The viral ranking Manchester never asked for, but the one it needs

Dear readers — imagine: it’s Thursday afternoon at Mill HQ and the team is scattered about the office. Jack Walton’s face is freckled with powdered sugar. Ophira Gottlieb is asleep on the couch using a sandwich as a pillow. Lucy McLaughlin is rustling around in a large bag of cream cakes in search of scraps and Jack Dulhanty is scrolling through endless food TikToks while his free hand searches blindly for a croissant.

How did it come to this? Did the Gorton and Denton by-election snap our brains? Not quite. But following a month of in-depth political coverage, we four news reporters — without a refined palate between us — decided to turn our hands to food criticism. To what end, you ask? To settle once and for all whether Manchester’s viral food spots, ones with hundreds of thousands of followers from all over the world that are lauded by dozens of influencers on Instagram and TikTok, are actually any good.

We fanned out across Manchester and brought back the city’s most hyped wares for a mighty feast. See our rankings — from worst to best — below.

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7. Morning Glory (Cafe: 7.6k followers. Owner: 79.4k followers)

One positive you can say about Morning Glory, billed as influencer Zack Hipps’ “love letter” to Manchester, is that, unlike many of the other viral spots on this list, there’s no queue. There’s no queue, because there are no customers. Not unless you count the large plushy sloth perched on the climbing frame-style benches at the back — the cafe’s mascot. And he looks depressed. Hipps is a 26-year-old self-styled “content creator” whose name has been made promoting various pop-ups and grab-and-gos on Instagram, experience he’s tapped into in the creation of his own spot (take the charmless use of a Mancunian yellow-and-black colour scheme or the facile nods to Oasis). Thank God I’m not Hipps’ lover, I think, as I try and fail to order the apparently-viral Manchester Tart Hipps snuck into the Brit Awards at the weekend in his latest exciting viral stunt (they don’t have any in today), his attempt at billet-doux reads more like hate-mail. In lieu of the famed tart, I go for a cinnamon and berry swirl, a third of which ends up in the bin. The only accuracy in the branding of this place — described on its website as a project born out of “deep-rooted passion for the north” — is the choice of mascot, the sloth. Morning Glory is a deadly sin.

Reviewed by Jack Walton

6. Eggslut (255k followers)

You, like me, may have come across Eggslut via their Manchester marketing campaign — a short video by food-influencer ‘Only Scrans’ in which he recites a Mike Garry-esque poem in ode to the viral butty bar. “In Manchester, we know what we’re about,” he says, and all sorts of other things like that, while standing outside the Pev for some reason. What is Eggslut about? The chain began in Los Angeles in 2011, and spread to Las Vegas, Tokyo, Kuwait, and London before settling on us, the next obvious choice. I go there and order their signature dish, a coddled egg with potato puree in a jam jar that costs £9.95 and is called the slut. “One slut please, to takeaway,” I ask the woman on the counter. “Right, one slut,” she says in response.

The slut is predictably unpleasant. Their coffee is also not good. Their truffle hashbrowns cooked in beef dripping are up there among the greatest things I’ve ever consumed, but that’s probably because I was unspeakably hungover at the point of consumption (this may also have affected my judgement on the coddled egg). There was a queue out the door, but only because I brought the whole Mill team along and we stood single file with some distance between us. What else to say? Eggslut Manchester used to be a Starbucks — I think that says it all. It’s the same sort of thing, only now American chains get off on masquerading as local independents.

Reviewed by Ophira Gottlieb

5. Onda (245k followers)

If Manchester’s modern viral food scene had an epicentre, it would be found inside Onda’s tiramisu drawer. Described by one chef as “an actually pretty normal thing”, a TikTok of the drawer in action reached international notoriety, fawned over by Hollywood A-listers and turning a small pasta pop-up into one of the most in-demand restaurants in the country.

Hello! Jack Dulhanty here. Thank you very much for reading The Mill.

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