The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Table talk
Two famous former footballers’ foray into food is – pretty peculiar, really
Michael Deacon at the ‘bonkers’ Rabbit in the Moon, Manchester
I FEEL FOR EX-FOOTBALLERS. Genuinely, I do. And the more successful they were, the more I feel for them. Because their success is their tragedy.
Picture it. You’re a top-class player, lifting trophies, earning millions, a hero to fans across the world. You’re acclaimed, revered, loved – and have been, ever since you were a teenage boy.
But then, at some point in your 30s, your knees or ankles or hamstrings go – and that’s it. You’re useless. You’re past it . You’re forced to retire. No more seven-figure salary, no more cup finals, no more awards, no more crowds of 80,000 people chanting your name. Barely half way through your three score and 10, life – or at least, the only life you know – is over.
Decades stretch emptily ahead of you. Financially, you don’t need to work – but psychologically, you have to. You, after all, conquered the country’s most furiously competitive sport, and you would never have managed that without b eing the kind of man who is incapable, physically incapable, of taking it easy. You have a need, a restless all-devouring need, for glory. And that need doesn’t vanish the day you hang up your boots. It ’s still there, deep inside you, roaring away like a furnace. But now you have no way to satisfy it. You’re young, rich, famous – and finished.
Gary Neville and Ryan Giggs were two of the greatest footballers of their age. For 20 years together at Manchester Unite d they won ever y trophy
going. But eventually they too were mown down by time’s merciless centrehalf. And so their hunt began for something new to win at.
They trie d football management ( Neville was given four months at Valencia; Giggs just four matches at Manchester United). They tried running a club of their own (briefly buying, along with other former teammates, the non-league Salford City). They tried media punditry( both, at different times, writing insightfully for the Telegraph). But they also tried something a little more unusual.
Together they started opening hotels and restaurants. And among their roster is the restaurant I’m reviewing this week: The Rabbit in the Moon.
One thing I’ll say for the pair of them straight away: they haven’t played it safe. Nowhere even near it. Because The Rabbit in the Moon is, without a sliver of doubt, the most bonkers restaurant I’ve ever reviewed.
Its name is inspired by the ancient Far-eastern belief that the patterns formed by lunar seas make it look as if there is indeed a rabbit in, or on, the moon. The lunar theme also pervades the restaurant ’s design. Vases shaped like astronauts. A table and coasters decorated like craters. Pillars daubed with unearthly shapes and symbols which may or may not be the work of extraterrestrial beings.
And, above all else, there’s the dark. Because this restaurant is extraordinarily dark. So dark that you might as well be dining on the moon itself. The difference being that on the moon, as far as I’m aware, your eardrums aren’t blasted at near-deafening volume by a hip-hop version of John Lennon’s Imagine.
The food is described by the restaurant as‘ space-age Asian ’. My friend and I ordered the tasting menu, which opened with an item called ‘crispy rabbit ears’. These proved not to be rabbit ears that were crispy, but crisps that were shaped like rabbit ears. They tasted like Quavers sprinkled with pepper, and came served on a mysterious jet-black dish that looked like a cross between a crater and an ashtray.
I liked the next course: ‘octopus hot dog’ in a squid-ink bun. Cartoonily kitsch, but it worked: the octopus had an unmistakably frankfurter-like texture. Similarly fun to look at was the ‘foie gras doughnut’, but I enjoyed eating it rather less: cold and moistly pungent, it made me think of dog food dunked in chocolate.
Out came a bowl of crispy noodles, and a jug of curry sauce. The moment the waitress poured the sauce, the noodles hissed and shrank back, as if in pain. Cautiously we tasted it. Thankfully we didn’t hiss or shrink back in pain, but all the same, we weren’t keen: the sauce was so gingery, sharp and sour. I wasn’t entirely at home with the veal sweetbread sliders, either: warm and floppy, like a microwaved plimsoll – then in places crunchy as rusks.
Still, they were nothing next to the next item: fried calf brains. It tasted like… well, frankly, it tasted like the brains of a calf, fried. ‘Fried calf brains’ is the type of phrase I’d normally use as a hyperbolic simile. Good God, I might write: the food was so bad, it tasted like fried calf brains. But here, it was an actual dish.
Pudding, I should add, was very nice: a hollowed-out pineapple, filled with ice cream, and accompanied by a variety of other pineappley treats. But then we asked for coffee, and it came served in a cup apparently designed to look like a child’ s head, and we were reminded how thoroughly bananas this place was.
Still, credit where it’s due. When you hear a couple of ex-footballers are opening a restaurant, you expect something bland and middle-of-the-food. This is most certainly not that.
Cold and moistly pungent, it made me think of dog food dunked in chocolate