“Delivers on its promise”: Stow, Bridge Street, reviewed

Ever since Stow – Bridge Street’s newest occupant, replacing Juice Bar – announced its opening, I’ve been intrigued. There is no big personality, no ostentatiously nameless backer or celebrity chef fueling the opening; it’s not a spin-off or expansion of an existing restaurant, it’s not a chef swap disguised as a launch or rebrand.

I’m looking for information on who or what they are, but the ad copy is clean and limited: “food on fire / cocktails & wine / nice people.” That’s three things that sound very much up my street; can they follow?

I’m a big believer in the ability of bread and butter to tell a restaurant much more than most other things. From the get-go, it feels like Stow is doing something a little different from its contemporaries, with their milk bread and burnt onion butter setting the tone.

The bread is the opposite of sourdough, which can be found everywhere: light and fine, soft and juicy and almost nostalgic in its sweetness. But then, once it’s baked, it darkens—really, right, shockingly black—in the pizza oven, balancing the inherent sweetness of the bread with the smokiness and bitterness.

Burnt onion butter plays with similar flavor contradictions, burning sweet onion balances, flavors, reframes the flavors. It’s both familiar and unusual, it’s cleverly executed, and it’s lovely.

Stow is small, and the kitchen dominates much of the restaurant, with the chef’s table bar stool seating area directly in front of the pass. Cooking with fire is what many restaurants are all about, since the Basque Asador Etxebarri paved the way, regularly voted in the top five restaurants in the world. Sounds good, right? Fire! Wrong! Macho! But cooking exclusively with fire – indoors – is hard work, often dangerous and always technically and physically difficult. Few achieve it more than with a lip phone, but Stow appears to be the real deal.

Adjacent to the kitchen is a Gozney dome oven on one side and a Big Green Egg on the other; you can feel the heat as you sit on the stools, and the chefs walk by with huge bags of charcoal slung over their shoulders mid-service. They really cook exclusively with open fire, and they do it calmly: the flame is used as a tool, a technique, a spice, a flavor as important as any ingredient. It’s expertly, lovingly applied evenly, with light touches and gorgeous big, spherical flashes. This isn’t timid cooking—and it’s exciting.

The menu is also compact: a child’s handful of small plates, three main courses, three sides, three puddings. We follow the bread with char-grilled beets served over a ricotta mousse and smoked honey, and a small dish of soft borlotti beans drizzled with olive oil and topped with salt flakes and sprigs of sage. Beets are fork-tender and smokey; the beans skate too salty, too oily, too tasty – always just on the right, compulsively delicious side.

The Ratte potatoes, sliced ​​lengthwise and cooked to a bronze finish, are fantastic, topped with a storm of Cora Linn (Scottish sheep’s milk cheese) that melts and crisps from the after-heat of the flame-roasted potatoes. The crown prince pumpkin is slowly roasted and finished with fire, the skin is blistered, the flesh charred and giving way. None of this is groundbreaking cooking; I’ve eaten these dishes – or versions of them – in countless restaurants in Manchester and beyond. But it’s beautifully done, the composition is thought out, every idea perfect.

The main event, the monkfish – available in two sizes – is the presentation of the plate. Cooked on the bone and then carved before serving, the bone stands proudly in the center of the plate, ripe for greedier diners to carefully pick clean when fillets are a recent memory. The fish is dressed in a classic beurre blanc with a nice sprinkling of dill leaves and an array of translucent, terracotta trout roe. Our waiter arrives with two spoons – ‘the sauce is so good I don’t want you to miss it’ – and I think, yes, this is my way of dining. He’s right by the way, the sauce is quite good enough to spoon on its own.

The smoked cream tart we ordered for the pudding is an oat biscuit base, a bit like a cheesecake, but then the filling is unusual, unlike anything I’ve had before. It’s made the same way as custard, using smoked cream, but then cooked at an obscenely high temperature. It’s pitch black—so black it looks like it must be a bug, but it’s not. It’s chewy, caramel, almost salty. It resembles a blondie, a Basque cheesecake and a syrup tart all at once, and at the same time very much its own thing.

The “rum frost” served with it is soft, almost collapsible, glossy and boozy and just the right match for a sweet, inventive tart. The chocolate cremeux dish is comparatively calm, smooth, soft and unassuming, but what makes it memorable is the spiced date puree and flecks of recklessly fresh nutmeg that make it quietly Christmassy and utterly delicious.

So that’s fire; what about cocktails and nice people? Well, our drinks are reliable and perfect, and every one of them is a delight: a martinez poured from an icy gin bottle to the table, a hazy paleoma (a paloma-style base with a hazy pale ale; I’m good at puns), and the perfect off-menu boulevardier. The bar is separate from the restaurant, so it is full of people at the beginning or end of the evening, making reservations or just stopping by for a drink. It feels like Stow has achieved the unthinkable: a neighborhood bar in the heart of Deansgate.

And from the moment we walked through the door to the time we reluctantly left, the service was some of the most charming, assured, and welcoming I’ve experienced to date. It doesn’t matter if it’s front of house, bar manager, chef or service staff, to a man they are knowledgeable, self-driven and just the right amount of help. Oh look! There’s the third arm of their formula: nice people.

Stow definitely lives up to their promise: they’re just nice people, cook with fire and serve amazing cocktails. I love them and can’t wait to go back.

Stow62 Bridge St, Manchester M3 3BW