Urban Cookhouse, restaurant review: Big Apple-inspired ... but leaves a sour taste
54 Princess Street, Manchester, Tel: 0161 235 8768
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Your support makes all the difference.I'm sorry. So, so sorry. Jane, Tom and James, I've made you come out to dinner with me in Manchester to what I thought would be a fun, creative restaurant.
Big mistake, as it turns out. Urban Cookhouse is a dud. But we couldn't have known – the location, in Manchester's city centre, is decent; the décor is New York loft-ish (it's a converted shipping warehouse); the "Manhattan-inspired" menu reads well. Owner Tim Coulston has opened Urban Cookhouse as the "debut site" for his company Violet Hospitality. What follows our arrival, blown in on a dank autumn evening, is so bad it's almost comedic. Tim, better get the formula right before you spread out.
We avoid the cocktails: they have, it says, "a distinctly urban flavour". Sounds… gritty. Of the 10 white wines on the list, four are "sold out". The more reasonable ones, as it happens. May we have the Olivier Tricon Chablis 2013 for the same price as the Chenin we want? A shrug (which I discover, when the bill comes, means "no"). Later, when in desperation we've drunk two bottles of it and beg for more only to be told it, too, is now sold out, we're offered the Chenin. By then the thin line between inept service and poor management has been crossed.
The kitchen has an entirely different problem – I can only guess from the food we eat that they have too much of everything. Perhaps they're trying to make space in the fridge by piling plates with random additions.
Of the starters, spiced shrimp salad with jalapeño cornbread is the worst: a vast, leaden slab of carbohydrate, quartered red onions, a mystery mousse and a clod of fridge-cold clarified butter, within which there are a few tiny shrimps. (You, like us, might have thought it'd be a US-style shrimp here, but no.)
Potato gnocchi with prosciutto crisps comes with unwelcome, barely softened onions; my "snack" of Manhattan poutine is at least what it says it is: a tin of chips slathered in gravy and grated cheese, which hasn't melted due to the lukewarm components. Sigh.
We plough on, and through. Hake, cooked well enough, inexplicably comes with a tuna melt sandwich, while five blobs of red sauce decorate the plate but not the palate. Fried bread as well as house fries with the New York strip steak? Greasy, unnecessary. The steak is – says Tom cautiously – OK. Certainly softer than the yolks of the two fried eggs that top it.
I admit I order my main course out of curiosity. And curious it is, too. Sweet- tomato pie with squash soup, grilled corn and lime butter at least looks like it sounds (apart from a mysterious added bowl of – can it be? – ice cream). Having been spoilt by pies and pithiviers with crisp, golden pastry in the past, I am dismayed – although not entirely surprised by this point – to see a flat, matt puck of pastry, burnt on one side and pale on the other. Inside its dense, flabby layers is a single, sliced tomato. The tomato is indeed sweet. The overall effect is of a Year Three home-economics attempt at apple turnovers.
The waitress is as bewildered as I am about the ice cream. She returns to the kitchen, which has turned off its main lights the minute the mains left the pass, to find out what it is. Parmesan, comes the answer. The bland soup is neither silky nor chunky, just thick.
One redeeming moment. It might have been unwise to order a Midnight Manhattan pudding – a raspberry soufflé with dark-chocolate fondant that the menu says requires 15 minutes prep – given that the chef seems to have clocked off and someone's sweeping the floor. But as it turns out, this is the most accomplished and tasty dish we try. Towering and wobbly, it's light and comes with a jug of terrific raspberry sauce to tip in.
The next day, because I'd had wine, I check with my fellow diners whether what I'm writing is unduly negative. No, no, they assure me – it really was that bad. And we're not snooty southerners, before you ask. Jane is from Liverpool and spends lots of time in Yorkshire and Tom's hometown is County Durham.
It doesn't give me any pleasure to report on bad restaurants – I usually demur from writing them up and try somewhere else. But Manchester deserves better.
4/10
Urban Cookhouse, 54 Princess Street, Manchester, Tel: 0161 235 8768. £75 for two, with wine
Four more foodie notes from the past week
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MeatLiquorN1
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Bhel puri
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Shotgun BBQ
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