CityLife

The Grill on New York Street

The Grill On New York Street 1 / 2 images

The Grill On New York Street
Piccadilly
May 2011

Overall rating: 3/5

The trouble with liking a restaurant in Manchester is that unless enough other people think as you do, it doesn’t stick around for long.

Grado, Paul Heathcote’s modern Spanish restaurant in Piccadilly, was a bit of a favourite of mine, serving Spanish food that was always much more than just the standard tapas variation on a spicy-tomato-sauce-in- a-shallow-terracotta-pot kind of theme.

When head chef Steve Midgeley was in charge there was a passion about the cuisine, the wine list was pretty good, the interior classy, if slightly dull.

I suppose the only real problem was that the ambience hardly set your heart aflutter and,
apparently, it didn’t pay.

Not enough people ate there. In a city where tapas can be had literally as cheap as chips, people were not prepared to cough up for Grado’s prices, even for food that often you couldn’t find to the same elsewhere in the city.

As an example, this time last year the restaurant was selling a starter plate of Joselito Gran Reserva Ham for £18.50.

The almost purple meat, from black-footed Iberian pigs, has a depth and complexity of flavour akin to a top-end wine and is widely regarded as the best ham in the world. But the punters of Manchester did not go for it and as a leg costs about £500, that hits the bottom line hard.

So when Heathcote’s ailing empire was put under the spotlight and broken up and Grado was bought by Living Ventures, a complete change was inevitable. Living Ventures, of course, is the company behind the Gusto chain and Blackhouse Grills – taken from a template forged at its popular The Grill On The Alley in the city centre.

It transformed Heathcote’s London Road restaurant in Alderley Edge into The Grill On The Edge; which you could see the logic of. Transferring The Alley’s menu and reputation for consistency to Cheshire and complementing its other outlet, the Hale Grill was always a good bet.

But when I heard that Grado would become The Grill On New York Street, I was more than a little surprised. Do we need another Grill in town? How could the restaurant elbow its way into people’s consciousness, especially given its slightly out of the way location?

Living Ventures has tweaked the interior slightly, the main change being the bar. In Grado it served tapas and was part of the restaurant, now it has been partitioned off and works better for a Grill and can hook in more people who just want to drink.

Our Saturday evening meal was not interrupted by a huge amount of fellow diners, or drinkers for that matter. The restaurant’s cut-price opening deals had come to an end and our waitress had noticed the subsequent dip in trade.

She presented us with a menu not unlike The Alley, in form and substance. There are a few diversions, but not many, and the New York Street menu is identical to The Edge.

What I hear over and over again about The Alley is that word ‘consistency’.

It is thought of as a place where you rarely encounter a bad meal, whether you go with a cohort of suits or your Aunt Ethel.

Here in Manchester, though, consistency often does not go hand-in-hand with a sense of adventure. In London, many similar places – informal, not overly expensive – have menu items you won’t have tried before or have twists to classics which make you sit up straight.

The Grill On New York Street’s menu is not adventurous. There is something for everyone but it is hard not to think you would tire of it after a few visits. But what we had was  pretty good.

The Grill’s reputation for meat goes before it and my dining partner pronounced that his big plate of raw-red carpaccio of beef (£7.50) was tremendous, if slightly underseasoned.

The high-quality meat came with Thai asparagus – why not British we thought, so superior to anything else in its current short season?

But maybe that desire for ‘consistency’ and supply issues for the many Grills is the reason. The South Asian variety, though looking a little spindly, was packed with flavour.

My hot chicken livers (£5.50) were the right side of rich, with no sign of bitterness, maybe due to snippets of salty bacon in there too.

My companion was a big fan of Grado’s wines and had heard that a few choice ones were still knocking around in the cellar.

Restaurant manager Gosia Everett couldn’t have been more obliging and brought up an almost forgotten bottle from Rueda that we bartered for a decent price.

The Grills feature a new source of steak each month, for a premium price, usually about a third again on the cost of the standard cut.

It was worth the extra tenner. My sirloin (£30) was from a Limousin herd reared in the Eden Valley, near Penrith. Pity the poor French beasts who have to eke out an existence in that climate. The meat was as flavoursome as it was lean with not an ounce of fat I could detect. Which didn’t go for my mash potatoes that were iced with so much butter that I could almost see my arteries being coated, like one of those graphic reconstruction’s on TV’s CSI. All excellent – though I could have done with a veg side that I didn’t have to pay another £3 for.

My friend went for that day’s special. His seared tuna (£17) was juicy and  lightly cooked but came with big leaves of chicory, that were overwhelming in size and its bitter flavour.

While my friend chatted with Gosia about obscure vineyards in northern Spain, I tucked into a Burnt Cambridge Cream (£5) from a yawnsome line-up of desserts.

Gosia was here with Grado and has an obvious passion for the place, as well as expertise, which is vital to retain when a venue with such a high-profile past changes so drastically.

Grill also brings in a new-found consistency. Which is all fine, but because of its past, this Grill could do with taking a cue from its name and injecting a bit of New York ambition, pizzazz and identity into its menu.

The Grill On New York Street, New York Street, Piccadilly, M1 4BD (0161 238 9790, the grillonnewyorkstreet.uk.com).

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Paul Ogden's review of Grado April 2010

Grado
City centre
April 2010

Cuisine: Spanish
Average three-course cost: £27

Overall: 4/5
Decor: 4/5, Service: 4/5, Food: 4/5

Any good chef will tell you that great food begins and ends with the quality of ingredients. A masterful cook can create a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, but in many ways it will always be a porker’s lughole, especially if the pig has been reared in a grim warehouse in Mexico.

So when your kitchen uses only the best ingredients you are halfway there to a special meal.

And the new spring menu at Grado, Paul Heathcote’s modern Spanish restaurant near Piccadilly, includes one of the world’s finest products, something that many foodies have on their must-taste-before-I- die list, the Rolls Royce of the porcine world: Joselito Gran Reserva Ham.

The meat comes from Joselito’s own herd of Black Iberian pigs which roam the wooded countryside outside the village of Guijuelo, near Salamanca in western Spain.

They grunt, foraging for acorns, snuffle and soak up the sun for two years before a man with a big, black moustache (probably) comes for their meat.

The family-run company then salts the hams and hangs them in their traditional cellars and the Gran Reserva does not see light of day again for three years until its fabulous flavour has matured, the fat gloriously aged.

Grado introduced the meat to its New York Street restaurant a few weeks ago and is already on its second leg, the hefty price-tag seemingly failing to put people off sampling what many great chefs declare is the world’s greatest ham.

The leg rests in a metal stand on Grado’s sleek tapas bar looking like a knarled old tree branch, the black trotter sticking hautily proud in the air, a mark of the highest quality.

But this kind of quality comes at a price. A whole ham will set you back about £500 and at £18.50 for a 50g plateful as an appetiser at Grado, head chef Steve Midgley swears this is one part of the business that makes no profit.

So precious is it that any spare fat taken from the ham is squirreled away to use with roast potatoes instead of the usual goose fat – probably making them the most luxurious spuds in the city.

If you order it, the bitter outer skin of the ham is stripped away, a plateful is carved delicately wafer thin by a chef, taking care to include different areas of meat and fat which give slightly different tastes.

Good Spanish ham is red, Joselito’s maturity deepens that to crimson with golden grey fat.

To get a sense of its greatness, taste Grado’s Teruel Serrano ham first, which is pretty good in itself. After it, though, the Gran Reserva is a revelation.

Like a fine wine, the depth and variation in flavour is truly awesome, the texture in turns firm and melty, the taste salty and sweet, then slightly bitter and all the time there is a nuttiness from the acorns.

At the start of a meal, with a bone dry fino sherry – even if the plate is shared between four to cut down the cost – it is magnificent.

There is a fear that after this terrific start, the rest of your meal could slide effortlessly downhill. And after Grado itself burst gloriously onto the Manchester dining out scene in late 2007, a few people had mentioned to me that the restaurant itself may have slid downhill, too.

Authentic

Heathcote’s restaurants – which include the Olive Press chain, the Simply Heathcotes brasseries, as well as Alderley Edge and Longridge’s fine dining establishments – have sometimes been criticised for inconsistency, with the talented Bolton chef being seen as taking his eye off the ball in the kitchen somewhat in the search for a bigger empire.

Those disappointed diners at Grado may have pitched up after the departure of head chef Midgeley who, some time after launching the restaurant, departed for City Cafe, at Piccadilly’s City Inn hotel.

He is now back at Grado, being unimpressed with the corporate nature of hotel cuisine and I found that the restaurant was back to its best.

A little hidden away, Grado is the epitome of Latin cool, with big banks of windows and a floor to ceiling rack of wine – an advertisement for their excellent Spanish collection  – separating the diners from the doorway.

The room is rectangular with an open kitchen at one end, a raised area to the left and a classy tapas bar to the right, where you could easily spend an afternoon hanging around sipping a glass of cold Cruzcampo and chomping on pardon peppers.

After the luxury of that ham, I wanted something simple as a starter.

My Spanish tortilla (£4.90) was fairly plain but done faultlessly. The size of a saucer, the fluffy omelette hid small nuggets of potato and came with a dollop of fresh alioli on top.

Over the table were sweet and sour sardines (£5.20), the filleted fish looked a little like oversized anchovies with a nice subtle flavour on their own but that was masked when taken with the citrusy, sharp marinade they came with.

My peasanty main of rabbit (£17.95) included a rather modest hunk of meat in a sagey wine sauce with apricot and rice.

Grado offers a daily roast from its charcoal oven, and Friday’s choice is baked sea bream (£13.50).

The juicy fish – a great Med favourite – came with spiced peppers, little knuckles of knockout chorizo, aubergine and olives. The potato chips were extra at £3.50.

My dessert, Santiago Tart (£5.80) was a rich, moist almond-based cake lifted by some matching almond ice cream and over the table was crema catalana (£5.30), a lighter, less rich version of the French crème brûlée  with a bright, summery citrus kick.

During the evening we had been served by friendly, relaxed, young staff, some with a reassuringly thick Spanish accent which adds to the feeling of authenticity surrounding Grado.

The place is a slice of modern Spain where you can savour a slice of unrivalled tradition too.

Grado, New York Street, Piccadilly, Manchester M1 4BD (0161 238 9790, heathcotes.co.uk).