Dear readers — there was nothing The Mill team enjoyed less than when, in June of this year, all the candidates in the Makerfield by-election piled in to a ridiculous pie-off with each other to prove who was the most Wigan.
Jake Austin of the Lib Dems told BBC Manchester that “one of [his] fondest memories” was spending his “hard-earned pocket money” on chunky steak pies. A solid performance, but Reform’s Rob Kenyon one-upped him with chunky steak on a barm. Impressive, but Burnham delivered the killer blow with his penchant for a Babby’s Yed (“now I really will lose the BBC news channel viewers”). It might seem inconsequential, but rankings in the pie ring played out identically in the polls. The MEN even wrote an article about the election headlined: There's only one thing I care about in Wigan, and it's not Andy Burnham or rugby league. It was pies.
Is that what Wigan, Greater Manchester, the north of England as a whole, should be reduced to? Pies and gravy? It was demeaning, and we were livid.
Still, a job’s a job and we haven’t published one of our food rankings in a while. So here are the Mill’s Top Eleven Places to get a Pie and a Pint in Manchester City Centre; ranked, in order, from worst to best. We didn’t include sharer pies or dessert pies, but pot pies were allowed and even welcome. This was a lot of food and drink to get through, so we enlisted our friends at our sister papers The Post (Liverpool) and The Dispatch (Birmingham) to assist us. You might say we all chipped in. A joint pie-line if you will.
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