Scottish Steak Club Restaurant at the MacDonald Manchester: No LONGER Just for Hotel Guests

Now, I have lived in Manchester for many, many years. And yet it never ceases to amaze me by yielding up something new; some hitherto unexplored little street, or some old favourite venue into which new life has unexpectedly been breathed. And on Tuesday night, I found out something little short of amazing: when you come out of Piccadilly train station, you can turn LEFT as well as right. Nah, you say - that's just the London Road, there's not much down there except maybe a hotel or two; well, one of those hotels - The Macdonald Manchester Hotel and Spa - has a restaurant which is frankly too good to remain the preserve of overnight guests a moment longer, and now I know it's there, I WANT IN.

The Scottish Steak Club Restaurant (yes, I know - the name IS promising - more of that later) is pretty busy on a filthy wet Manchester night, and although there are plenty of lone diners busily reading their Kindles at a table for one (the classic stereotype of a hotel restaurant), there is actually a nice buzz about the place thanks to a number of parties who are clearly already in the know about the left turn out of Piccadilly. Christmas music plays softly in the background, and the view of traffic on the London Road through the rain-smeared window actually makes me feel pretty cosy and - dare I say it - festive. I also very much like that from my seat I have a variety of interesting things within my sightline: I can see into the open plan kitchen, and am able to keep a close eye on a table piled high with fresh bread that is sliced on demand whenever someone (mostly me, truth be told) orders a plate of wheaty goodness served with balsamic vinegar and oil at a reasonable £2.50. I can also see Mr Liz, with a bit of sauce around his mouth, but I choose to largely ignore this and keep an eye on the chefs and the bread and the rain instead.

For starters, I go with the chicken liver parfait served with fruit chutney and toasted brioche. The pate itself is very good, although I'm not really a fan of brioche as an accompaniment - the soft sweet bread fails to provide the contrast needed to cut through the richness of the meat, but this problem could be easily circumvented next time by asking for different bread (yes - I am still gazing longingly at that table). Meanwhile, across the table Mr Liz has come up trumps (thankfully not literally) by ordering the haggis, neeps and tatties with whisky sauce. This comes as a pretty tower of different layers, with the haggis stratus just seen here peeking coyly from its moat of rich cream sauce, and whilst some might feel this is a rather gentrified version of what is essentially a sturdy, rustic sort of dish, it's actually far less polite than it looks, and we both love it.

As the name suggests, the restaurant specialises in Scottish steak, and although the menu is actually extremely wide-ranging and includes plenty of non-steak options, we both decide to try the main attraction - not least because all the steaks are cooked on a Josper charcoal grill. If you've never tried steak (or indeed anything) cooked on a Josper, I can assure you it's a revelation - this is essentially a giant indoor barbecue, but because it's being manned by experts rather than someone's slightly inebriated husband in a comedy apron, the food comes out perfectly moist and with a delicately smoky taste that a man full of beer in a back garden will never get close to. I elect to have the fillet steak, which is on the edge of pricey at £27.50 but is just stunning - charcoally, slightly caramelised stripes on the outside but perfectly rare in the middle - and comes handsomely equipped with some very good chips. Mr Liz goes for an enormous rib eye off the specials board and enjoys its strong, earthy flavour - he reckons he can taste more than a hint of unami, and decides that the accompanying onion marmalade forms an unusual but inspired foil to its savoury notes. I also order an entirely unnecessary side, also from the specials board - cabbage with bacon and cream, which provides a peerless lesson in the art of taking a healthy vegetable item and turning it into a decadent frenzy and is absolutely delicious, albeit a little on the rich side.

We are pretty full by now, but Mr Liz's eyes light up at the sight of someone else's Knickerbocker Glory and he bravely finds a small spare corner of his pudding stomach to try his own. I'm a big fan of retro desserts appearing on sprightly modern menus, and this is a good example of how to take a 70s staple and make it just a little more sophisticated - plenty of fruit, plenty of good quality ice cream and jelly and - thankfully - two chocolate sticks, so that an unseemly squabble does not develop. The service throughout is spot on - friendly and helpful without being intrusive, with staff happy to offer advice and recommendations - they even bring a little sample of the "secret sauce" for us to try when we are trying to decide what should accompany our steaks.

We were invited to try the menu as guests of the restaurant and therefore were lucky enough not asked to pay for our meal - if I have any criticism of the Scottish Steak Club it is that a meal for two here with steak and wine would soon mount up cost-wise. You do get what you pay for, however, and knowing the quality of the steak and the cooking I would go back, especially as special offers run on certain nights and there are plenty of lower-priced items on the menu. And Manchester? PLEASE don't show me any more nice places to eat - there aren't enough days in the week, and these jeans are frankly getting really a bit tight now...

- The MacDonald Manchester Hotel and Spa is on the London Road, Manchester M1 2PG; tel 0161 272 3200.

Festive Christmas Menu at Manchester's DoubleTree by Hilton: Local Girl Thrilled with Bonus Turkey Dinner

It will come as no surprise to many of you that most meals are of interest to me; indeed, my Twitter timeline consists almost entirely of people who I follow purely because, like me, they are prone to listing details of whatever they have just consumed, ideally with a photograph or two. My very favourite meal of all, however, stands head and shoulders above all others: Christmas dinner, shining like a lovely sprouty beacon at the end of a long wintery corridor; a sturdily shimmering mirage lighting the way through the dark months of the year. I love everything about it: the oft-maligned turkey, the goose-fat roasties, the fruity stuffing, the chipolatas, the honey-roast parsnips, the gravy, the sprouts...oh, especially the SPROUTS. I even like the bit where I sleep fatly on the sofa afterwards: I literally look forward to this meal all year.

So when the email arrived from DoubleTree by Hilton inviting us in to try the new Festive menu, a small corner of Didsbury might just have caught a glimpse of me, running about excitedly, full of the thrilling possibility of an additional, bonus turkey dinner - in NOVEMBER. There are of course plenty of set menus about at this time of year, but the one at DoubleTrees's City Cafe outpost is pleasingly traditional, allowing the hungry and festive diner to choose from the following:

Starters

Parsnip and apple soup
Mosaic of guinea fowl, pistachio, cranberry, plum chutney
Poached salmon , caviar, lemon crème fraîche
Beetroot tarte tatin, goats cheese fritters, balsamic dressing

Main courses
Roast turkey, apricot and chestnut stuffing, roasted vegetables, cranberry sauce
8oz rib eye steak, horseradish mashed potato, onion frites, truffle sauce
Pan fried sea bass, Lyonnaise potatoes, fennel puree, creamed leeks
Chestnut and mushroom pithivier, cranberry chutney, roasted vegetables

Desserts
Cheese cake, hazelnuts, marshmallows
Traditional Christmas pudding, brandy sauce
Dark chocolate ganache, cherry cloud, cherry sorbet
Selection of English cheese, fruit chutney

The restaurant is quiet when we visit on a freezing cold Tuesday night - just as well really, as our table has thoughtfully been set with crackers which we pull loudly and excitedly before squabbling noisily over the prizes (remember this is a full three days before the launch of the Christmas menu on November 30th); it is with no little sorrow that I resist donning my paper hat in a jaunty manner.

And the food is excellent. I start with the soup, which arrives - rather thrillingly - as a pile of grated apple in a dish with the jug of soup on the side; the two are then united at table before my very eyes. This is no mere theatre: keeping the raw apple separate from the hot, creamy soup until the last possible moment means the fruit retains its sweetness and its crunch, cutting through the comforting velvet of the liquid in a manner that leads me to think that I shall do this at home from now on whenever I make soup. Meanwhile, Mr Liz is hoovering up a substantial piece of lightly poached salmon served alongside a little pile of satisfyingly piquant potato salad topped with caviar - a most classy dish, although obviously it would have been made classier still had he put his party hat on.

(NB In this narrative I have omitted the part where Mr Liz stage whispers - with some trepidation - to enquire "whether he can eat the flowers".)

For main, I have the turkey, of course. This is everything this misunderstood bird should be - moist, thickly sliced and nestling in a sea of sticky gravy, and flanked by crunchy roast potatoes and a lovely fruity stuffing. There is even a sausage on the top and a dish of cranberry sauce on the side - perfect. Well, almost perfect - come on DoubleTree, THREE sprouts? I normally serve myself in the region of twenty (although I have, at times, come to regret this). Mr Liz has the steak, which is obviously the more sophisticated dish - tender pink meat with a rich sauce, served with perfect, thin, crunchy onion rings and a pile of horseradish mash. I am amazed that on such a reasonably priced set menu this dish does not come at a supplement - it is quite simply great value. I would have put a little more horseradish in the mash, but that is because I have been known to eat creamed horseradish straight from the jar, so my opinion probably doesn't count here.

We are by now pretty full, but Mr Liz makes room for some Christmas pudding - a spicy little number in a pool of boozy sauce - whilst I toy coquettishly* with a handsome selection of cheese.

*stuff face wildly in the manner of a person who has not eaten for weeks

Head chef Michael Campbell comes out for a chat; he is rightly proud of the menu he has designed, although he did say he might make a few tweaks here and there before the full launch, so it's possible your dinner might differ very slightly from what you see here. All in all, it would be hard to beat this in terms of quality and value for a Christmas do - the menu ends with coffee and mince pies, and costs £19.95 at lunch and £22.50 in the evening. We also felt the wine list was approachable, with an excellent barrel-aged Tempranillo at £21.50 and plenty of others around the same price mark (although I did not permit Mr Liz to look at the prices towards the bottom of the pages, lest he keel over clutching his chest).

So, a good night to really get the festive season underway, and even raise the exciting possibility of squeezing in at least five turkey dinners before the year is out. Although, looking at this, I can't help thinking it would serve me right if they just give me sprouts and horseradish next time I go...

Doubletree by Hilton Manchester is at 1 Piccadilly Place, I Auburn Street, Manchester M1 3DG - just across the pedestrian bridge leading from the train station. The set menu runs until December 23rd.

101 Brasserie at Manchester's McDonald Townhouse Hotel: Local Girl Turns up Unexpected Gem and Longs for More Days in the Eating Week

Over the last few years, there has been something of a trend (often, it has to be said, most clearly voiced by London-centric food writers) for criticising the Manchester restaurant scene. Not only do we have no Michelin stars, we also apparently lack anywhere even half decent to eat, no doubt leaving Southerners to imagine an ugly scene in which hollow-cheeked Mancunians queue wanly outside Greggs in order to fight over the last crumbs of a pasty or two, before stopping for a pint and some black pudding flavoured crisps on the way home.

I have a different issue with Manchester restaurants: I think they are just too good. Bearing in mind that there are only seven days in each week (and I am expected to spend a worrying proportion of at least five of these engaged in gainful employment) and only one size of jeans in the drawer, this leads to some difficult decisions over where to eat on a night out; decisions not helped when you discover ANOTHER restaurant turning out really classy food that you were previously unaware of. For me, the restaurant revelation of the week has been the 101 Brasserie, attached to the McDonald Townhouse Hotel on Portland Street; as a Manchester resident, hotels in the city centre barely even register with me, and Portland Street tends to be somewhere I hurry along, head down, lest I accidentally make eye contact with a Yates' Wine Lodge.

All that is set to change, however, with the discovery of this little gem on the corner of Princess Street. 101 Brasserie is a small, muted affair, tastefully (too tastefully?) decorated in the subdued colours and style that so many hotels go for in the hope of appealing to all tastes. What the environs lack in oomph though, the food delivers in spades: good, strong, gutsy flavours with a traditional slant to the dishes in terms of ingredients and presentation. Take Mr Liz's starter, for example (I did in fact try very hard to take it, but he defended it in staunch manner by building a wall of condiments around it and emitting an occasional growl) - his Free Range Eggs Benedict was a sturdy yet elegant dish generously piled with flavoursome crispy bacon and thick, creamy Hollandaise: it would make an excellent lunch dish if you're ever passing during the day. My Slow Cooked Yorkshire Duck Leg was a small pile of tender, gamey meat flaked and served with shallots and a touch of orange, and was a delight from first mouthful to last - it wasn't quite as generously portioned as the Eggs Benedict, but the staff were MOST forthcoming with a basket of excellent bread with which to mop up any last remaining morsels.

These starters were, for us, the highlight of the meal, but quality remained impressive with our mains. An Autumnal nip in the air meant that there was one clear choice on the menu for me: Highland Venison served with red cabbage, dumplings, sweet potato and juniper. The meat was tender, juicy and pink, and went well with the sweetness of the cabbage and the potato; my only (minor) grumble was that I would have liked a little more cabbage. However, a side order of buttered samphire more than made up for this small shortcoming - there was so much of it I even permitted Mr Liz an exploratory foray, although he was altogether distracted by his own side of proper, fluffy-on-the-inside, golden-crunchy-on-the-outside chips. These he scoffed alongside a 21 Day Matured Scottish Ribeye Steak, perfectly cooked and packed with flavour. We did find ourselves wondering whether the chef couldn't perhaps use some ingredients from closer to home; this may of course be out of his hands as part of a hotel chain, but it's a shame nevertheless, particularly as the standards of cooking are so high.

Pretty full by now, we had planned to share one dessert but ended up with two - I really fancied the Peanut Butter Parfait, whilst the staff all recommended the Warm Layer Cake with caramel parfait and poached pear. We enjoyed the cake - a dainty square of moist sponge alongside soft, sticky fruit - but preferred the peanut butter parfait: there's something about that combination of salty and sweet that does it for me every time (insert your own double entendre here if you must - personally the desserts were too classy for that if you ask me).

Service was cheery, friendly and enthusiastic - the staff are clearly proud of the food they are serving up, and are happy to discuss any of the menu items. Rather than follow the same dishes offered by the other McDonald hotels, at 101 Brasserie the chef has chosen to design his own menu, and this little streak of individuality shows: true, there is nothing here that would change the face of gastronomy, but there ARE plenty of things I would like to eat, over and over again. And that, to me, is worth a DOZEN of your Michelin stars.

- We were invited to try the brasserie and were not asked to pay for our meal. However, we were under no obligation to be nice, and our server was not aware that we were there to review. And we will definitely go again - value is good for city centre with starters around the £6.50 mark and mains all under £20.

Smoak Bar and Grill at Manchester Malmaison - Local Girl in Too-Full-For-Cheese Shocker

It strikes me that, by and large, hotel restaurants must be a tricky thing to get right. I fear that for many of us, raised on a diet of sitcoms from the 1970s and 80s, the image that prevails is one of a very tall, quite silly man goose-stepping his way around the tables of some astonished, weeping tourists, while a small Spanish man drops trays and gets smacked around the head (yes - I actually thought Andrew Sachs was Spanish - I was very young). I have eaten in some truly dreadful hotel restaurants, utterly beige in their soullessness, and peopled almost entirely by unhappy couples pushing little pieces of very anaemic fish around their plates.

I have also been to some rip-snorting hotel bars and restaurants, which have taken the sensible route of thinking, "I know! Let us simply concentrate on designing and running a really good bar or restaurant, that loads of people would want to come to, and give them lovely food and drink in an atmosphere not resembling that of a funeral parlour - and then we'll run a nice hotel as well." The very best hotel bar I have ever been to was at a nice little place on the outskirts of Edinburgh - they made Bloody Marys with fiercely hot chilli vodka, and ran a quiz where someone would come round with an enormous carrier bag full of packets of crisps between games, prompting an unseemly fight over the last bag of prawn cocktail between the hundreds of happy locals who were happy to patronise this excellent bar that just happened to have handy rooms attached.

For similar reasons, I applaud Smoak Bar and Grill, the new restaurant that has replaced the Brasserie at Manchester's Malmaison. On a Thursday night, the place was packed - full of youngish, cheerful people who were eating and drinking here because they wanted to, not because they had to - a huge compliment to a new restaurant in a part of Manchester not short of places to eat. Here is why we loved it:

1. The menu. As its name suggests, Smoak is primarily a steak restaurant, specialising in succulent slabs of meat grilled to perfection over oak smoked chips (more of that in a minute). However, the menu is impressively extensive: I have already ear-marked a further half dozen dishes I must come back and try - top of the list for next time is the rare breed chop with pulled pork, served with coleslaw, cornbread and fried onions. There are a few vegetarian dishes on the menu, but as our table offered a clear view of the restaurant's butchery (basically some tasty animal carcasses hanging in a glass case), it might be a little thoughtless to bring your herbivorous friends here anyway.

2. The staff. The people who work here are simply lovely, and give the impression that they enjoy their jobs very much. From the charming young barman who assured us that ALL their cocktails were both hangover and calorie free, particularly the cream-based ones (fictitiously, it turned out - NEVER trust a winking barman is a life lesson I have clearly learned far too late) to the cheeky waiter who took one look at my licked-clean dessert plate and said "well yes - I can see you didn't enjoy that at all", all were cheerful, funny and friendly - a delight.

3. The grungy-in-a-good-way atmosphere. This might just be the point that divides opinion over Smoak - this is a dark, sexy warehouse of a space, with bright red seating and tables crammed in close together (all the better for noseying at what your neighbours are eating, is what I say), and The Killers playing at high volume over the noisy clink of cutlery and the buzz of cheery, after-work conversation. The staff wear t-shirts, and happily dollop ketchup onto the side of your plate if that is what you so desire; the wine is served in tumblers and the water from space-ace metallic beakers. We loved all of this, but it IS brave to serve high-end food and drink (at reasonably high-end prices) in this kind of deliberately casual atmosphere; we were disappointed to see, for example, that all of the neighbouring tables had spurned their tumblers and asked for proper wine glasses instead (which were brought instantly, without resentment).

4. The food, obviously. All of this would count for nothing, of course, if the food wasn't really, really good. The steaks themselves were peerless - I went for the fillet steak with bearnaise sauce and, for the first time ever, left my sauce through choice, because the steak it accompanied was simply too rich, juicy and buttery to have any need of such adornments; my husband found the same with his pepper-crusted sirloin steak from the specials board, and joyously dunked his skinny, skin-on chips into his peppercorn sauce instead. He also wolfed down the roasted bone marrow that came with my fillet with all the speed and alacrity of a cat that has stolen something particularly tasty from your plate; I swear I even heard him growl softly, just once, when a passing waiter came too close.

Starters and puds were also good - frito misto with a gorgeously fishy, salty dipping sauce for me, and the splendidly named "Three Sausage Sampler" for Mr Liz - a strange but exuberant offering of three differently sized meaty chunks (putting me in mind a little, somewhat bizarrely, of the three bears) perched aloft a smear of mashed potato. The starter portions were not large, but the desserts were enormous (I would prefer a slight swapping-round of these ratios) - six perfect profiteroles balancing on a choux pastry ring for me, and a plateful of pear and chocolate waffles for Mr Liz; both are shown below - remember the waffles look smaller due to the perspective, but were actually roughly similar to the Coliseum in circumference.



Regretfully, all this greed left me unable to sample what might just be Smoak's crowning glory - a proper, wheel-it-about, point-at-what-you-want CHEESE TROLLEY. I will have this next time, and in the meantime I include a picture below that I may stroke lovingly from time to time whilst thinking about what I could have had.



So...not everyone will like Smoak, and that is precisely why we loved it - a great restaurant that just happens to be part of a hotel. And not a goose-stepper or a moose head in sight.