, is launching its first food menu alongside a new autumn cocktail list. Both menus focus on updated classics, served in a room inspired by European café culture and Lower East Side bars, with records played through a custom-built GNK sound system.

Fairmont Cheshire, The Mere, near Knutsford, has unveiled its Christmas by the Lake programme, with festive afternoon tea in The Orangery (£65pp, 27 November to 31 December, excluding Christmas Day) and Santa Sunday lunches in The Grand Ballroom on 6 and 13 December. Other dates include a Burgundy wine and cheese evening on 19 November (£70), a wreath-making workshop on 26 November (£80) and a festive menu at Gordon Ramsay at The Mere. Christmas Day lunch costs £195 per adult, and the season closes with a £195pp New Year’s Eve gala ball with a champagne reception, dinner and fireworks.

Sexy Fish Manchester is marking Halloween with Scary Fish: Vampire Tide, a gothic, underwater-themed takeover with Don Julio 1942 on 31 October. Costumed characters, live performers and DJs take over the restaurant and bar through the night. A Halloween dessert platter and cocktail menu launches on 26 October, ahead of the main event.

Salford’s Black Friar, the Grade II-listed Victorian pub that reopened in 2021 after more than 15 years derelict, has opened Christmas bookings and is promising its biggest festive makeover yet. Dishes confirmed so far include venison carpaccio with oyster caviar, turkey ballotine and a Christmas pudding knickerbocker glory, with two courses starting at £39. The full menu is on the pub’s website, and early booking is recommended.

Liverpool Cocktail Week returns for its fourth year from 9 to 18 October, with more than 50 bars and restaurants pouring signature cocktails for £5 to £7 to anyone wearing the official wristband. Heavy hitters like Black Cat Club and The Alchemist sit alongside a crop of independents, while Royal Albert Dock adds 11 dockside venues to the crawl, with wristbands available to collect from Gusto. Wristbands start at £12.95 (£7.95 a head for groups of four or more), which should pay for itself well before closing time.

Oktoberfest has arrived in Manchester 23 floors up, as Cloud 23, the sky bar inside Beetham Tower’s Manchester Deansgate Hotel, teams up with Munich lager NOAM until 25 October. On offer are limited-edition Oktoberfest cocktails and buckets of ten bottles on ice, with a free pretzel landing alongside every order. NOAM is the best-dressed beer in Bavaria, brewed with Paulaner and poured from a fluted bottle designed with fashion label Acne Studios.

Leeds brewery Northern Monk has been on something of a spree, opening four bars in 18 months – among them a York refectory and Edinburgh craft beer institution The Hanging Bat – while brewing more beer than ever and somehow shrinking its carbon footprint. Its charity arm has also been reborn as the Northern Monk Foundation, dedicated to getting people outdoors, which so far has meant local schoolkids planting trees in the Lake District and catching lambing season on a nearby farm.

Eat Well, Do Good returns to Manchester this October for its third year, with the city’s hospitality trade once again fundraising for chef-made meals for people in crisis – families in temporary accommodation, women in refuge, food bank users, and parents staying overnight in hospital with their children.

Vetch has shifted from its tasting menu format this September in favour of an unstructured, order-as-you-go menu built for sharing, from chef-owner Dan McGeorge. Dishes span oysters with green strawberry and yuzu hot sauce, buffalo wing with caviar, salt-aged duck with blackberry kosho and a 600g T-bone, alongside a reworked drinks list and looser, faster-paced service.

McGeorge won Great British Menu in 2021 and Vetch holds two AA rosettes, a Good Food Guide “Very Good” rating and a Michelin Guide listing for 2025 and 2026.