The crew behind bars like Bunny Jacksons and chaotic pizza establishment Crazy Pedro’s are to revive a favourite Northern Quarter haunt. Liquor & Burn on High Street is being extended into the next door unit, where the Convenience Store bar was, and will re-open for business this weekend.
Also planned is a new ‘upscale’ bar upstairs, in the unit formerly housing the original Almost Famous burger bar, and a potential ‘pop-up’ revival of the infamous tiki bar Keko Moku. “That building, I think, is the coolest spot in the Northern Quarter,” Liquor & Burn’s new owner Lyndon Higginson told the Manchester Evening News.
Higginson is involved with all manner of bars across the city, from Bunny Jacksons and sister bar Junior Jacksons, the dive bar on Oldham Street, to other projects like Pedro’s, The Liars Club and Junkyard Golf. However, he started his career as the bar manager of Keko Moku, back in the early 2000s.
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“That little bar, which was my first manager’s job, I thought was the best bar in the country at the time,” he went on. “It’s where my career started, so it’s a nice full circle. That building can tell a lot of stories! It’s so nice to go back to it. We’ve knocked through into the space where Convenience Store was, so the space is bonkers.
“We’ll tweak things a little bit, but keep the food as it is, though we’ll refine the burrito menu, and make the taco menu twice as big. We’ll also start doing two for one margaritas all day, every day. There may well be the return of Keko Moku too, as a pop-up here and there, dress the place up.”
Meanwhile upstairs, where Almost Famous was, Higgingson is planning a new cocktail bar called Super Deluxe.
“That’s going to be a high-end cocktails place,” Higginson went on. “We’re normally about the good times, and the parties, but we want to refine our drinks side of things in there, and that’s likely to happen early next year. I always revered the stairway up to that crazy burger joint, it was great way to come into a room. Now it’ll be a stairway up to a beautiful cocktail bar.”
Keko Moku closed in 2017, and was bought by Beautiful Drinks, the owners of Almost Famous, which then relaunched the bar as Convenience Store. Beautiful Drinks recently closed the original Almost Famous, and re-opened it on the site of Home Sweet Home on Edge Street.
The newly revived Liquor & Burn will re-open at 5pm this Friday (September 23).
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