Manchester’s Most Influential Dishes

Manchester can be remarkably sentimental about its food. Suggest taking one of its favourite dishes away and all bets are off. 

We’re creatures of habit really. Find something good and we’ll order it for decades, tell everyone else to order it, argue about where does it best and eventually forget there was ever a time before it was everywhere. 

We’re even worse once everyone else catches on. Suddenly it’s not just something we like. It’s ours, apparently. 

Either way, once Manchester decides something belongs here, good luck getting rid of it.

Happy Seasons – Hong Kong style 3 roast meats 

Manchester has spent four decades finding new things to eat in Chinatown. So why is it so hard to order anything else? 

The best things do indeed come in three, but in Happy Seasons’ case, they’re practically the Holy Trinity. Roast duck, char siu and crispy pork belly have become one of the great constants of eating here. 

As for how Happy Seasons makes them? That’s barely changed since 1982. And there’s a ridiculous amount of work behind them. 

Preparation starts the night before. Ducks are marinated, glazed and hung to dry; pork belly is cured and pierced for its crackling; char siu is left to marinate before it ever sees the roaster. 

Then they do it all again. Twice a day. 

There’s plenty more on the menu, but let’s be honest, these are the meats Happy Seasons built its reputation on. 

Almost Famous – The Famous Burger 

The Famous Burger has a lot to answer for. Just look at the glorious excess it helped unleash across Manchester. 

The Famous was there from the start. Two cheeseburgers loaded with pickles, salad, Famous sauce and smoky ketchup, arriving in a red plastic basket along with a whole roll of kitchen roll. Your hands were never going to stay clean. 

Then Manchester caught BurgerMania.

Almost Famous helped turn the dirty burger into a city-wide obsession. Burgers got taller, toppings became increasingly unhinged, menus got messier and suddenly everything from pubs and bars to dedicated burger joints wanted a piece of it. 

Almost Famous doesn’t turn the dial up. It rips the bloody thing off. This is, after all, a restaurant that decided one of its burgers needed an entire corn dog sticking out of it. 

You know you’ve left your mark on a city when closing down leads to a resurrection barely a month later. 

Pollen – Cruffin 

Go to a farmers’ market this weekend. There’ll be a cruffin. 

Try a new bakery. Cruffin. 

That little coffee shop with six pastries behind the counter? You already know where this is going. 

Manchester has fallen head over heels in love with them. And rightly so. Croissant meets muffin. What’s not to love? Then our bakers got creative. Pistachio, lemon, tiramisu, crème brûlée – apparently, there’s very little they won’t put inside one. 

Pollen remembers when they were much harder to get your hands on. Back in 2017, people queued for up to an hour beneath its railway arches near Piccadilly, desperate to get there before the morning’s batch disappeared. 

Turns out, the cruffin had far more staying power than its silly little name suggested.

Bundobust – Vada Pav 

A potato burger had absolutely no right becoming this famous. 

Yet here we are. 

Spiced mashed potato, battered and fried, red and green chutney, soft brioche bun. Bundobust has sold hundreds of thousands of them since bringing vada pav up north. 

And plenty has changed since. New cities, new beers, new dishes, a brewery, Michelin recognition – that potato burger hasn’t budged. 

Better still, it escaped the restaurant. 

When Bundobust first started serving it, plenty of people needed telling what one actually was. Now Manchester City fans can pick one up outside the Etihad on matchday. 

Never underestimate what Manchester will do for carbs inside more carbs.

Black Milk – Freakshake 

We owe the humble milkshake an apology.

It used to have a fairly easy life. Then Black Milk got involved and suddenly the poor thing was carrying an entire dessert trolley on its head. 

Brownies, cookies, doughnuts, slices of cake. Black Milk stuck half the cake counter on top and helped kick Manchester’s dessert scene into a whole new level of excess. 

The timing couldn’t have been better either. Instagram was taking over our phones and changing how Manchester found its next place to eat. Black Milk was serving something nobody could resist pointing theirs at. 

Before long, dessert shops were multiplying and freakshakes cropped up all over the region. But somehow, putting a doughnut on top of a milkshake stopped looking remotely unreasonable. 

Look what you did, Black Milk. Long may the madness continue. 

Miami Crispy – Spicy Chicken Burger 

Nobody remembers declaring it, but Manchester is now deep into the Spicy-Dipped Chicken Wars. 

New contenders keep appearing, everyone swears their favourite does it best and those all-important sauces are guarded like state secrets. 

Miami Crispy has ridden the Spicy-Dipped Chicken Wars all the way into the Manchester Book of Legends. 

Which is quite funny when you look at the thing. Fried chicken dunked in fiery red sauce, lettuce, mayo, sesame bun. That’s your legend. 

During Ramadan, waits have reportedly pushed towards two hours. At its peak, insiders reckoned that little Burnage takeaway was turning over as much as £45,000 a week. 

After all that, it’s still a chicken burger from a takeaway in Burnage. 

Bunny Jackson’s – 10p Wings 

At what point does eating a million chicken wings become a civic achievement? Because Manchester has done its bit. 

Bunny Jackson’s started flogging them for 10p during England’s 2018 World Cup run and then did something far more ridiculous… They kept doing it. 

Long after football failed to come home, the wings staying put was arguably the greatest trade-off.

Ten wings never sounds particularly ambitious. Then you look down and there’s a small poultry graveyard in front of you. But ten becomes twenty remarkably easily when every extra wing costs less than the carrier bag you brought your shopping home in. 

A million wings later, imagine trying to take them off the menu. There’d be riots on First Street. 

Forget the Big Mac Index. We’ve got Bunny Jackson’s wings. 

This & That – Rice and Three 

The best thing This & That ever served probably wasn’t one of its curries. It was an idea. 

Rice and Three was exactly the sort of lunch Manchester understood. Cheap enough to eat regularly, quick enough to fit around work and filling enough to stop anybody thinking about tea before they had to. 

Manchester turned that idea into a Mancunian rite of passage. This & That just happened to serve it first. 

From its tiny café down Soap Street, the format spread across the city. Kabana, Little Aladdin and Yadgar made it perfectly clear that one Rice and Three café was never going to satisfy Manchester. 

That simplicity was the genius of it. Pick your rice, point at three curries and find somewhere to sit. Textile workers were doing it in the 1980s. Students discovered it, office workers joined them and generations of Mancunians have kept the plates coming ever since. 

If it isn’t broken, Manchester generally sees no reason to fix it. 

The only meaningful question arrives at the counter. 

Which three? 

Godfather – Chicken Kebab 

There are some things your dad just knows better than you. Godfather is one of them. Ask mine what belongs on this list and he doesn’t hesitate. Godfather. Chicken kebab. 

He’s had plenty of time to get the order right. Godfather has been on Kingsway since 1984. Forty-two years is enough time for plenty of other dads to have done exactly the same. 

Boneless chicken gets marinated with saffron, grilled and piled onto naan baked fresh for the job. Salad, sauce, the usual negotiations follow. And if you know what you’re doing, there’s a bottle of lemon juice and salt getting poured over the chicken before anything else happens. 

Turns out, the old man knew what he was talking about. 

Rudy’s – Pizza

There’s Manchester pizza before Rudy’s, and Manchester pizza after it. We’ve all eaten considerably better since. 

We tried picking one Rudy’s pizza for this list. Then it became pretty obvious the topping was never the point. 

It was always the base. 

Soft, blistered and beautifully light, it was unlike much else being served in Manchester when Rudy’s opened in Ancoats in 2015. Within a year, those pizzas were already appearing in guides to the best in the world. 

More followed. Lots more. Rudy’s started multiplying, while Neapolitan pizzerias sprung up across Manchester and gave us more brilliant pizza than we knew what to do with. 

Ten years later, the city’s pizza scene barely resembles the one Rudy’s arrived in. Rudy’s didn’t do all of that on its own. But try telling Manchester’s pizza story without it.

Erst – Flatbread 

Erst has served some extraordinary food over the years. Manchester still won’t shut up about the bread. 

And with good reason too. 

The toppings have changed more times than we can keep track of. Beef fat and Urfa chilli. Whipped lardo. Tomato and garlic. Walnut tarator. Anchovies, fermented onions, cheese. If Erst can spread it, spoon it or melt it, chances are it’s found its way onto that famous grilled flatbread. 

Yet somehow, beneath all that, the flatbread remains one of the few constants the bosses refuse to substitute. There’d be uproar. 

Eventually, Manchester ate enough brilliant flatbreads for the whole thing to become a scene. Erst had been at it for years. 

Koffee Pot – KP Full English 

Serve Manchester the same breakfast for nearly half a century and you’d think we might be sick of it by now. We’re not. 

Since 1978, its Full English has fed just about every version of Manchester going. Goths, musicians, footballers, clubbers still piecing together the night before, builders starting theirs. 

It even found its way into an Elbow song.

In that time, the Northern Quarter around it has changed beyond recognition. Koffee Pot has closed, moved, come back again and the daytime greasy spoon even turns into a taco and margarita joint with Birria Brothers by night. 

A brilliant breakfast isn’t exactly hard to come by in Manchester anymore. Koffee Pot carried on frying them.