Best Restaurants in Northern Quarter
By EATMCRSome neighbourhoods become known for one thing. The Northern Quarter never really saw the point.
Some neighbourhoods become known for one thing. The Northern Quarter never really saw the point.
Within a few streets, dinner can take you just about anywhere. Better still, it usually does it properly. One table is ordering the dishes they’ve spent all week looking forward to because nowhere else quite scratches the same itch. The next is taking a punt on something they’ve never eaten before. Both are exactly where they should be.
That’s why eating in the Northern Quarter never gets old. However far the food takes you, it never feels like you’ve wandered into a collection of restaurants trying to be somewhere else. They’re unmistakably themselves. They’re unmistakably Northern Quarter.
It’s one of the few parts of Manchester where familiarity and discovery seem perfectly happy sharing the same table.
These are some of our favourites.
Evelyn’s
Evelyn’s menu gets around.
Normally that’s where restaurants start getting themselves into trouble.
A bit of this cuisine. A bit of that one. Before long, dinner starts feeling like somebody couldn’t decide what they fancied cooking.
Evelyn’s never has that problem.
Everything eventually comes back to the charcoal. Harissa sits happily alongside soy. Labneh doesn’t feel out of place next to miso. Smoke works its way through the whole menu until everything starts speaking the same language.
By the time everything lands on the table, it no longer feels like Middle Eastern food borrowing from Asia or Asian food borrowing from the Middle East. It just feels like Evelyn’s.
The vegetables aren’t treated any differently. Why would they be? They’re not there to balance the table out. They hit the charcoal, pick up exactly the same care and usually leave somebody wondering why they bothered ordering meat in the first place.
That’s a surprisingly difficult trick to pull off. Evelyn’s barely looks like it’s trying.
The Trof
You don’t stay one of Manchester’s favourite restaurants for as long as The Trof by forgetting why people fell in love with you in the first place.
Changing for the sake of it was never going to be an option.
That becomes obvious the moment you open the menu. Mince on dripping toast. Ox cheek pie. Pork collar with cabbage and bacon. Sticky toffee pudding. Bakewell tart. They’re the sort of dishes you’ve usually decided you’re ordering before you’ve even left the house.
The Trof knows exactly how the classics should taste, but equally knows exactly where to interfere. That’s down to Matt Nellany and Jamie Pickles who have quietly transformed what comes out of The Trof’s kitchen. Better ingredients. Sharper sauces. A little more precision from the kitchen. It’s everything you’d hope for from The Trof.
Downstairs is still the beloved Victorian tavern. Upstairs has become one of the city’s most celebrated culinary spaces.
One works brilliantly for a pint. The other for dinner. Most nights, you’ll end up doing both anyway.
Which, when you think about it, is probably exactly how The Trof should have done it.
Le Coq Boutique
Chicken deserved this.
Finally, somebody’s treating it like the reason you went out for dinner.
Twenty-four-hour brines, butter basting, chicken-fat hollandaise and, of course, Chicken Wine. Where else was it going to end up?
Le Coq Boutique has taken one of the safest orders on almost any menu and given it the full works. The birds are spatchcocked, rubbed, butter-basted and roasted to order before arriving ready to carve up at the table.
And that’s before you’ve smothered the thing.
Café de Paris butter? Go on then. Hot honey? Obviously. Chicken fat, lemon and garlic? You haven’t come this far to suddenly show restraint.
The chicken may have top billing, but the supporting cast is ridiculously good.
Hash browns arrive under truffle and pecorino foam. Hispi cabbage gets chicken-fat hollandaise and crispy chicken skin. Even the Caesar salad has somehow acquired an entire grilled sardine.
Do yourself a favour and leave plenty of room around the chicken. The sides deserve considerably more than whatever space is left.
Le Coq Boutique has taken the simple pleasure of a whole roast chicken and built one of the Northern Quarter’s most exciting dinners around it.
Just make sure whoever’s carving actually knows what they’re doing.
BAB
Call BAB a posh kebab if you like.
Everyone else does.
You’d just be doing it a slight disservice.
The kebabs arrive gloriously uncovered, either because there’s physically no way to wrap something that overstuffed, or because hiding them would be a complete waste of everyone’s time. Towering flatbreads are buried beneath slow-cooked meat, pickles, herbs, and sauces, looking as if somebody forgot to tell the kitchen when to stop.
Good job they taste every bit as good as they look.
The kebabs might’ve got you through the door, but BAB’s never been a one-trick pony. The whipped feta’s become every bit as essential, while the mezze does a very convincing job of turning one kebab into a table full of food.
The only thing that catches you off guard is the 9pm closing time. Somewhere serving kebabs this good in the Northern Quarter has absolutely no business calling it a night that early.
So yes, call BAB a posh kebab if it makes you happy.
You’ll still struggle to find a better one.
This & That
Lunch at This & That has always involved a small leap of faith.
The walk down the alley doesn’t exactly suggest you’re about to eat one of Manchester’s finest lunches, and neither does much of what greets you inside. Fortunately, appearances have never counted for much here.
Get there early and the menu board’s full. Get there a little later and half of it’s disappeared beneath hurriedly rubbed-out chalk, forcing you into the sort of split-second decisions Manchester’s been making here for decades. More often than not, the plate that eventually lands in front of you turns out to be better than the one you originally had in mind anyway.
A rich meat curry, a ladle of dal, whatever vegetables happen to be bubbling away that day and a generous mound of rice is usually as good a place to start as any.
Then everything starts blending together.
Three curries. One mound of rice. It begins as three separate dishes before slowly becoming one, each forkful changing as the sauces work their way across the plate.
The last mouthful’s usually the best. By then, every curry’s found its way into the same forkful anyway.
The Badger
Most new pubs spend years trying to feel established.
The Badger somehow managed it before the paint had dried.
Walk in now and you’d swear it had been part of the Northern Quarter for decades. Even the regulars look like they’ve been drinking there for years. Low ceilings, proper pints and the sort of atmosphere that makes you wonder what was here before. The answer, of course, isn’t this. It just feels like it should have been.
You’d hardly be surprised to know either that they also happen to knock up one of the city’s best Sunday roasts, complete with cult-status Boddingtons gravy. As if you needed another excuse.
Nobody asked for a country pub in the Northern Quarter. Good job nobody was asked.
Smaak
Telling Brits there’s a better way to eat chips is brave territory.
Smaak has an entire Dutch food tradition backing up its argument. It also came armed with generations of expertise and a fryer shipped over from Amsterdam. They clearly fancied their chances.
Then you discover they spent more than a year developing the sauces.
A year.
There are marriages that have received less commitment.
All that work eventually produced the likes of Joppie, a sweet, tangy curry mayo; Oorlog, where peanut sauce, mayonnaise and raw onion are piled onto the fries; and bitterballen, crispy little Dutch croquettes filled with slow-cooked beef.
The potatoes gets just as much of the attention. Smaak uses locally grown Cheshire spuds, cut thick and fried in the Amsterdam-imported kit until crisp and golden outside, fluffy in the middle.
The Dutch have been happily ordering Joppie, Oorlog and bitterballen without a second thought for years. Manchester might need a minute to check they’re not taking the piss.
For all the novelty of Manchester getting its first friethuis, there’s nothing novel about the way Smaak approaches one. This is Dutch comfort food exactly as seriously as the Dutch take it.
Smaak could’ve been a curiosity you visit once. It’s far too good for that.
That’s worth getting lost down a Northern Quarter alley for.
Mackie Mayor
Everybody’s got an old reliable.
Mackie Mayor’s Manchester’s.
It’s where you end up when nobody can agree. Pizza? Fine. Tacos? Go for it. Ramen? Absolutely. Fried chicken? Why not. Someone will inevitably wander off for another pint while everyone else pretends they’re definitely ready to order. Spend long enough in Manchester and, sooner or later, you’ll find yourself under that glass roof wondering why anybody ever suggested going somewhere else.
The former Smithfield market hall has become one of those places that solves problems.
Nobody compromises. Nobody settles. Everyone leaves wondering why they don’t come here more often.
Somehow, it still feels just as exciting as the first time you walked in.
Gooey
Everyone walks into Gooey with a plan.
It normally lasts about thirty seconds.
You tell yourself you’re just grabbing a coffee. Then your eyes wander towards the counter. From there, the outcome’s usually inevitable. Thick cookies, towering doughnuts, cinnamon rolls the size of your head and bakes that seem to have absolutely no interest in being sensible.
The name was never subtle, and neither are the bakes. Thankfully. Manchester’s got plenty of places that know when to stop. Gooey has built an entire reputation on wondering what happens if you don’t.
No regrets.
Just crumbs.
Siop Shop
Most artisan bakeries spend years trying to sound exclusive.
Slop Shop summed itself up as a “souped-up Greggs”.
Unsurprisingly, they were underselling themselves.
For our Welsh readers, this feels fairly self-explanatory, but siop translates to shop. Which means the Northern Quarter favourite is essentially called Shop Shop. A strong start if you ask us, and that’s before you’ve even seen the doughnuts. We don’t know why that makes us love them even more, but it does.
That same attitude runs through the whole place. Brilliant coffee, exceptional baking and doughnuts that deserve every bit of the queue, all without ever feeling like they’re trying to impress you. You pop in because you’re hungry, not because you’ve spent three weeks researching the city’s best laminated pastry.
It’s got that lovely Northern Quarter feel too. And it’s almost impossible to remain a stranger, with their ever-changing bakes giving you the perfect excuse to keep finding your way back.
Bada Bing
British lunch culture has always been built around efficiency.
Bada Bing clearly missed the memo.
It’s pretty difficult to carry on with your day as though nothing has happened after one of their sandwiches. The Oldham Street deli has spent years doing American-Italian hoagies with absolutely no interest in moderation, and Manchester’s a far better place because of it. Bada Bing deserves every bit of the love it’s received over the years. Few places have earned it quite like they have.
Perhaps that’s why the city never really stopped talking about Bada Bing when it disappeared in 2022. Sandwich shops don’t normally get comeback tours. Bada Bing did. Quite rightly, too.
Everything about the place feels slightly larger than life, from the Sopranos-inspired identity to sandwiches that seem determined to solve not only lunch, but several future meals in the process.
If you’ve got anything particularly important planned for half past two, we’d suggest getting it out of the way before lunch.
