Ooh la la – The French by Simon Rogan

You may or may not have seen some mutterings on Twitter that it was my birthday last week. To celebrate becoming yet another year older and not necessarily wiser, we took a trip over to Manchester to sample Simon Rogan’s new offering The French, headed up by head chef Adam Reid. Having opened earlier this year to rave reviews, I booked our table back in June and eagerly awaited our visit.

The French itself is housed in a beautifully opulent dining room within the hotel. Old meets new in the Victorian interior fused with Scandinavian furniture – a nod to the styling in Rogan’s other restaurants.

The restaurant offers two choices during the evenings, a six course menu or a ten course. Being the greedy guts we are, we obviously went for the ten course feast and then really pushed the boat out with ten paired wines – the majority of which were white, all of which matched beautifully and our sommelier was on had to answer any of our questions.

However, to really start the evening off, cocktails were the order of the day for our aperitifs, which were brought over from the French’s sister restaurant Mr Cooper’s House and Garden. Beautifully crafted, we sipped and chatted away whilst the canapes arrived.

As usual, I am not going to bore you with long winded descriptions of each of the dishes, I managed to take some decent photos so I’ll let these seduce you into dining there instead!

Spice up your life!

We had an olympic weekend in more ways than one these past few days. Starting with an amazing trip to the Olympic stadium to witness Yorkshire’s Jessica Ennis start her heptathlon campaign we then had to rush back up north to Manchester to get our fill of Kashmir cuisine at the Spice Club. Completely overtaken with olympic fever we had not anticipated that we would actually be dining on the eve of Team GB’s biggest athletics win – oops! Fear not, the food provided more than made up for our withdrawal symptoms from the games!

The Spice Club is one of Manchester’s first ever supperclubs and is about to celebrate its second birthday. It’s something of an enigma having been featured on shows such as the Hairy Bikers.

Another day, another supperclub…

Sticky Pinny and I are getting a bit of a reputation as supperclub obsessives! Less than a week after our trip to my home supperclub in Edinburgh, we found ourselves on a train hurtling across the penines to Manchester. Now, I have a love/hate relationship with Manchester. It always seems like, culturally, it has loads going on. However, this is set against what often feels like a very aggressive, intimidating, gritty and quite dirty city. It also didn’t help that as I entered Piccadilly it was a busy half term shopping day – i.e. hell on earth. I was in two minds about turning round and getting on the next train to a quiet, tranquil countryside idyll.