Restaurants are winning awards all the time these days. Or being voted best something by someone. It’s a bit exhausting and makes genuine achievements easier to pass over. Awards fatigue, it's probably called.
For example, this week Higher Ground, on the edge of Chinatown, was named in the top 50 restaurants in the whole of the UK. This wasn’t based on random data like social media hashtags, online reviews and number of mentions on Twitter, randomly crunched together by a random online betting company, but the National Restaurant Awards annual top 100.
It only opened in February, and already it’s leap-frogged Mana, the only restaurant in Manchester to have a Michelin star hanging by the front door, and the first place to land one in the city for decades. It’s a massive achievement, and one that could well be the first of many.
