CityLife

Vertigo

Vertigo

Vertigo
City Centre
June 2011

Overall rating: 4/5

Decor: 4/5, Service: 3/5, Food: 4/5

When Ithaca went bust just over a year ago, it showed all that glitters is not gold.

The blingy destination restaurant opened in 2008 after a reputed outlay of £4m and lured A-list diners, including Jay-Z, Kanye West and Victoria Beckham, into its black, bejeweled interior.

Many critics thought it was a gem and were wowed by modern Japanese cuisine – the softshell crab and black cod were particularly good – but you would have had to trawl the seas of the world for many a year to pay off that initial, staggering outlay. Now, after 12 months in darkness, the building is back as Vertigo, promising fine dining and pushing its chichi bar firmly to the backseat. On my return, I was reminded how small the building’s footprint actually is, but apart from changing the tables and chairs, black is the new black at Vertigo. There is the same glittering, sandpaper walls, pitch velvet curtains and an open kitchen where you don’t see people doing much because the real kitchen is out of sight.

You eat on the ground floor, with extra space on the first for dining, and there are two more levels before you get to the glamorous but a tad gloomy top floor bar, with its trademark uplit tables.

I suppose the trip up there would induce vertigo in some, but the name may also epitomise a queasiness the price sensitive among us may feel on seeing the cost of the starters, which average out at a tad high £9, though the mains are pitched better at £18 or £19.

Head chef is Ian Armstrong, who was previously at mid-range and well- regarded Albert’s Shed in Castlefield. Vertigo’s owner, who apparently prefers to remain anonymous for now, has asked him to up his game into the fine dining league and given him free rein in the kitchen to create something new for the city.

His menu is well-balanced, interesting, playful even, and its execution is on the way to being very good indeed.

Take my starter: Rabbit In An English Garden. It could have been form over substance; a Masterchef conceit that could have had me hopping mad after the tasting.

It was laid out like a Beatrix Potter storybook picture from Peter Rabbit, with a blob and smear of carrot puree for the sun and sky, crushed black olives for the charcoal earth and mini carrots and baby leeks for cute Peter in his little blue coat to nibble on.

But this particular Peter had been whizzed up into a rough terrine with a delicate strip of ham around the four circles of meat to keep him fenced in.

There was a dollop of pea puree too. I don’t know what that was meant to be, the compost heap perhaps? And thankfully there were no currants.

But it all tasted very good. In fact, the whole dish was full of fantastic stand-alone flavours – though the Jerusalem artichokes were too strong for me.
Flavours that came together as a whole wonderfully. My companion loved the presentation and textures in her stylish surf and turf dish of scallops with confit pork belly (£11). The four medium-sized scallops were beautifully cooked and squared up nicely with the crunchy pork belly and baby food cauliflower puree.

Vertigo’s wine list is accessible in price, with a number under £20, but then has a high step to the next level. We had an acceptable South African Chenin Blanc from Simonsig (£19.50). It was kept in its bucket near the bar, probably due to space issues, but this meant we had to rely on the waiter to keep an eye on our glasses, which wasn’t totally reliable.

Service in general was a little clunky. Our waiter was jolly and polite but made a few errors, like only offering the lovely, handmade bread after our starters, but all mistakes were rescueable.

Mains continued where starters left off. The kitchen seems to like courgette flowers – the bulbous, pretty, yellow-green blooms of the vegetable.
They are the mainstay of one of two veggie dishes on offer and also came in my main, the flower stuffed with aubergine caviar, which was nicer than it sounds.

It came next to an excellent fillet of seabass (£19.50) with a crisped skin that sat on a subtle, substantial crab risotto which some may have declared bland but I thought balanced the plate’s competing flavours.

Over the table was a succulent heap of sliced roast duck breast with a confit leg en croute (£20.50). The breast could have been pinker, but was tasty all the same and the sweet filo lifted the confit and balanced any saltiness. It all came on a bed of puy lentils that my partner judged to be a little too firm. There was sauerkraut too with unnecessary nuggets of pancetta and a blindingly good juniper jus.

We were disappointed in dessert only in the fact that our waiter told us the menu had been printed wrongly. It was supposed to be a trio of rhubarb(£6.50). There was a rather dry frangipane vanilla and rhubarb tart, decent rhubarb ripple ice cream and rhubarb and custard. But a crème Anglais was substituted for the latter.

Vertigo is obviously piggybacking on Ithaca’s classy interior, but if nothing needs fixing that is really no bad thing. It still looks stylish in that flash, The Only Way Is Essex kind of way, so why change?

The food is good, inventive, ambitious and its prices are mitigated by generous portions.

Service is patchy, but has the potential to be much better.

So will it last longer than Ithaca?

I hope so, as independent, good quality restaurants serving British food outside of our hotels and department stores are as rare as tripping over a diamond on John Dalton Street.

Vertigo, 36 John Dalton Street, Manchester M2 6LE (0161 839 9907, vertigomanchester.co.uk)