CityLife

Paul Ogden's restaurants of the year

FIVE STARS: Stanley House

THE trouble and joy of reviewing restaurants is that things change.

For good or ill, nothing stays the same and your subjective snapshot of a Friday night in February can be wildly out of date a month later.

One of my favourite dining out experiences of the year was a summer evening in City Café, at Piccadilly’s City Inn – wonderful food in cool, restrained, elegant surroundings.

What it lacked in atmosphere was more than made up for by head chef Lee Scott’s menu and sommelier Marcin Czyszek’s passion for his subject. Unfortunately, just weeks later Scott had left for pastures new.

That experience was only surpassed by another hotel with a reputation for fine dining. Stanley House, on a sheep-infested hill at Mellor, near Blackburn, combined stunning presentation and some glorious ingredients to produce my meal of the year and my only five-star approval.

I loved the quirky design, but though that may not be to everyone’s taste, the food certainly will be.

Dining in the suburbs was crowned by Ambiente, an authentic Spanish place with Moorish overtones, in Worsley.

But as well as the highs, there were lows. Disappointment is greater when expectation is heightened and I was sorry not to have been bowled over by Lounge Ten and Tempus (at the Palace Hotel), the first a stalwart of the city’s dining out scene but which may have been resting on its fine reputation, the other an iconic building that the food did not do justice to.

Hopefully, things there will change for the better.

Change certainly caught up with Negresco, one of the city’s most bizarre start-ups. The gothic-inspired design didn’t even last to Halloween before darkness fell – again – on the scores of stuffed animals on show.

I have to disagree with my fellow food writer, Neil Sowerby. Not all chains offer poor value for money.

Loch Fyne equalled the company’s laudable environmental credentials with a superb meal in a sensitively-converted building in Didsbury.

Major change for Ye Olde Cock pub the restaurant is now housed in – and for the better.

Change has been forced on one of the most expensive restaurants in the city – but that’s no bad thing for the dining public.

I was mightily impressed by the lunch I had at blingy Japanese restaurant Ithaca.
Not just for the quality of the meal, impeccable service and palatial décor, but for the price.

The £16.95 lunch could be had at an amazing two for the price of one in November. Good news – that offer returns throughout this month.

Watch this space for more price changes like that at restaurants across the city in 2009.