The owner of Sammy’s Bar was accused of aggressive behaviour online. Then, the reviews disappeared
‘Don’t you dare. Don’t you speak’
Dear readers — if there’s one thing the local media seems to agree on, it’s that Northern Quarter bar Sammy’s is one of the greats. The MEN’s what’s on editor Jenna Campbell cited it in August in a round up of Manchester’s best bars, calling it “a must visit for any respectable Manchester bar crawl”. Confidentials included it in their own round up of Manchester’s best hidden cocktail bars back in 2022, writing “It’s all about hospitality at Sammy’s and weekends go down like house parties”. Even London-based journalists have climbed on the bandwagon — VICE’s iconically-named reporter Snake Denton tried to do a 24-hour bender in our fair city and stopped by Sammy’s, which Snake described as being “like Binley Mega Chippy as reimagined by Wes Anderson”. So far, so good, if you like that kind of thing. But when you start looking for reviews from the general public of this bar, you encounter a digital black hole. Unusually for a bar, it no longer appears to be a location on Google Maps (though users on Reddit claim it used to have a 2.3 star rating). And we’ve been hearing very different stories from some of the people who’ve visited it: about an erratic and sometimes violent reception from the owner, Sammy Shonn himself. That’s today’s story.
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Your briefing
📃 An Oldham Council meeting descended into chaos on Wednesday evening over a badly-worded motion that led Lib Dem and Conservative councillors to ask the council to “not not” write to Secretary of State Angela Rayner to ask for the council to withdraw from the Places for Everyone scheme, the opposite of what they intended to vote. Places for Everyone is Greater Manchester’s flagship development plan that aims to build 175,000 homes, some on Green Belt land. Insults like “dictators” and “Nazi sympathisers” were thrown around, the riot police were seen outside and the meeting was adjourned after just twenty minutes. The Tory group leader, Graham Sheldon, asked councillor Lewis Quigg to apologise, who refused, saying “I quit this party. You no longer have any control over me.” A police officer was seen having a stern word with Quigg outside for quite a long time afterwards.
🏛️ Our commiserations are with Edward Begley, a man from Eastern Kentucky who tried to claim Baguley Hall, Manchester’s oldest building, as his birthright. In May, the building was put up for sale by Colliers on behalf of its current owners, Historic England, and Begley submitted an application to Historic England outlining his plans for the hall and emphasising he was destined to inherit Baguley Hall through his bloodline. Tragically, Historic England has said that he is not. “We are sorry to inform you that having carried out assessments on the basis of financial standing, and track record with historical buildings and projects, you did not pass either assessment,” wrote Catherine Dewar, Historic England’s regional director for the North West, adding that his family history and passion was to be “greatly admired”.
Quick hits
🎓 The University of Bolton has won its legal battle to change its name to the University of Greater Manchester.
🚲 Cycling campaigner Harry Gray won a £4k payout from a driver who careened into him in Bolton. Gray said he would have been happy to not take legal action. “All he had to do was say sorry, oh well.”
🎶 Sean Marshall, the head of technology at Co op Live, says during the last year he has “been tested and pushed in more ways than I could have ever imagined”.
🐈 Luna, a one-and-a-half-year-old cat, has been reunited with her family in Leeds after jumping in a mechanic’s van destined for Manchester.
The owner of Sammy’s Bar was accused of aggressive behaviour online. Then, the reviews disappeared
By Mollie Simpson
If you read Manchester’s Finest on a regular basis, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Sammy’s was some kind of utopia. In 2022, the magazine claimed that on entering the ‘70s-style cocktail bar through an unassuming front entrance that looks like an old laundrette, “The powerful welcoming feeling you get is probably enough to start a small cult (but he’s far too nice a guy to do that).”
The nice guy in question is owner Sammy Shonn, a 41-year-old hospitality mogul who explained his bar’s unique selling point in the same feature: it was all about community. “What we sell isn’t why you come,” he told Manchester’s Finest. “You come because you feel at home, you feel like you’re in my lounge. This is your space — your bar.” This point seemed to chime so much with Shonn that he reiterated it in a separate feature for I Love Manchester, saying: “It has got so soulless out there but here we are all about looking after people and so far so good.”
The impression given in both articles was one of a cocktail bar that was friendly and relaxed, where the punters were on a first-name basis with the owner, who was attuned to the needs of his patrons.
It’s a portrayal which seems alien to some of Sammy’s past customers. In the last two weeks, I’ve spoken to seven people who have visited Sammy’s, who spoke to The Mill to vent their frustrations with Shonn and the way he treats his customers. Two sources detail getting into conflict with Shonn, experiencing unnecessary escalations of violence and aggression. Others have raised questions about the bar’s exclusive, young, hip feel, asking why “the crowd is really bizarrely all young and all female”. No one wanted to speak on the record, and all the names have been changed in this story to protect interviewees’ anonymity. Although we approached Sammy Shonn with the allegations this piece details, he chose not to respond, and didn’t offer any factual corrections on the stories that we put to him. Messages to those who have worked with him at the London restaurant went unanswered or came to nothing.
Shonn is tall with a shaved head and a moustache, and is often photographed with a silver chain around his neck. He hails from Manchester but moved to the capital for a few years, initially running a comfort food pop-up stall in Camden before co-running an Eastern Mediterranean fine dining restaurant in South London. In late 2019, he would open Sammy’s on Great Ancoats Street, in a move that Manchester’s Finest called “returning to his roots”.
For me, the story began much later than this — in 2023, when I first received an email about the business. “I've been a few times recently and am feeling slightly odd about it,” wrote a reader I’ll call Kay, saying the bar’s owner seemed to guard the entrance carefully and turn people away. The email went on: those permitted to enter Sammy’s tend to be young women.
It sounded strange, but I was undecided on whether to pursue this story — it’s not unusual for bars to screen out the kinds of customers they don’t want, like nightclubs in Deansgate filtering out people who wear trainers, or Berghain bouncers curating an edgy crowd who look like they haven’t tried too hard.
I had first visited Sammy’s the year before I received the email. Buena Vista Social Club had been performing at Band on the Wall and as the gig finished, me, my then-boyfriend and his friends decided we didn’t want the night to end, so around 10pm, we crossed Great Ancoats Street and stood in the queue outside. A red and green OPEN sign flickered outside. Someone noted there were only three girls in our group and around four boys. Why would that be a problem, I asked. “They don’t like too many men in there,” came the reply. A member of our group walked to the front of the queue, claiming he knew someone who could get us in, and we made it inside.
I didn’t think there was anything off about Sammy’s — it was a fairly unremarkable night. The crowd seemed young and it felt a bit like a Freshers’ Night out, all screeching and drunk hugging and dancing on the tables, and we left after two drinks. So when the email came in a year later, I read it and then promptly forgot about it. It seemed more likely to be an anomaly than a consistent pattern of behaviour.
But then in September this year, another reader reached out via email with the subject line “Sammy’s — something off with the owner…”. saying his friend told him a story about being put in a headlock and thrown out of Sammy’s for making a joke about a dirty table. Then two months later, a reader reached out to tell me all the online reviews of Sammy’s on Google and Facebook had disappeared from public view.
Wondering if more people could cite similar experiences there, I put a callout in a Mill newsletter asking for readers to come forward. Further sources answered my call. Messages to people who had left negative reviews of Sammy’s, which have been scraped onto another site, returned one further source who wanted to chat.
Terry is the man who emailed me and who later convinced me we should take on this story. He said he had a friend called Alan — a “nice, quiet guy and the last person you'd expect to be physically removed from a bar” — who had been out in Sammy’s and had watched his friend being placed into a headlock, sometime in late 2019. He passed us Alan’s number, and encouraged us to chat to him. Alan readily answered the call.
Sammy’s opened in October 2019. It was filled with all the Japanese and mid-century influences that seem to dominate everyone’s Instagram feeds, and a post teasing its upcoming opening received hundreds of likes and comments. “I fucking love this,” wrote one person. “An aesthetic — let’s go,” wrote another.
One of those early visitors was Alan. It was his 21st birthday. They had been on a bar crawl, Alan, his friends and his girlfriend. When they arrived at Sammy’s it was fairly quiet — he thinks they might have been the only group.
Near the end of the night, Shonn started cleaning up. Alan’s friend, someone he describes as being “a bit obnoxious” and “a bit of an odd guy” was being “sassy, in a drunken way” and made an offhand joke about the tables being dirty. Shonn put Alan’s friend in a headlock.
“Don’t you dare,” Shonn said to him. “Don’t you speak.”
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