Should Manchester Museum give back its African artefacts?
Over several decades, Manchester Museum acquired thousands of objects from across Africa. They were collected through various means but many were stolen. Now the museum is asking: what is the future of these collections? And how many should be given back?
Next Thursday, join us for a night at the museum to debate one of the most contentious topics in curating. We'll be hearing from curators, as well as members of the Igbo community living in Manchester, on what should happen to these artefacts. Then there'll be a chance for Mill readers to join in the debate and share their views.
The event is exclusively open to Mill readers. Tickets are free, but you need to book your place. Just click below.
If you've booked a ticket but can no longer attend, please return at the link above.
TNQ did everything right. The Northern Quarter Restaurant – a 30-odd cover bistro on the corner of High Street and Copperas Street – survived 22 years in the city. Like a prize fighter it ducked and weaved every uncertainty, every ebb and flow of the fickle world of hospitality. “They changed the menu when they had to, tweaked the offering,” one wine buyer told me at a recent hospitality conference, both of us staring forlornly at the stalls flogging payment systems and Ricky Gervais’ vodka. But last month TNQ’s luck ran out, and one of the Northern Quarter’s oldest restaurants closed indefinitely, citing rising bills.
Manchester’s restaurateurs see the closure as a bellwether, a sign of where the city’s hospitality industry is headed. “Places in the Northern Quarter come and go,” says Rich Carver, who has been running the pizza shop Honest Crust for the last 13 years. “But when it’s a place that well established… There hasn’t been a dip in quality; it's really just about the external factors.” Anyone who has read anything about the hospitality industry in the last few years knows what these external factors are: rising bills, some of the highest VAT rates in Europe, distant wars and a looming oil crisis.
But behind the global pressures lies a local story. A story of a food scene that, as the city developed, went from relatively modest, to proudly independent, to nationally significant. Which brings us to now: a scene governed by online influencers; one that's steadily losing its character through chasing trends, and where a new restaurant can’t open without dozens of financial backers and a queue out the door on opening night.
So how did we get here?
Let’s go back to when TNQ opened. Back in the early 2000s, a restaurant in Manchester city centre was not a casual affair. Many were in hotels, or were generally more formal: bistros, white-tablecloth types, the odd minimal bar-and-grill. Of course, there was always Chinatown, and the Rajdoot, and Rincon De Rafa and Dimitri’s. But the restaurants of the day — th en vogue ones — took themselves more seriously.
None of these places had any need to concern themselves with Instagram coverage or queues. Indeed the main thing any of them had to worry about was Mark Garner — a food critic who this paper has covered extensively for his not-so-savoury treatment of restaurant-owners, and who started his review site Manchester Confidential in 2004. But, back then, going for dinner in the city was still something of an event. You booked a table, maybe somewhere like Rosso – the domed and Rio Ferdinand-owned Italian on King Street – and you half-expected to see a United player out with his family, likely wearing a horrendous pair of jeans.
But in the early 2010s there was a rapid proliferation of scrappy independent bars and restaurants, mostly centred around the Northern Quarter — Solita; Almost Famous; Lust, Luck, Liquor & Burn; and so on. They were a departure from the restaurants described in the previous paragraph: They were Millennial, and in retrospect painfully so. They served drinks with names like “bitch juice” and said their burgers contained unicorn meat.
“When we first arrived, Manchester was massively on the rise. It was a bit of a wild west of indies,” says Jason Bailey, who started the street food pop-up GRUB in 2014. The Northern Quarter during this time was home to some of the earliest instances of viral restaurants. The aforementioned Solita – a burger restaurant whose chefs used to walk out mid-shift because they couldn’t meet its owners madcap demands (deep fried lasagne burgers; Alaskan snow crab leg burgers) – got in the newspaper for having a queue.
These places were not run by masterminds. “We’d never price anything up,” Franco Sotgiu, Solita’s founder, once told me. “If it cost us £20, we’d just do it for £25.” But there was a sense of the bohemian about it. Young restaurateurs were winging it and it was working. “Eight or nine years ago was a golden age,” says Bailey, remembering the number of recognisable names that started out back then. “Rudy’s, Pollen, Mackie Mayor, loads of indie bars.”
Eight or nine years ago, by my estimation, was also when things began to change. London brands started making the move to Manchester as early as 2015, a notable example being the high-end steakhouse Hawksmoor. That restaurant became an instant classic, the staple of the Manchester business — or council executive — lunch. It helped that it made an effort to blend in, taking up an old courthouse on Deansgate. “We had this very big view that we didn’t like things from London,” says Sandra Handley, a food writer who’s been covering Manchester since 2007. “If you wanted to be a chef or a chain from a different part of the country, you had to amend your vibe to suit us.”
But when The Ivy — one of the capital’s most famous restaurants, credited to me once by a chef who worked there as the inventor of frozen, cubed Avocado — opened a site in Manchester three years later, it didn’t deploy the same strategy. It opened a four-floor timber pavilion covered in plants and containing two restaurants, one with a floor made of semi-precious jade. It was an investment of unprecedented scale. “Everyone was like: ‘holy shit’,” remembers the wine buyer I met at the conference. “If you try to adjust for inflation, no one has spent that money on an interior in Manchester since the ‘90s.”
From that moment, Manchester could no longer claim to be the home of scrappy independents and a few stalwart restaurants. It was suddenly the kind of place a London brand would sink a few million to branch out to. It was a cultural shift, and it’s no surprise that, since then, Manchester has seen a steady rise in the number of national and international brands opening. The Ivy also started the conversation of Manchester becoming a food city to rival London, seemingly by virtue of the fact The Ivy was also from London.
All of these new brands needed marketing: Enter the influencers. Manchester now has a well-established food media based pretty much entirely on Instagram. These pages operate more as hype machines than critical voices. They also take payment for their content (though not in every case, it should be pointed out). When I asked one person at the top of one of Manchester’s biggest food sites for an interview for this story, he declined, but he did describe his company as a “positive affirmation platform designed to support the independent ecology of the city.”
The restaurant owners I speak to see these influencers as little more than a bland necessity; a way of getting the word out. Sam Buckley, head-chef at Green Michelin-starred Where The Light Gets In in Stockport, says they’re pretty short-term options: "It's going to get hype, you’re going to get busy for a week.” Then, it mostly returns to normal. One general manager of a restaurant in the city centre told me they paid a popular Instagram account £500 for a 30-second promotional video, were busy for about a month, then just went back to marketing themselves.
Hi — Jack Dulhanty here, the author of today’s piece, which features, among other things, a chef called Cook.
Over the past few years I’ve written a lot about Manchester’s hospitality scene, including big investigations into Michelin-star restaurant Mana and infamous food critic Mark Garner.
Like many parts of Manchester life, our bars and restaurants suffer not for a lack of coverage — but a lack of quality coverage. Promotional websites and influencers who are paid for their positivity dominate the scene, and new openings have to focus on winning their attention above what ends up on the plate.
The Mill believes in celebrating what’s good, but being honest about what isn’t. Blind boosterism will get us nowhere. We intend to start adding more food and drink writing to our coverage (on top of, not as well as) for this reason. If you’d like to read all of that — plus the eight additional editions our members already get every month, sign up today.
But one criticism of these Instagram and TikTok food critics is their lack of, well, criticism. “It feels like listings to me,” says Carver, from Honest Crust. A few weeks ago The Mill published a critical list of viral food spots that landed us in hot water on Instagram, with many feeling we had attacked independent businesses. Particularly since the pandemic, the independent business has become a sacred cow, a thing that must be protected and supported. It raises questions for many in the industry about how to have an honest conversation about the city’s food scene. “It shouldn’t be: ‘oh I’m an independent therefore it’s okay if I’m shit at what I’m doing’”, said one (independent) operator, who asked to remain anonymous.
But back to The Ivy. The restaurant’s scale also made way for what has become a cornerstone of Manchester’s food culture: the super-venue. A super venue is not a food hall. They’re more like a mutation of that model, and one that strikes white hot fear in the heart of even the stoniest restaurateur.
Rather than some quaint market hall with several independent traders, super venues operate more like vast canteens. I’m talking about places like Escape to Freight Island in Mayfield (3,000 person capacity), Diecast behind Piccadilly (5,000 person capacity) and the yet-to-reopen Ducie Street Warehouse in the Northern Quarter (11 food traders, two bars, two concert stages and a 32-seat cinema). To an independent, these places pose a level of competition that wasn’t previously imaginable. This isn’t just a new place opening over the road. To quote Bailey: “It’s like opening ten restaurants and nine new bars all at once”.
On top of this super-powered competition, Manchester’s independents face rising rents, bills, wages and a post-pandemic world to contend with. Working so close to the bone means less margin for error, which means less creativity, less joy. To quote Carver, who is actually about to open his own brick-and-mortar restaurant after years on the food hall circuit: “It’s not as fun as it used to be.”
The other day I visited New Wave Ramen – a Mill Friday-lunch favourite on the chic Tib Lane, which opened in 2023 – to meet Phil Cook, its head chef. Cook had been a chef (yeah, this isn’t going to get any easier) ever since leaving university some 20 years ago. He decided to buy a noodle-making machine, to get out of the kitchen and start selling them wholesale. In the end he used the machine to open his own restaurant following a stint at Mackie Mayor, the food hall, as a trader.
He went into business with another trader who also owns a hotel and a few other street-food stalls. “We’re not a big company, but we do have some sort of resources,” he tells me. This is the reality of the modern independent — there isn’t the scope to be a plucky upstart, at least not in the city centre. You need something else there to float you: a big investor, another more stable business, some property. It’s why you see so many restaurants at the foot of apartment buildings (that’s where Carver’s will be, up on Great Ancoats street). Nowadays, modern restaurants and hospitality are ways of sprucing up developments and adding a sense of community. They’re “placemaking” tools. Look at Pollen, the incredibly popular Ancoats cafe: They had to Crowdfund to open their second site in Kampus, a Capital and Centric site where one-bed flats go for around £1,300 a month.
The effect of this — building restaurants within developments — has to my knowledge not been studied. But it’s an interesting development to consider, looking back on when TNQ opened as a neighbourhood restaurant on a corner of the Northern Quarter, at a time when eating out was something you went out and did rather than an amenity an estate agent sells you. It’s no wonder some operators don’t think there’s a living to be made in food and drink any more. During our conversation, Bailey — the founder of the street food spot GRUB — told me he’s getting out. “We’re about to announce we’re becoming a placemaking company.”
If someone forwarded you this newsletter, click here to sign up to get quality local journalism in your inbox.
