The Northern Quarter bar, from the team behind Blinker, has had quite a year...
When barman Dan Berger opened The Morris in the Northern Quarter last summer, the aim wasn’t to chase awards or industry hype. It was much simpler than that. “The main focus of The Morris was to try and put a really, really fun drinking place together,” he says. “There’s a gap to do something that’s quite premium, yet approachable, but equally as fun.”
Still, the recognition arrived almost immediately. Just six months after opening its doors, The Morris landed a spot in the UK’s Top 50 Cocktail Bars list – a huge achievement for any venue, never mind a brand new one still finding its feet. “We weren’t expecting it in the slightest, you know,” Dan admits. “But weirdly, the same thing happened with Blinker [Dan’s other bar on Spring Gardens]. It was the same period of time. So it’s nice to know it wasn’t just a one-off thing.”
The awards ceremony took place in London earlier this year, but Dan reckons Manchester deserves its own moment in the spotlight too. “Every year there’s more strong bars opening and joining the party,” he says. “Everyone’s quite different in their approach, so it’s more the merrier really. It’s better for the city.”
Dan would know better than most. Before The Morris, he built a devoted following at Blinker, the Spring Gardens cocktail bar that quietly became one of Manchester’s most respected drinking spots after opening in 2021. Blinker built its reputation on heavily seasonal cocktails and warm service without pretension, a philosophy that clearly carried over into The Morris, albeit in a looser, more experimental form.
“Blinker’s very much flavour-forward,” Dan explains. “If rhubarb’s in season and we’re doing two rhubarb drinks on the menu, we want them to shout and scream rhubarb. Here, we’ve got a little bit more flexibility. We can put different flavours together to create really unique serves.”
That experimentation runs through every part of The Morris. The bar uses rotovaps and redistillation techniques usually associated with high-end kitchens or ultra-serious cocktail labs, but the drinks themselves deliberately avoid feeling intimidating. Instead, the references are nostalgic, playful and slightly chaotic in the best possible way.
One cocktail involves redistilling mini apple pies (from a certain exceedingly well-known cake maker) with rye whiskey to create a spirit that genuinely tastes like warm apple pie filling. Another menu previously featured Fruit Salad sweets and Drumstick lollies as inspiration. “We’re keeping it fun,” Dan says. “We’re trying to keep it retro.”
The process itself is part curiosity, part obsession. “As bartenders, you’ve always got that curiosity and that itch you want to scratch,” he explains. “It’s about finding new ways to do things, finding fun ways to do things.”
He’s revamped the cocktail menu to celebrate the bar’s first birthday – with one of the menu’s most talked-about drinks riffing on Snoop Dogg’s famous ‘gin and juice’. Rather than simply making a fruity gin cocktail, Dan went deep into the reference itself, researching the Canadian citrus drink supposedly referenced in the song before recreating its flavour profile from scratch using guava juice, raspberry, lemon verbena and clarified citrus. “That’s when the fun bits start happening,” he says. “We can make a modern-day cocktail that has got the same flavour profiles as the original reference would have tasted like.”
Berger does nothing if not make things that little bit harder for himself. The results, however, are supremely worth it.
Despite all the technical wizardry, there’s no sense of ego around The Morris. In fact, Dan says one of Manchester’s strengths is how collaborative the bar community has become. “Everyone knows everyone. Everyone respects the other bars,” he says. “We actually all recommend each other’s bars as well.”
Dan’s second in command at The Morris, Dom, even offers customers a Google Maps guide to the city’s best drinking spots, compiled with recommendations from bartenders across Manchester. “It’s nice to be part of that community,” Dan says.
That community spirit feels increasingly important as Manchester’s cocktail scene continues to evolve into something far bigger than it was even five years ago. A world class scene by any measure. Dan jokes that the only downside is customers now stay for ‘one drink instead of two or three’ because there are simply too many good bars to visit in one night.
Still, that feels like a pretty good problem to have. And for Dan, who has now helped launch two nationally recognised bars in quick succession, the success of The Morris feels less like a lucky break and more like proof Manchester’s cocktails scene isn’t simply emerging anymore.
It has properly arrived.
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