Click here to view a virtual tour of our restaurant
Isinglass is an English restaurant. Not in the St George’s flag sense, but well-travelled enough to enjoy our real eccentricities. We put the food grown and reared in the lush countryside ringing Manchester on our menu, all year round. Simple as. Only that takes a lot more imagination and frankly old school cooking skill from our kitchen, some historical depth rather than banging out cooked-chill or frozen meals from a big food distributor. So when the last asparagus or yellow courgette is picked in Cheshire it’s off the menu. That’s why it’s not laminated. And that’s why the food is fresh, cooked to enhance not mask it’s natural flavours. We are not Tuscan or a Mediteranean wannabe. Follow a Pisan gran’s recipe slavishly using supermarket finest and it will still not taste the same under Manchester’s slate grey sky. We serve food for our climate, field fresh Chat Moss salad in summer, slow-cooked boiled beef and baby carrots coming in the cold. Food that satisfies, lingers and reconnects with youthful memory. Direct from fields not a factory.
How we came about: We took a last century bakery on a busy shopping street, ripped out a bad retro seventies shell and room size shipyard weld oven, and eight skips later a period townhouse was left. Its an interior under-designed to relax not intimidate, full of those high ceilings, wood floors, original fireplaces and cooking ranges beloved of the South Manchester housing boom.
Where (the hell) are we: Urmston. Just paltry minutes away from Chorlton and the main arterial A56 or M60 but admittedly a location wild card for the city-centric. We’ve become a spiritual home for Chorlton & Didsbury exiles, drawn to Urmston’s whole tree-lined streets of unrenovated period property and league-topping schools yet still pining for free trade coffee. And we’re grateful that Urmston’s finest have welcomed a bit more variety to their many dining out options.
we took a last century bakery on a busy shopping street, ripped out a bad retro seventies shell and room size shipyard weld oven, and eight skips later a period townhouse was left. Under-designed interiors relax not intimidate, full of those high ceilings, wood floors, original fireplaces and cooking ranges beloved of the South Manchester housing boom. We’re in Urmston, an area of tree-lined Victorian streets and league-topping schools. As Time Out said when it called us one of Manchester’s most impressive restaurants “Every suburb should be as lucky as to have an Isinglass”. But we started cooking our style of English food in 2002, culminating two years later as Isinglass, we had many doubters. Some equated local food with institutional canteens, wanting the faked exotica of a split spice cabinet of global flavours. Cynics said it didn’t matter where food came from as diners knew no better. Writing menus based on locally-grown ingredients, taking historical recipes from hand-written books, was too risky for many fellow chefs. Foolhardy even. We ploughed on, refusing to serve garlic bread, balsamic reduction or pasta to the odd customer convinced that meals were wholly barbaric, lacking in finesse somehow without a mock Mediterranean flavour. As the weeks went on our band of customers grew out of nowhere. Without a single press release or review they judged us with their taste buds not media-taught snobbery. They appreciated food cooked using the classic techniques from scratch using the best grade ingredients from local farmers. We put the food grown and reared in the lush countryside ringing Manchester on our menu, all year round.