Kallos Cafe & Wine Bar
Ian Jones, Food and Drink Editor
Kallos is a small plates restaurant and wine bar just outside of Manchester city centre, showcasing dishes from Greece and Southeast Europe. You’ll find it around the corner from The Black Friar in Colliers Yard, where it has carved out an oasis of Mediterranean-style calm. Head over when the sun is shining, and it’s the nearest thing to Santorini Salford has to offer.
It’s a carefully crafted passion project from Ionna and her partner Ivan, who hail from Greece and Bulgaria, respectively. The duo have serious Manchester hospitality chops, taking in 20 Stories, The Ivy, Musu and more.
Based on our encounters at Kaji, Ivan is one of Manchester’s best sommeliers, pairing impeccable knowledge with relaxed charm. Here, the wine list focuses on the high quality of krasí coming from Greece, each glass making the ideal match for food and mood.
This kind of deep knowledge and personal flair is at the core of this independent restaurant. For example, the mezze section features a recipe for some beautiful macerated peppers from Ivan’s mother, Rosa – a melt-in-the-mouth appetiser, full of garlic and parsley flavours.
Top tip: make a special trip for one of the lunchtime flatbreads, particularly if you’re tired of the now-overplayed sourdough sandwich. Golden brown and filled with the perfect amount of filling, the bread is crispy on the outside and wonderfully soft when you bite into it.
From this section, the merguez sausage flatbread could be the snack of the summer – powerfully flavoured but never over-the-top. Makes sense – the ratio of beef and lamb was carefully engineered by the butcher for Kallos alone, for the perfect balance.
There’s a similar level of detail behind practically every dish on the menu. It’s a neighbourhood restaurant backed with fine dining know-how – think of it as a Greco-style Erst.
And it’s a menu that demands repeat visits. There’s a highly recommended bright, vivid Dakos salad, with olives, tomatoes and capers that burst in the mouth, contrasting with chunks of crunchy, earthy carob rusk.
The most popular dish is feta wrapped in filo pastry, resting in a pool of hot honey. No surprise. It’s decadent, delicious and you’ll need a lie down afterwards.
Interestingly, there’s a section dedicated to tinned fish, inspired by a trip Ivan and Ionna made to New York. Relax, this isn’t a bashed-up can of John West, these are beautifully ornate tins with wildly varied flavours, served with pita bread, aioli, pickled chilli pepper and lemon.
It’s a dreamy, olde-worlde-style foodstuff, with quite the following on social media. The pita is a particular treat – rip open that puffed-up, crispy ball (yes, as satisfying as it sounds), then pile it high with spiced mackerel and olive oil and feed to your boo. Romance, guaranteed.
Kallos is as kallos does. In ancient Greek, it means beauty, and from top to bottom – food to drinks, venue to service – it looks and feels stunning.
