Best Restaurants In Ancoats

Ancoats has made choosing where to eat unnecessarily difficult, cramming an unreasonable number of incredible restaurants into one small corner of Manchester. Knowing where to start is another matter entirely.

Somewhere along the way, we’ve become horribly spoiled by it. Ancoats having brilliant restaurants doesn’t really surprise anybody anymore. We simply expect it.

The restaurants can take a fair chunk of the blame. Ancoats didn’t become one of Manchester’s favourite neighbourhoods and then suddenly decide it fancied a great food scene. The two have grown up together.

The result is somewhere that’s both a safe bet and an exciting one.

If you’re choosing a restaurant in Ancoats, you’ve already got a significant head start. Getting dinner badly wrong around here takes some doing.

These are some of our favourites.

Rudy’s

It’s difficult to work out whether Rudy’s grew up with Ancoats or Ancoats grew up with Rudy’s. Either way, the pair have done suspiciously well for themselves.

Back in 2015, there was one Rudy’s, one little spot on Cutting Room Square and a growing number of Mancunians willing to make the journey through still disused mills and fenced off wastelands specifically for that pizza.

Then the queues started to form. Ancoats started filling up. Rudy’s started multiplying. And truthfully, neither has ever looked back since.

Remarkably, ten years and a small army of new Rudy’s later, they’ve remained impressively resistant to any unnecessary tinkering that ruins a perfectly good pizza. Good.

The pizzas are still gloriously uncomplicated: soft, blistered bases, a roaring-hot oven and, if you’re asking us, absolutely no reason to order anything other than the fennel sausage. Pick up a slice too enthusiastically and there’s every chance the middle will surrender before it reaches your mouth, but dignity has always been a reasonable price to pay for a slice of Neopolitan heaven.

That’s why the original still feels so inseparable from Ancoats. Both have become bigger, busier and considerably better known than they were a decade ago, but an evening pizza on Cutting Room Square remains one of Manchester’s greatest delights.

There are Rudy’s all over Manchester now.

This is still the pilgrimage.

Erst

Erst has a deeply irritating habit of making the thing you were least excited about become the thing you won’t shut up about afterwards.

Nobody arrives desperate to tell their mates about grilled cabbage.

Or butter.

Or a slice of flatbread.

Then again, nobody leaves talking about anything else either. It’s happened to the best of us.

The menu rarely makes life any easier either. It’s short, seasonal and forever changing, which somehow makes every decision feel disproportionately important. Whatever arrives at the next table immediately becomes the thing you wish you’d ordered instead.

Manchester has spent the last few years falling in love with natural wine, small plates, open-fire cooking and concrete. Erst just beat them all to it.

The menu changes constantly.

The strange ability to make ordinary things feel completely extraordinary apparently doesn’t.

They’ve probably done more for the reputation of vegetables than anyone’s mum ever has.

Elnecot

Keeping up with Ancoats is exhausting. Elnecot has been doing it since 2017 and not a bead of sweat has dropped from their brow, and rather annoyingly, still looks perfectly comfortable.

This is a restaurant that has already lived through several versions of the neighbourhood. When Michael Clay opened the doors, building work was still rattling away around Ancoats and his menus were busy introducing diners to duck hearts, ox cheek and the occasional lamb bollocks.

Quite a lot has happened since.

Somewhere along the way, the restaurant that once convinced Manchester to order lamb bollocks also became somewhere you’d happily book for Mother’s Day.

These days it might be brunch before wandering round the makers market, Sunday lunch with the family, tea on Cutting Room Square after work or simply that restaurant everyone ends up agreeing on when nobody can decide where to eat.

Not one of those versions feels like the restaurant has wandered off and forgotten what it was supposed to be.

Ancoats has never exactly struggled for shiny new restaurants. Every year another opening arrives promising to become the neighbourhood’s next obsession. Lucky enough for Mancunians, Elnecot has changed, loosened up and found new reasons for people to fall in love with it again.

Looking back now, it’s surprisingly difficult to remember exactly when Elnecot became everyone’s default answer.

It just sort of happened.

Flawd

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Some menus are designed to last for years. Flawd’s barely survives the day.

By the time you arrive, half of it’s already been rubbed out.

Good.

It normally means something better turned up this morning.

That’s pretty much Flawd in a nutshell. The menu’s never interested in standing still for very long because the ingredients rarely do either. Fish changes. Vegetables come and go.

Somebody wipes the board clean and does it all again tomorrow.

Before any of that, Flawd was a bottle shop. It just happens to be one of Ancoats’ most exciting places to eat as well. Shelves lined with natural wines, bottles you’ve never heard of but immediately want to take home and a team who somehow always know exactly what to pour alongside whatever’s just appeared on the blackboard.

Then you remember they actually feed people as well.

Silky split pea dip with thick slices of Pollen sourdough. Tomatoes that taste almost impossibly of themselves. Hyper-seasonal vegetables from Cinderwood Market Garden that taste like they’ve barely had time to leave the soil.

All being cooked in a kitchen that, by most restaurant standards, barely exists.

No gas. No oven. Just a sandwich press, a pressure cooker and a team producing the sort of food most fully equipped restaurants would be delighted to call their own.

It’s tiny.

Fortunately, it more than makes up for it elsewhere.

Ramona

Ramona is aggressively difficult to shoehorn into a neat box. It changes personality far too often for that.

Lunch slips into afternoon drinks. Afternoon drinks drift towards frozen spicy margaritas around the fire pits. By the time Manchester’s best DJs have taken over, any plans you thought you had afterwards have quietly become somebody else’s problem.

All of this happens inside an enormous former MOT garage on Swan Street, because apparently opening a normal-sized restaurant wasn’t going to be nearly enough fun.

The pizzas certainly aren’t shy either. Thick, airy dough is fermented for 48 hours before hitting square trays, where the cheese caramelises around the edges into one of the best bites of pizza in Manchester.

But pizza only explains one version of the place.

There are margaritas, campfires, DJs, sprawling outdoor spaces and an impressive ability to turn “shall we get something to eat?” into a commitment you hadn’t realised would require most of your evening.

The pizzas are excellent. The inability to leave is equally impressive.

The Jane Eyre

Trying to get a straight answer about Jane Eyre is a complete waste of time.

Cocktails.

Sunday lunch.

Wine.

No, the small plates.

See what we mean?

The food never feels like it’s trying to impress you. It doesn’t need to. Really good ingredients, a kitchen sensible enough to know when to stop and the sort of small plates that are infinitely better shared over a bottle of wine.

About the only thing everyone does seem to agree on is that somebody behind the bar has mastered the mixology dark arts. The Breakfast Boulevardier has survived menu after menu for a reason, while Sweet Jane has quietly become a house signature in its own right. Around them, the cocktail list constantly shifts with the seasons, without ever compromising the precision or balance that’s made the bar one of Manchester’s very best.

Even the name catches people out. Despite what almost everybody assumes, Jane Eyre has nothing to do with Charlotte Brontë. Joe and Jonny Eyre simply named it after their mum, Jane.

It’s a lovely little detail.

Everything about Jane Eyre feels a bit like that.

American Pies

If you’re going to do something properly, you may as well overdo it.

American Pies appears to have taken that rather personally.

Everything here is gloriously over the top. Thick Detroit-style slabs with cheese running right to the edges, towering toppings and deep dish pizzas that arrive looking like they’ve been built rather than cooked.

Beneath all that chaos is a bloody good pizza. That’s the bit people tend to forget because they’re too stunned to speak as their behemoth deep dish pizza thuds onto the table. Were you really expecting the team behind Brewski to come back from Chicago skimping on portion sizes after they saw how it should be done properly, returning with both Chicago deep dish and Detroit-style pizza rather than a watered-down version of either. Ancoats is much better off for it.

Take the photo.

It’s not for Instagram.

It’s because nobody’s believing you otherwise.

Ancoats Deli

Ancoats had been crying out for a proper deli.

July 2024 fixed that.

By the time most sandwich shops have locked the door, Ancoats Deli’s only just getting started. The lunchtime queues give way to charcuterie boards, martinis and bottles of wine, while the courtyard works just as well with a sandwich at midday as it does with a spritz a few hours later. Ancoats Deli never really closes. It just changes personality.

The sandwiches deserve every bit of the attention they get, but reducing Ancoats Deli to what’s between two slices of bread misses the point. It’s the bottle of wine you grab on the way home. The cheese you suddenly decide dinner’s been missing. The giant tins of Perelló olives that somehow find their way to the till every single time.

You go in hungry. You come out with dinner, tomorrow’s lunch and a bottle for the weekend.

It’s the sort of place every neighbourhood wishes it had.

Ancoats finally does.