Latest news with #Blinker
Yahoo
28-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Inside the brand new Northern Quarter pub from one of the city's best bartenders
If there's one thing that Manchester city centre has plenty of its pubs and bars. A pub that also doubles as a bar might be a slightly rarer breed though. Enter The Morris, a new venue from the team behind one of Manchester's best watering holes. Headed up by ex-Gordon Ramsay bars boss Dan Berger, the new spot has taken over the unit previously occupied by Fierce Bar, which sadly closed in December last year. READ MORE: 'I went for lunch at the special street food spot in Manchester that we are about to lose for good' READ MORE: 'I went for a cheap €1 beer at a Benidorm bar - despite being warned against it' Dan opened Blinker in May 2022 to critical acclaim, earning multiple award nominations and landing at number six in the UK's Top 50 Cocktail Bars list in 2024. The bartender, who grew up in Heaton Mersey, has spent the bulk of his career working in some of the best cocktail bars in Melbourne and London, and now is turning his attention to his second Manchester venue - and he's confident it will offer something very different to Blinker. Walk into the space and it very much feels like a proper boozer - think timber-clad walls, leather booths and Guinness wall signs. Take a second look though, and at the back of the room you'll find a bold pink wall hinting that something else lies within. While it's ground floor is billed as a classic pub, take the stairs and you'll find yourself immersed in a retro-style cocktail bar nodding to the 80s - a complete shift in vibe from downstairs. "The Morris was always designed to be quirky. I wanted it to be fun, exciting and a little bit different," says Dan ahead of the venue's launch this week. "Down here was very much traditional pub in terms of look and feel, but with a modern day offering. We're championing local breweries and we want to be a Manchester institution for good wine and beer down here. "We want to help promote other Manchester independent businesses and lift those up by working together." Announced in January, it's been a busy six months to get the hybrid pub-meets bar concept ready, with a few snags along the way, but as they prepare to open the doors, Dan says he's confident in what they're offering. "I feel very positive going into it, the build was a totally different animal to my first bar though. At Blinker it was just a white box whereas here there's multiple levels, lots of fire exits and fire zones to be aware of, so a lot more to consider in terms of the design run and flow. "I wouldn't have been able to bring it to life without Patrick and the team at Up North Architects though, they've supported me through the whole project. They took my weird and whacky idea and managed to get it down onto paper. "With the back of the pub we wanted this pink wall so that's where the intrigue starts and then you follow the neon up the stairs and then suddenly it's like bang, you're in another room, in a cocktail bar. "The whole point of upstairs was to be fun and quirky, we just want people to enjoy themselves and the drinks. We want people to enjoy the bar without it being too rigid." The team's laidback approach extends to their cocktails and drink list upstairs too, where the're offering playful twists like the 'Cheeky Vimto', 'Cream Soda', and 'Drumstick' - and some are using a method that's new for the city. "Carbonated drinks are starting to become a big trend and someone had to do it first in Manchester," adds Dan. "It's been big in London, big in New York, and globally it's really taken off. "It's just fun to be able to pre-batch drinks, force carbonate it ourselves and then pull it through the draft system. The speed in service is beneficial but that wasn't the main reason, it was to link up the tap wall in the pub to the cocktail bar upstairs. "We've got the pink tap in the pub in a nod to upstairs too with the elderflower and grape spritz on. It's more about bringing a different style of drink to Manchester too. "It gives people down here a taste of what's upstairs and when the sun's out they can enjoy it outside on Thomas Street." "The fizzy drinks are the ones, we've also re-distil spirts on site too so we've got a cocktail with a drumstick lolly distillate in too, and then in the shaken section we have the Fruit Salad and we've distilled those sweets with gin and made a fruity banger." Split into 'Fizzy', 'Shaken', 'Stirred', 'Sub Zero', and 'Sensible' - the latter a selection of non-alcohol pours and mixes - the upstairs cocktail bar is meant to feel nostalgic and totally different to the team's first bar Blinker, which is all about seasonality. Downstairs, there's a selection of beers including Manchester Union lager (£6), Wrexham lager (£6) and Guinness (£6.50), alongside a range of other breweries including Tiny Rebel, Cloudwater, Track, Weekend Project and Polly's. "It's nice to champion British beers more than anything else really and have a point of difference," says Dan. There's a strong lineup of other beers and cans too, as well as highball and spritz cocktails and wines too. Feeling peckish? Well there's bacon and scampi fries, crisps, nuts, Pepperami, sweet chilli rice crackers and pork scratchings to fill that void too. "I like drinking in pubs, cocktails are my thing professionally but I like going to the pub, and I suppose it was always a passion I wanted to pursue in owning a pub one day. "Having the space down here to here to do a proper pub is great, but when I saw the space upstairs I thought this just screams cocktail bar. "It will be completely different. I didn't want people to walk in and think it was just like Blinker. "This venue has nostalgia running through it so all the flavours of the cocktails upstairs have an element of that, so people will recognise flavours from back in the day. "Blinker will stay the seasonal-focused bar, while The Morris will be our nostalgia cave." The Morris opens on Wednesday, May 28. 57 Thomas St, Manchester M4 1NA.
Telegraph
29-03-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
One-sip cocktails are giving ‘a swift half' a whole new meaning
Hospitality businesses are grappling with a thorny problem: customers are not drinking like they used to. Many reports have shown that alcohol consumption is markedly down, especially among people born after 2000. In response, most restaurants and bars have expanded their 'no and low' ranges, with non-alcoholic beer and wine, and more thoughtful alcohol-free cocktails. Even among the still-drinking, there is recognition of a swelling body of evidence that consuming a lot of alcohol is not the best thing for your health. Propose a three-Martini lunch in a British office and you will be up in front of HR before you can say 'extra dirty'. For an industry that has long found profit margins in booze, this 21st-century abstemiousness is a worrying development. But there is another solution: just make the cocktails smaller. Rather than doling out great vats of Martini and negroni, bars and restaurants from Blinker in Manchester to Daisy in Margate are discovering the allure of the smaller measure. So much so, in fact, that journalist Tyler Zielinski has written a new book, Tiny Cocktails: The Art of Miniature Mixology, dedicated to them. 'You're drinking less, but you still get the same flavour without the overindulgence,' Zielinski tells me, over a tiny Martini and a tiny bullshot at Maison François, a brasserie in London's St James's which has a menu of shorter drinks. Front-of-house head honcho Ed Wyand says it lets diners sample the list more widely, too: 'You can drink three pretty hardcore cocktails, just less of them.' Customers also order things they might not otherwise. The bullshot – beef consommé and vodka – which hot-blooded British drinkers will associate with shooting weekends, is an intriguing item on a list, but you might not want a full serving of boozy beef soup with your meal. At home, a tinier measure can be a way to taste a prized spirit without the drink costing the earth. For the people running bars and restaurants, tiny cocktails are a way to get the gears moving. The Connaught in Mayfair, routinely ranked among the best bars in the world, welcomes customers with a tiny measure of a seasonal cocktail served in its own cutesy glass. The menu at Rita's, in Soho, offers diners a 'mini Martini', served with a piquant but breath-cursing skewer of olive, blue cheese, anchovy and jalapeño pepper. At Tayēr + Elementary, in east London, they sell an average of 200 of their 'One Sip Martinis' every evening. The fabled restaurateur Jeremy King, who has a menu of smaller 'sharpeners' at Arlington, his reborn Le Caprice, says he has long appreciated the more diminutive measure. 'We opened with half-sizes a year ago,' he says. 'I have often found I wanted one Martini, but two was too much, so one and a half was very good.' His sharpeners are all pre-mixed, diluted and chilled to icy perfection so they can be at the diner's lips in seconds, which he says helps convey 'generosity'. 'A tiny drink gets the wheels turning,' says Max Halley, of Max's Sandwich Shop in north London, which offers 'shots' of negroni. 'It starts people enjoying themselves without costing too much or being very much alcohol.' Seen from a historical perspective, Tyler Zielinski says the current movement is a reversion, rather than an aberration. 'Historically, cocktail glasses were much smaller,' he says. 'If you go into a vintage shop, everything is port- or sherry-glass-sized, even the Martini-style glasses.'
