Critic hails fresh food floor show
RAYNER IS MIGHTILY IMPRESSED AFTER VISIT TO LIVE SEAFOOD IN BESWICK
FOOD critic Jay Rayner has paid another trip to Manchester, this time reviewing Chinese restaurant Live Seafood on Ashton Old Road.
Rayner described it as ‘a parade of the best and (obviously) freshest Chinese seafood dishes you will ever have had placed before you.’
The Beswick restaurant presents its seafood alive and swimming, with diners selecting their dinner from water tanks before it’s taken to the kitchen to be killed and cooked.
Most of the seafood is listed with market pricing, meaning dishes can cost anywhere between £15 and £200 depending on the beast and the size.
There is also a menu of Sichuan-style meat dishes, but with the presence of the water tanks Rayner observed: “choosing the meat dishes would be an odd way to go.”
In his Guardian column this week, he wrote: “This week’s restaurant is not a secret. Many of Manchester’s Chinese restaurateurs will know exactly where it is: on a scuffed drag, a mile or so east of Manchester Piccadilly station, overlooking wasteground apparently untouched by thoughts of urban regeneration.
“That doesn’t stop Live Seafood being obscure. And utterly, delightfully nuts.”
Upstairs in the private dining rooms, there are pictures of Finding Nemo on the wall: (“You’ve seen the movie, now eat the cast, and so on,” he wrote), while one dish was presented with a lone fairy light flashing on the plate.
In the tanks downstairs, he found a king crab ‘the span of a tyre,’ as well as live turbot, eel, carp, crabs, and the ‘ludicrously penile geoduck.’
The review reads: “Some will find this whole thing repulsive; they will literally be repulsed by the notion that they should select the living creature they are about to consume. To which I say: get over yourselves.
“Here, the moment of death has been moved significantly closer to your plate.”
The Guardian critic praised most of the dishes he ate, but was particularly enamoured with a whole seabass, sliced and deep-fried so that it blooms into ‘a fish-porcupine hybrid.’
He also complimented the salt and pepper-style velvet crabs, the platter of clams with black bean sauce, and prawns deep-fried in their shells and served with a sweet chilli sauce.
Rayner concluded his review with: “Downstairs a man has just bought a single huge geoduck at £95 a kilo, which he has paid for in £20s thumbed off a fat bank roll.
“It has been fished out of the tank, and now its end probes the edge of the bag in which it sits. Stop frowning. At Live Seafood in Manchester, a frisky geoduck heading out the door is all part of the floor show.”
Jay Rayner