Six By Nico Deansgate

Say it loud: the new Mad Hatter menu at Six By Nico is their best since Chippy Tea – the legendary spread that kicked the whole Six By Nico phenomenon off. 

Let’s have a brief recap for those who’ve been living under a rock for the past eight years. Six By Nico is a fine dining restaurant which offers one thing and one thing only: an affordable tasting menu made up of six gloriously creative dishes. Success has seen multiple branches open across the country, with two in Manchester alone. 

Appropriately, the theme changes every six weeks, and this time it’s the turn of the Mad Hatter. As in that crackpot from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – said to be a victim of mercury poisoning, according to kid’s book boffins with too much time on their hands.

No heavy metals in this meal, you’ll be glad to hear, just plenty of turned-up-to-11 wild concoctions. With a theme like Mad Hatter, it’s all up for grabs. This can be a worry. Are the ideas too zany? Too psychedelic? Too unhinged? Relax, each course has a healthy hint of weirdness, but it never overpowers the dish.

A standout dish is the fourth course, Breakfast In Disguise, which flips the concept of breakfast into an evening meal, incorporating pollock, black pudding, smoked bacon and ‘egg yolk jam’. Not forgetting some edible paper designed to look like the receipt from a greasy spoon cafe, rather than any other form of mind-altering edible paper you might be picturing. 

By the way, we lied above. As well as the six core courses, you’ll always find the odd extra treat on the menu (for a small charge). In this case, the extra treat is an opening course called Eat Me! Drink Me! – named after the cake and drink that Alice encounters early in the book. 

Lo and behold, it is a cake and drink. Although, the drink is actually an umami-rich consommé, poured from a glass teapot – all very Lucy In The Sky-era Beatles. Sticking with the theme, it contains teeny tiny pickled mushrooms that cut right through the dark, woozy brew. 

The cake is a two-high stack of ultra-crumbly aged Cheddar empire biscuits. Both form a great opening act, and worth adding to the line-up for a mere £9. 

Of course, it wouldn’t do to spoiler the entire menu so we’ll leave it there. As ever, the ideas are in service of taste, texture and flavour, not the other way round. 

We’re not sure how many menus Nico and his team have done so far – a dozen? – but the quality of both inspiration and execution remains sky high. Ignore the Hatter, make haste.