Hidden cocktail bar named one of the UK’s best
A HIDDEN cocktail den in Salford is flying the flag for Greater Manchester’s bar scene after being named among the UK’s best new bars.
Peggy’s Bar serves a range of understated, grown-up cocktails using seasonal and innovative ingredients - you just have to find it first.
The back alley bar – which is notoriously difficult to spot – opened in the former Corridor site on a tiny road off Chapel Street in June.
The entrance to the bar is easy to overlook: an unassuming door on a dead end road, marked out with a small sign lit with Peggy’s logo – a leaf.
Venture inside, and you’ll discover one of the best bars in Greater Manchester.
The stripped back space is home to a handful of dimly lit tables which flicker with candlelight, while the sound of Howlin’ Wolf crackles over the record player.
Two bartenders welcome customers warmly, and whip up cocktails with quiet, polished movements – they are Adam Day and Shane Kilgarriff: friends and business partners with an insatiable interest for unusual ingredients and boozy cocktails.
Shane’s passion for the industry was ignited when running the bar at the Michelin-starred Clove Club in London, when he worked closely with the chefs to create inventive drinks.
“The quality of the produce that was coming through every day was amazing, and they’d do as little as possible to the ingredients, but just bring the best out of them,” he explains over the bar.
He also had the opportunity to try techniques on the bar which were usually reserved for the kitchen.
“Things that the kitchen take as basic things, the bars consider to be quite advanced techniques,” Shane explains.
He adds: “[The capital] has such a focus for cocktails, there’s so much work and people doing interesting things, and I think that’s quite hard to come by outside of London.”
The barman took his experience to Manchester, near his home in Rossendale, with a view to open his own place.
He met Adam while working at Mr Cooper’s House and Garden at the Midland Hotel, and together they had the rare opportunity to experiment with the restaurant’s cutting edge equipment, under the watch of then head chef Simon Rogan.
“We had a Rotovap, an indoor BBQ - there was unbelievable quality equipment,” says Shane.
“We don’t have anything like that at Peggy’s, but it was nice to have access to those things to see what direction you can take with drinks.”
The drinks at Peggy’s favour more down-to-earth processes, such as pickling and fermenting, with ingredients combined in unusual and exciting ways.
Their restaurant-approach to cocktails means they source ingredients with the care and detail of a Michelin-starred kitchen, using foraged, locally sourced and seasonal produce wherever they can.
Drinks, for example, include the ‘sour’ (priced at £8 - like all their cocktails), made with white rum infused with roasted Jerusalem artichoke, homemade vermouth, clementine liqueur and topped with white truffle oil.
The presentation here is very simple - not a cocktail umbrella or Haribo in sight - and at odds with a large chunk of Manchester’s cocktail scene.
“One of the things that’s lacking in Manchester is somewhere you can get a good drink and really good service – it’s not enough of a feature,” says Shane.
Peggy’s has just made the shortlist for the Class Bar Awards’ ‘new bar of the year’ category. It is up against five fellow shortlisters: Three Sheets, London; Domino Club, Leeds; Coupette, London; Mint Gun Club, London; and Scout, London. The winner will be announced at a ceremony in London by CLASS magazine on February 20.