/FOOD&DRINK
LAST year, Michelin-starred restaurant The Clove Club was the highest new entry on the World’s 50 Best Restaurant list. This year it was ranked as the best restaurant in the UK, and the 26th best in the world.
It’s an impressive introduction for the Shoreditch-based restaurant, which has its roots in Greater Manchester thanks to the founders Daniel Willis and Johnny Smith. But does it live up to the accolades? Spoiler: of course it does. But it’s not exactly what I was expecting.
The Stockport-based pals called Manchester their stomping ground back in the day, when they used to DJ at Northern Quarter bar Odd, among others. And it was their love of DJing, not restaurants, which drew them to the capital, where they sought to break into the music industry.
Eventually, their skills at orchestrating supper clubs proved so popular that they hung up their headphones to set up a restaurant with Isaac McHale - former development chef The Ledbury and one half of pop-up dinner duo the Young Turks.
There are some things which people love to write about The Clove Club. ‘Hipster’ gets bandied about a lot. Granted, as I meander to the restaurant getting lost I encounter craft coffee, dive bars and the shipping-container-chic Boxpark – but The Clove Club? It ain’t hipster. Staff wear pristine shirts and aprons, there is no music in the dining room, and the service is orchestrated with the pre-eminent touch of an omniscient being.
I arrive with my pal, and we’re swept through the understated grandeur of the bar to the dining room; a tall-ceilinged, small-ish, white-walled room with a calm open kitchen framed by deep, seablue tiles.
I don’t spot any of the pretentious dishes it has been criticised for in the past; the five course menu is priced at £75 and it’s refined, confident, and sublime. The chefs favour local and underused ingredients, prepared by hand and from scratch, which infuses dishes with a rustic and homely touch.
Snacks include a strikingly simple beetroot sorbet, a succulent fried chicken in a nest of pine, and a soup so green and lush it tastes like roly-polys in a freshlymowed garden.
Roast Orkney scallop is a divine dish, elevated by a light touch of spices and cinnamon foam. The morels that accompany the chicken are stuffed with all sorts of gorgeousness; they’re so good they deserve their own marble plinth with a brass band to announce their arrival.
But the stand out for me was the pre-dessert. As a chocolate lover, I’m normally offended by any dessert that fails to threaten my waistline, but this one is different. The fennel granita with sheep’s milk mousse has all the frostbitten freshness of a winter walk in the English countryside.
I inhale the final dessert - and that’s not a hyperbole. Alongside loquat sorbet and loquat kernel cream is a puffed grain called amaranth; it’s all light and floaty. When I chuckle at a joke from my pal, it whizzes off like I’m blowing the seeds from a dandilion.
She responds by laughing harder and ends up with half of it in her hair.
Resolved to taste the next spoonful, I overcompensate by breathing in a little, and end up inhaling it. It’s a tricky thing to eat, and not even that delicious, but it is bloody funny.
Overall, it’s not the hipster den its sometimes portrayed as. The Clove Club is best known for its tasting menu which – when it launched back in 2013 – was a pretty big deal. Now, you can’t move for them, and with that it seems The Clove Club has grown bolder in its cooking.
I’m inspired by meeting Manchester entrepreneurs that are absolutely smashing it, and certain that there’s more where that came from. Could they have achieved the same success if they had stayed in Manchester? Perhaps not. Simon Rogan may have left, but chefs like Samuel Buckley, Adam Reid and Aiden Byrne are sticking to their roots.
In order to push the Manchester food scene further, let’s hope that the next local stars will build their empire closer to home.