Another Hand, Manchester: ‘I found myself clap-like-a-toddler delighted’

Once or twice a year I go up to Manchester to teach a seminar on the art of writing with tone of voice – what a thing to do, just to play with language so freely and so joyously! – to a room full of students who behold me as if they are cows chewing the cud. It is exceptionally bad for my ego and my spirit. What I normally do afterwards, to get over it, is crawl across the city in search of all the great bites of food I have saved to my perfected-over-years, highly curated Manchester map – Companio, Siop Shop, that restaurant in Chinatown where they stung Big Sam – and eat myself out of my misery.

And so, head low and soul dark, I arrive at Another Hand. Since opening in 2022, Another Hand has become Manchester’s go-to “if you’re up there” restaurant recommend. It’s a cosy, 24-cover room on a slightly strange elevated shopping street developed a few years ago above Deansgate – a purringly low-lit seasonal-ingredients-and-a-very-good-wine-list spot nestled among a medium-sized Odeon and a beer pong bar, with weird Astroturfed banquettes outside for people to eat, and take photos of their matcha soft serves on. This is not where I expect to find the peak of rhubarb season being played like jazz: this is where I expect to be manslaughtered in Britain’s first ever fatal beerbike accident while queueing up for a sample sale.

But it’s 9pm, the only booking the three of us can get for a Friday evening, which means something. After a round of three cocktails and four oysters – during which I almost manage to forget the moment that afternoon when I asked a room of 20-year-olds, “Can one of you nod if you know what I’m talking about?” and no one nodded – we start with a mixed bag: a jerusalem artichoke with toasted hazelnuts and coffee, which was served cold in a way I wasn’t quite expecting. I am still slightly wondering what the hazelnuts and coffee were doing. The overall effect, weirdly, was like eating chewy, burnt popcorn: not for me.

There followed an aged beef tartare in a celery-root cannolo with a parmesan foam. I’m not always a tartare person – I’m always a little bit aware that I’m eating a wet bowl of meat and mustard, and it makes me feel like a dog whose diet has been prescribed by a solemn vet – but this won me over. With the parmesan, the cannolo as a sort of bun, and a tomato ponzu in there that I forgot to tell you about acting as ketchup, the whole bite tasted, my friend Jake said, of cheeseburger. And he was right: an £11, one-bite, perfect cheeseburger. But: cheeseburger.

There is a similar playfulness throughout this menu, which I actually found myself clap-like-a-toddler delighted with as the meal went on: a mushroom and miso-cured egg dish (“I had something like this in San Sebastián!” I said, because if you’ve been to San Sebastián, you legally have to tell people at every opportunity) came with what I found to be a fairly pointless roast-onion tea. But, with the pickled walnut sauce dotted delicately on top it, it evoked a perfect mouthful of fry-up mushrooms with HP. The pork cheek with swede, hay-smoked tea and pickled daikon was clever and refined, the result of layers of technique. When each component part was assembled on a fork, it hit all the notes of an utterly perfect Sunday roast.

This “one thing tastes like another thing” trick might get a bit tedious, if that was all that was going on here. But in quick order we had: a seabream, torched, just-charred on only one side, the silvered skin curling up almost like crackling, served on a pickled cream that had the tang of a sourdough starter (a compliment); a plum-coloured Cornish duck breast with umeboshi that was somehow mintily vibrant, with a softly perfect cook on the meat (“That is what I want every Christmas Day,” Jake said, as a leek ash-topped Hasselback potato landed in front of him and he gasped); and a pork cheek that his wife, Healey, sort of accidentally had entirely to herself without sharing, which I always take as a sign that something’s good (from the small scraps I was allowed from her plate, it was: just-pickled daikon adding a pleasingly vinegary cut-through to the whole dish). The showstopper, though, was the barbecued Cornish scallop, cooked as if it were a perfect white wad of fat, and served with burnt citrus and roe, a plate everyone at the table separately attempted to hide from each other so they could hog.

All right, then, here’s my problem: halfway through the meal I had to go to the bathroom, and asked the (I thought) normal question: “Hey, where’s the bathroom?” The answer is this: outside the restaurant, along the new-build mews and, after a slalom of Astroturf, through a code-to-enter door and round another corner. Simply: no. I know this is a silly thing to care about when someone has just blowtorched a seabream so immaculately for me, but also, because of the immaculateness of the seabream blowtorching, I kind of want to stay in the restaurant and revel in the magic of the meal. I don’t want to go outside without a jacket, get blown around a bit by the drizzle and come back a little shellshocked to my table to be asked the question: “Sorry, where were you?” It’s £100 a head. Let me have a piss!

I don’t want to end on that, though, so let me just briefly say, the service was exceptional, friendly, knowledgable and fun throughout. My only criticism is, they sent us round the corner to a bar where I had two martinis when I should have had one – but that’s my fault more than theirs. This is going to be my “if you’re up there” recommendation, going forward. I just wish it was in a building I could love as much as I love the food.

Another Hand, Unit F, 253 Deansgate, Manchester M3 4EN (0161 834 2988; anotherhandmcr.com). Starters £11-£17, mains £26-£30, desserts £10-£13, wine From £51