Coming into the New Year with a swagger, the Ducie Street Warehouse scored itself a pretty impressive accolade. It was named the best roast in the UK by popular Insta channel 'Rate Good Roasts'.
Well, it actually landed joint top in the chart, alongside The Hawthorn in Haworth, Yorkshire, home to Bronte sisters and, it would appear, an excellent Sunday lunch. The likes of 10 Tib Lane, The Refuge, Pot Kettle Black and Ate Days A Week also featured in the top 10, meaning an excellent turn out for the city.
But it was DSW which clawed its way to the top spot, beating last year’s winner the Bull & Bear at the Stock Exchange hotel. These are not the first occasions that the blending of meats, roasted vegetables, Yorkshire puddings and gravy has received national recognition for venues in the region.
Indulge in more of Ben Arnold's food writing covering Greater Manchester...
Back in 2012, The Parlour in Chorlton was named the best Sunday roast in the whole of the UK by the revered Observer Food Monthly, which caused roadblock scenes every weekend for months. Nonetheless, this is still a red letter day for the roast, and with that it was off to the Piccadilly Basin to give it a test drive.
Quite apart from what is coming out of the kitchen, Ducie Street is a good-looking place. Built in 1867 as a cotton warehouse, it boasts ludicrously high ceilings, giant floor-to-ceiling windows, gargantuan iron pillars and handsome decor. It would fit right in in any cosmopolitan city in Europe.
That’s all very well, of course, but no amount of mid-century lighting and discreet booths can make the food decent. And a Sunday roast, with its many moving parts, is notoriously hard to get right at scale, which is why so many get it wrong.
Ducie Street falls into the category of those getting it right, along with the aforementioned 10 Tib Lane and the newly opened Maray, off Albert Square, both of which are currently nailing it in this department. From the dining room, tucked at the back of the main room, you can see right into the large open kitchen, and there they are - the Yorkshire puddings rising straight up in the ovens like giant chefs hats.
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It’s a good sign, and you can’t help suspecting that they’ve positioned the Yorkshire pudding oven there on purpose. Also a good sign is the cauliflower cheese menu. Yes, that’s an entire menu dedicated to this prince of sides.
Here we see the humble cauli celebrated; smothered in cheese of various types and the lily then gilded with additions like truffle, blue cheese, Frazzles (hmm, not sure about that one) or even macaroni. All are £4.50 and very much worth the addition. Also very much worth the addition are the Tuscan pork stuffing balls (also £4.50), which are excellent.
But these are distractions, ultimately. Welcome distractions, but distractions nevertheless. The roast itself ranges from £12 for the vegan to £16.50 for the dry-aged local shorthorn beef sirloin, with lamb, smoked gammon and chicken wavering in the middle. As prices go in town, this is actually erring towards the more reasonable end of things (10 Tib Lane’s sirloin is £20, for example).
A beef and a lamb are ordered, both served up with (alongside the stuffing and a faultless truffle cauliflower cheese) ‘proper roast potatoes’, sourced from Massey’s farm in Cheshire, a Yorkshire pudding and seasonal vegetables, in this case a very, very good, heavily buttered root vegetable mash.
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The beef arrives pink, the lamb also just right. Both are generous, and executing the main event effectively is always impressive, especially to a busy dining room, which this very much is. And that Yorkshire pudding is indeed a monster, a very fine example indeed.
The ‘proper roast potatoes’ heralded on the menu were not, sadly. Not crispy enough, or, in fact, crispy at all. Cheshire potatoes are a magnificent thing, luckily, so it wasn’t quite the end of the world, but this is an issue that can’t be easily overlooked.
For many, the roast potato IS the Sunday roast, and these were pale and sub-par. Perhaps on another day, or on another plate even, they may have been better. In mitigation, plenty of places fail on the roast potatoes, so this was a feeling I’ve had many times before.
The gravy - the menu also heralds this, and offers as much as you want if you run out - had the look and feel of being thickened with cornflour. Like the potatoes, there are better gravies in this town too.
Those two matters aside, Ducie Street does a very capable roast indeed, and in some pretty stunning surroundings. Is it award winning? Well, it’s won an award, so yes. But it needs to sort those tayters out.
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