Andrew Sheridan opens Counter in Manchester city centre
Open Restaurant Group's ninth site brings a chef's counter, a full-scale rotisserie and a sharing-plate menu to the Island Building on 9 November.
Counter Manchester, the ninth restaurant from Open Restaurant Group, opens in the city centre's Island Building on 9 November.
The venue is led by chef and group co-founder Andrew Sheridan, working with business partners Sam and Emma Morgan. It is the group's first restaurant in Manchester city centre proper, after sites including Hispi in Chorlton and the recently acquired Wreck Bistro.
Counter seats around 62 guests, plus a chef's counter for six to eight diners at the pass and a 20-cover terrace. The dining room has curved booth seating, a brass wine display and four-metre elm trees indoors.
Manchester is creative, loud and full of character, and we wanted Counter to reflect exactly that.
Built around a rotisserie
The menu drops the standard starters, mains and desserts structure in favour of dishes made for sharing. Dry-ageing cabinets for meat and fish sit beside a full-scale rotisserie, which anchors the kitchen.
Early dishes include a beef tartare pressed croissant, satay spatchcock chicken, a scallop hash brown and a mac and cheese brûlée. Dessert runs to the “Vimto 1908,” built around the Mancunian soft drink, jelly and baked yoghurt.
Drinks are led by Jake Nutt, who returns to the group after stints at Ynyshir in Wales and Gwen in Manchester, with a list weighted towards English wines and Manchester-brewed beers.
A city-centre bet
“Manchester is creative, loud and full of character, and we wanted Counter to reflect exactly that,” Sheridan said. He described the restaurant as a place where good food meets a sense of occasion “without taking itself too seriously.”
Sheridan has described his cooking as not sticking to rules or defining food by where it comes from, drawing on global ingredients and techniques rather than a single cuisine. That approach now extends to a ground floor among the kind of sharing-led openings reshaping Britain's bigger dining cities.
The opening adds to a busy year for Open Restaurant Group, which has also taken on Wreck Bistro from Gary Usher and a new site in Chester, while closing its restaurant at Netherwood Estate. Other operators are betting on UK cities beyond London too, with Darden scouting Manchester for its own debut.
