In November last year, Eunji Noh, the owner of a small neighbourhood restaurant in Chorlton, arranged a meeting with representatives of the food website Manchester Confidential. The website had been selling vouchers that allowed its readers to purchase discounted meals at Noh’s restaurant, The Thirsty Korean, but the promotion hadn’t been going well and she wanted to end it.
She thought she would be meeting a salesperson and a marketing manager from Manchester Confidential. But when she arrived at Benito Lounge, a café down the road from her restaurant, there was someone else there: Mark Garner, the website’s 66-year-old founder who both runs its sales operation and writes restaurant reviews — an apparent conflict of interest that helps to explain the regular criticism he has received since he launched the site in 2002. He writes under the long-running pseudonym “Gordo” and, not long ago, described himself on Twitter as “The North's most read and trusted restaurant critic.”
Within moments of sitting down, Noh felt she was being bullied by Garner. “This is typical of how Koreans do business,” he told her, according to those present. At another point he said: “You’re going to fold.” One witness to the meeting says Garner berated Noh, threatened to sue her if she ended the voucher promotion and reduced her to tears. “There was this tiny Korean lady — crying — with this six-foot fat man shouting in her face”. When we asked Garner for his memories of this meeting, he chose not to respond.
Manchester Confidential readers were paying £25 for vouchers which entitled them to £50 worth of food at The Thirsty Korean. Garner’s company kept the cash and in return the restaurant got some advertising from Manchester Confidential and a flood of new customers, in the hope that they might become regulars after the voucher promotion ended. Noh wanted to stop the deal because she thought it was tanking her business, which was grappling with challenges caused by the pandemic.
To make her case, she had brought an A4 sheet of paper, charting the last four weeks of trading. It showed a steep drop in revenue around the time Confidentials — as the wider company is known — started selling the vouchers to its customers. So steep, in fact, that Noh had called the meeting as a matter of urgency. She wasn’t sure she was going to be able to buy basic ingredients to open the restaurant the next day.
“It [the voucher promotion] put me in more difficulty than the lockdown,” Noh told The Mill this week. She says she regrets ever agreeing to the deal and is still fearful of Garner after the way he treated her in that meeting, which left her feeling degraded and humiliated. She remembers “begging to make him [Garner] listen,” but after about 15 minutes, Garner had heard enough. “I’m not having these crocodile tears,” he told her as he got up, leaving Noh sitting with his two dumbstruck staff, who started apologising for the way their boss had treated her.
A social media blow-up
The way Garner treats restaurants in Manchester has become a hot topic in the city’s hospitality industry in recent weeks, thanks to a social media post about Maray, a Middle Eastern restaurant that recently opened near Albert Square. Writing on LinkedIn, Garner said he had walked past Maray and it was “as dead as a door nail”. He said he had offered them help in the form of advertising, but never heard back. By contrast Rosso, an Italian restaurant nearby which has “been marketing with Confidentials.com for eight consecutive years”, was full of customers. Garner, who is not renowned for his subtlety, was making himself perfectly clear: the marketing power of his website — which employs around 30 people and has more than 150,000 followers on its main Twitter account — was enough to make some restaurants succeed while others failed.
The LinkedIn post received little engagement, but Maray chose to respond on Twitter, sharing a screenshot of Garner’s post. “This fella has been pestering us to work with him, won’t take a polite no for an answer!” the restaurant wrote. They continued: “Just for the avoidance of doubt & for public record — we’re absolutely fine; didn’t need you then, don’t need you now.”
It looked like an example of a new generation of restaurants, digitally savvy and lacking any deference towards the established food media, using social media to do their own marketing. The response to Maray’s tweets was overwhelming, and many of the replies and retweets were pointedly critical of Garner, including some from restaurant operators. “He (and the like) never understand it when we don’t want to use the fake PR machine,” said one person. “Same. Told us we wouldn’t get far without him. WRONG,” wrote another.
“It's just the arrogance to assume that at some point the self-professed ‘rainmaker of Manchester’ would get us on board,” Maray’s co-founder James Bates told The Mill a few days after posting the tweet. “It was the assumption that at some point he would get his own way which got my back up a little bit.”
The restaurant-going public immediately rallied round Bates and his team, posting supportive tweets about meals they were enjoying at Maray. But the incident raised questions that went beyond one restaurant and its marketing decisions — questions about the behaviour of one of the North’s largest media companies and how it treats the independent restaurants it covers. More specifically, it raised questions about Garner himself.
Garner has been a well-known figure in Manchester’s hospitality world for many years, but also a controversial one. In an earlier era, when Manchester Confidential was a web pioneer and one of the few online sources for food writing in the city, he was frequently quoted in national newspapers as an expert on the sector. “When [Anthony] Bourdain came up to talk at The Lowry, Garner was asked to host it,” remembers one industry source. “That was the power that he had.”
He has been declared bankrupt three times and in 2013 was disqualified from being a company director until 2025, after being caught running a company while being an undischarged bankrupt, a criminal offence. After his disqualification, the company was under the directorship of his daughter, according to Companies House. Since 2017, Garner says he has run Confidentials privately as a sole trader, which is within the rules.
Soon after Maray’s tweet, The Mill was approached by someone who said they had collated a list of restaurant operators who had reported bad experiences with Garner. Since then, we have spoken to more than 15 sources, including many we found independently from the original source and several former staff members at Confidentials. The accounts we have heard are more serious than the “pestering” received by Bates, but they confirm a pattern of Garner putting excessive pressure on restaurants to advertise, as well as using racist and sexist language that has alienated a string of former staff.
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