Cardinal Rule, Tariff Street, reviewed

Squeezing dinner around a few Friday drinks can be a chore. When you finish work at 5pm, the last thing on your mind is probably a big bowl of pasta, but skip it altogether and you risk waking up the next day in a dump without your phone and wearing someone else’s socks.

For this reason, bars with informally located kitchens have been a welcome addition to the food and beverage scene. Often they pop up for a few months and then bounce back down, another kitchen takes over, and if you go to the bar regularly enough, you witness a kind of Mr. Benn style dressing box from different global cuisines.

Friday night, once p colleague Jake and I found ourselves through Northern Monk Refectory on Tariff Street in Virginia.

Cardinal Rule is a more than slightly opaque name for a diner, but hey, at least it has more than one word and the vowels are still intact. It refers to one rule not to be broken, and the crimson cardinal is the state bird of Virginia, where owners Gab and Dustin are from.

Anyway, they sell fried chicken sandwiches, but crucially, the bookends are biscuits. Not garibaldis or custard butters, but American savory biscuits that are kind of next to a scone, but as their Instagram explains “not an af#*king scone”. Nothing sparks interest like the contentious transatlantic disagreement over language.

In many ways, the Northern Monk Refectory is the ideal setting for Cardinal Rule. It’s not a van on the street corner or a hatch next to the back boxes of a pub, but a handsome, airy and inviting space where the atmosphere remains the same regardless of whether the food is circulating or not. This makes for just the right amount of formality in my book. You’re not standing in line with a tray for food, but you’re not sitting around a white tablecloth either. I would argue that this less formal approach brings a simpler appreciation of the food on offer. Yes, it is with some beers, but that shouldn’t mean it can only ever be pub tree.

The menu is light and straightforward. There are six “fried chicken biscuit sandwiches” to choose from, each apparently talking about a different combination; Miss Honey you can guess Hot Take much the same Home town there is plenty of pickles and the vegan cookie is as expected.

I went anyway Cowboy (£10), because who can resist a sandwich called that. “Fried buttermilk chicken breast, bacon, Texas style barbecue sauce and cowboy candied jalapenos,” which all sounds like a perfect combination to me.

The thing about sandwiches is that if every ingredient isn’t of a certain quality, it drags the whole thing down into a mushy mess, but that certainly wasn’t the case here, as each ingredient does itself proud.

The chicken was thigh meat and therefore tender, avoiding the fluffiness you can sometimes get from breast meat, and the batter was a popcorn-colored coating; over plenty of well-seasoned coating, but not at the expense of the chicken itself – no tooth-cracking batter here. The bacon was molasses black around the edges, suggesting to me that it had practically been simmered in some maple syrup before some serious grilling. A great crunchy contrast to the tender chicken.

The barbeque sauce was a sweet and addictive addition to the sandwich that kept things interesting and balanced out the saltier flavors of the bacon. Then all you have to do is add something pickled or spicy or both to get a nice balance. The candied jalapenos, which are not necessarily too spicy chili peppers, were given more dimension by being candied and complemented well the muscular notes of the sandwich.

The pages provided are also light and manageable; cajun fries with ketchup (€3.50), potato salad (€3.50) and a ‘cowboy caviar corn salad’ of corn, black-eyed peas, green peppers and coriander (£3.50). There is an offer to combine main and side for £12.50 which I think is very reasonable.

Jake insisted on potato salad, I personally have never seen a plea. I don’t know if it’s the huge amount of mayo or the fact that it’s meant to be served cold, but it just doesn’t do it for me. That said, of course I tried some for our dear readers, and if you like potato salad, I’m pretty sure you’ll like this one; the potatoes were properly cooked to the point where they started to sizzle inside and the spring onions gave a flowery, earthy note. Apparently it’s a South American tradition, so who am I to say otherwise.

All this with a spiced honey sauce (£0.75) – for pouring, mopping or dipping – and you’ve got the ideal Friday night meal when you need something substantial without breaking the bank or speeding up your evening.

Jake and I were on one of the benches, and that’s how we got into a conversation with the next table of co-workers (finance, I think). Not all foods and dining experiences are suitable for interacting with strangers, in fact many are not. But above all, Northern Monk Refectory is a bar and a casual bar. I’d argue that this end of the Northern Quarter doesn’t enjoy weekend hoardings like it did a decade ago, but instead gravitates towards Stephenson Square, Oldham Street and Ancoats. But it deserves its share, and Northern Monk, with its loose and mobile patronage of local cuisines on the way up, is one way to stay interesting.

We were probably seated at Cardinal Rule around 8:15pm, late enough to have had a few but still there for a good fried chicken sandwich to pull us back from the brink, and it did. It’s modest, but still interesting, tasty without hitting your taste buds with unnecessary additions for the sake of it, and not forgetting the brand new.

It may be that another cuisine will emerge to replace Cardinal Rule, but if it doesn’t, and this charm stick around longer than expected, I wouldn’t mind one bit.

A cardinal ruleNorthern Monk Refectory, 10 Tariff St, M1 2FF