Six By Nico Spring Gardens Manchester

It’s official, the latest Six By Nico menu is hands-down the best yet. The theme is Nostalgia, and it taps into the same sense of fun and effortless wit as the popular Chippy menu, which dates back to Six By Nico’s very early days. 

Of course, we all know Six By Nico by now. It’s the wildly popular fine dining restaurant (a new one opened in Manchester a few months back) that promises two things: not to break the bank, and a tasting menu consisting of six wonderfully creative dishes, with the odd extra treat. 

It’s the perfect gateway into tasting menus without being dumbed down. Indeed, on our visit, we’re surrounded by date-night couples of all ages and backgrounds. (As much as we love them, the diners at most other high-end restaurants generally lie on the senior side of the eating-out bell curve.)

It’s fair to say your grey-haired, second-home owning grandparents might not get the same sense of joy from the first thing we eat: pickled onion Space Raiders. 

These are a £10 supplementary snack, and absolutely worth it, especially if you like your cheeks puckered from the kind of vinegar that can strip paint. 

They’re a sort of chunky potato fritter – hot, zingy and full of soft bits and crispy bits – that you dip into side plate sauce, an artful array of garlic emulsion and, er, fermented melon hot sauce. 

This is the other thing worth mentioning about Six By Nico – the kitchen team come up with the most out-there ideas for dishes, but more often than not, they work ridiculously well. 

We won’t list every dish, as this is the kind of menu that delivers laugh-out-loud surprises and it’d be unfair to deprive you of that (consider squinting so you don’t see the photos). 

Six By Nico has done it again. They’ve delivered another out-there tasting menu that won’t break the bank, but will blow your tastebuds wide open. It might be called the Nostalgia menu, but these ideas are brand new and brilliant.