My favourite places for small plates in Manchester city centre
Or how I learned to stop worrying and love small plates.
A couple of years ago, when I had been working as a food writer for several years and an editor for about six months, I began to feel jaded. When I first got a job writing about food all those years ago, I couldn’t believe my luck but I had also been worried that one day it would spoil my enjoyment of food - and possibly even writing. To some extent, that does happen but when it did, it wasn’t the bad thing I had thought it would be.
It’s a privilege to get given endless free food. Trust me, I have shovelled dog poo, cleaned hotel rooms and toilets, and worked in a call centre for a living before, so I do not take it for granted. But professionally, it’s not a bad thing to get bored of being courted by PRs (no shade, they are just doing their job), drinking welcome glasses of “fizz”, eating the latest hype burger, and being implored to write about an unimaginative “new menu launch”. It’s not a bad thing because it helps you to understand what is important to you, what still excites you, and what makes you really want to write.
But I was full of self-doubt and worried about social media haters, so I went home one night and wrote a diatribe on small plates that I never published. Since then, I have accidentally destroyed my old laptop with inexplicable water damage, so I can’t share an excerpt here but it went along the lines of: “Small plates are the devil’s work. I could reel off the boring ass menu (fried squid, ‘Korean’ chicken, halloumi, hummus…) with my eyes closed, and my eyes would definitely be closed because I would have nodded off from the tedium. They’re joyless, unimaginative, overpriced and I hate them.”
I was right to be uninspired by menus like this, but I was wrong about small plates per se. Small plates done well are a dream for a food FOMO sufferer like me. They allow you to try a number of things rather than being over-faced by a big plate of ‘same’. They allow chefs to experiment and diners to try a mix of safe bets and wild cards. They invite adventure.
Since then, Manchester has birthed some of my favourite restaurants, all doing small plates. Others were already there, sparkling exceptions to the rule. Now, I have a list of favourite go-to, special occasion small plates restaurants in the city. I’m not including things like dim sum or tapas joints here because frankly there are so many that they require their own round-up. This list of eight of my favourites focuses on, I suppose, broadly European small plates with a modern British flourish.
I’ve recently gone freelance in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis and am wondering if I have lost my mind, so I’m going to try something I feel a bit icky about doing. The following list is for paid subscribers only. For the price of a coffee once a month, please consider supporting my writing work and my tireless quest to help you to eat better in Manchester. Only if you can afford it, of course.
In return, you can read my solid gold Manchester small plates restaurant recommendations below (click the venue names to go to their websites):