CityLife

Harvey Nichols Second Floor Restaurant

Harvey Nichols Second Floor Restaurant 1 / 2 images

Harvey Nichols Second Floor Restaurant
City centre
November 2010

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

There has been rather a lot of soul-searching in the city about food critic and professional hatchetman AA Gill’s comments last month regarding Manchester’s food scene.

His unmerciful review of Rosso, though gloriously sneering and snobbish, did have some pertinent things to say about our celebrity-obsessed culture, but that could be said of many British cities, even London itself.

However, his shallow conclusion that Manchester had a woeful record for eating out due to some inherent cultural blight was well wide of the mark.

I believe the reason why the city centre has been unable to sustain a restaurant of Michelin quality is not due to a Mancunian taste for drink over fine dining, but the skewed economic geography of the city itself.

To sustain a top-class restaurant you need punters dining at all times of the week. You can’t pay for a kitchen of quality on full tables just at the weekend, and the city centre – despite its remarkable resurgence over the past decade – cannot provide an adequate flow of custom on those crucial days of Tuesday to Thursday when restaurants need to at least tick over.

That is due, in part, to the bloated economic power of south Manchester and north Cheshire. Why trek into the city centre midweek for a meal when such good dining can be had around Chorlton, Didsbury or Knutsford?

And so it is no surprise that the city centre’s hotels are largely the best fine dining places in the city. I suppose this may irk the likes of Gill, but does it really matter that midweek you might be dining next to a sales director with nothing better to do than check his Blackberry, if you are getting great food?

Those hotel kitchens need to be open seven days a week and their cuisine is integral to attracting guests – and so are largely subsidised by other parts of the business.

The same can also be said of our shops. Our top-quality city centre stores have to compete with the internet and that xanadu of bling in Trafford so means enticing shoppers in with a great foodie experience on top of their range of goods.

Selfridges has a decent restaurant, Kendals is upping its game with gorgeous Cicchetti and even the likes of Waterstones, on Deansgate, is in on the act, with its 2nd View Bar And Food due to open as a full restaurant in January after a few delays.

But top of the shops has to be Harvey Nichols, with its busy Second Floor brasserie and consistently excellent Second Floor Restaurant.

In the evening, when the front entrance is shuttered, a lift whisks you up from the side door on Cateaton Street into the granite womb of Harvey Nichols’ food zone.

Past the bubbly brasserie, brimming with diners – probably there for the Supper Club that was offering three courses and a Bellini for £20 from a selected menu – we entered the more cloistered surrounds of the restaurant.

The dining area is a slightly odd-shaped wedge at the front of the building and my advice is to book a couple of weeks in advance and ask for the corner table in the window – the best spot to eat in Manchester.

While the side windows have blinds to shut out the sight of Harvey Nicks’ arch-rival across the way, the corner table has a floor to ceiling vista of old and new Manchester.

To the left you have a bird’s eye view of the so-called Medieval Quarter, and like a Renaissance duke you can survey the scenes of debauchery outside the Duke of Wellington and Sinclairs Oyster Bar below. Ahead is the modern city with the Wheel, which looks its best near Christmas, and the brash Printworks.

Decor is trendy without being too funky and the elegant chairs are comfy too – often your poor coccyx has to suffer for some designer’s idea of perfection.

Apart from the setting, Alison Seagrave seemed to symbolise Harvey Nicks’ food. When she left 18 months ago, her replacement Stuart Thompson began to stamp his own mark on the place. He has garnered an impressive reputation for himself. So much so that I have it on good authority that in the recent Manchester Food And Drink Festival Awards he and the restaurant were narrowly beaten by the winner in at least two categories.

And that was largely reflected in the meal.

A few hundred years ago the great unwashed would have glooped down oysters by the bucket-load at Sinclairs below, when they were food for the mass market. So it was appropriate that my partner chose them for her starter, albeit in a form that wouldn’t have gone down well in the pub.

They were cooked in a light, crisp tempura batter. I’m sure if you held one of the little parcels to an ear you could hear the sea, and the briny flavour went well with crunchy picked cucumber. There was a Bloody Mary gel, too, though anything more than a fraction of the sauce tended to get in the way.

My single square of ravioli – for pedants, a singular raviolo – was filled with rabbit and was plump as a bunny’s behind. It had a wonderful, concentrated taste of the meat, which can be light in flavour.

There was rabbit ham as well, which I’ve never tried before. You’d need a lot of rabbit thighs, I’m sure, to fill a ham sandwich, so what little there was of it was sliced finely into strips. The flavour was decidedly delicate but there was still an echo of game in there.

There was a lovely, sweet carrot puree and a carrot salad too, which obviously goes well with rabbit, or so Bugs Bunny tells me. And there was also a slice of black pudding, which could have overwhelmed everything but, in fact, didn’t.

The mains selection features three fish, two veggie and three meat, which for most people who fancy flesh isn’t large.

I had the Gressingham duck, and its pink meat cut like butter. There was a good layer of fat too, crisped light brown and a little round gift of duck confit in a deep green wrapping of cabbage that was slightly too tough.

There was a celeriac pithivier – veg pie to you and me – with a dome of dreamy pastry and sweet, comforting celeriac mash inside.

My companion loved the marriage of black cherry with the her slow-cooked venison, and the intense squares of beetroot puree. But both dishes we thought were slightly over seasoned.

We shared dessert, which can be a mistake if the single dish is slightly off the mark. It was apple tarte tatin, with fat blackberries and a goat’s cheese ice cream.

The ice cream was great, not too rich with a good flavour but the tarte topping was volcanic in temperature on a cool base, which was slightly odd.

Presentation of the dishes throughout was faultless, as was the service, which was unstuffy, casual, chatty and though the staff were attentive I didn’t feel it was against the rules to pour the wine myself at times.

We had wanted a medium-bodied red from the exceptional wine list but our chosen wine was out of stock. Our waiter came back with a more expensive bottle from Gladstone Vineyard, a gorgously rich New Zealand Pinot Noir, they gave us at the price of the cheaper one by way of apology – the best way to say sorry, I find.

It seems a bit strange that even though I stand open mouthed at the cost of Harvey Nichol’s smatter lined up on industrial-looking rails, I find the prices in the restaurant easy to swallow.

For three courses of this quality, £40 is not too much to pay and if you want to economise a main and dessert will set you back £30. With or without dessert you get good coffee and impressive petits fours.

It is the kind of restaurant that stands up to AA Gill’s regular haunts in the capital and would be able to prove him wrong when he says we don’t care about our food.

But we don’t really want him to come back, do we?