The soon-to-be launched Manchester hotel, Treehouse Manchester, has unveiled an all-star line-up to curate two brand new restaurants and a rooftop bar for the city. Mary-Ellen McTague, Justin Crawford and Luke Cowdrey - aka the Unabombers - and Sam Grainger of Liverpool hit Belzan will be the creative forces behind the new project, set to open in early 2023.
The hotel, which already has outposts in London and Miami, will be on the site of the former Renaissance hotel at the end of Deansgate. It will feature a bar and restaurant on the 14th floor, and a rooftop bar with amazing views across the whole city.
Mary-Ellen, the former chef of Heston Blumenthal’s three Michelin starred Fat Duck and the likes of Aumbry and The Creameries in Manchester, will take over the ground floor restaurant, with plans for an sustainable, ‘zero waste’ all-day menu. This will involve everything from pastries at breakfast time and sandwiches, into a full evening menu too.
“Seasonality and sustainability are the most important things to me,” said McTague. “We have incredible people in Manchester, bakeries and market gardens, making world class stuff, so it means that embarking on a new project like this will mean celebrating the things that I love.
“We’ll be able to bring in people from all around the city that are doing really cool things.”
Meanwhile, Sam Grainger, the young chef behind Belzan and Madre in Liverpool, will be in charge of the 14th floor restaurant, which will focus on a pan-Asian concept. Grainger will be teaming up with Cowdrey and Crawford, known for launching The Refuge, along with neighbourhood spots Volta in Didsbury and Electrik in Chorlton, on the 139-cover restaurant, and will also be behind the smart new rooftop bar and party space.
Grainger also recently launched Carnival at Escape To Freight Island, with Pitt Cue and Hawksmoor founder Richard Turner, where Cowdrey and Crawford are also directors.
“We’ve seen how Manchester has changed,” said Cowdrey. “And it’s a dead exciting time, and a very different city to what it used be. One thing you definitely can’t do is wander in from London and think you can conquer it, it doesn’t happen like that.
“Hotels in Manchester have tended to be something of an antiquated approach, and it’s been screaming out for somewhere that has a much more flexible, open-minded, disruptive, interesting concept where people come to us if they’re not even staying at the hotel. 10 years ago that was completely alien to people. We’re excited by that, and Manchester is ready for it.”
Added Crawford: “It all fell into place really. There will be lots of opportunity to do lots of different things. We can bring live music into it, which we do at Freight Island, but we have a lot of ideas about where it’s going to go.”
The hotel will have 216 rooms, and will feature similar style to that seen at its London hotel, just at the top of Regent Street, which has transformed a brutal 60s office building into a midtown oasis. Design-wise, it will be heavy on the ‘playful’, with ‘living wooden art pieces’, stepping stones in the lobby and ‘hopscotch carpets’, and specially designed space hoppers in the gym.
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