On a Thursday morning on New York Street, there’s a bit of ad hoc, mildly grisly butchery going on in the back of a white van. It concerns a pair of two-year-old sows, huge creatures about 150kg each from a litter of six, which have lived and foraged outside their whole lives on the idyllic Jane’s Farm near Nantwich in Cheshire.
Farm manager Ste Simock, who loves a chat, has driven them over. He says the pigs – a kind of hybrid breed with some middle white and old spot in there – have been gorging themselves on fallen apples and acorns for the last few weeks. Even as piglets, they’d eat the spoiled food from the next door Cinderwood Market Garden, which would be thrown over the fence. They ate like kings. Or in this case, queens.
Partial dismantling begins. The heads, which like the huge carcasses have been cleaved in half and could do with a once-over with a Bic razor, are prone to spoiling, so they’re removed and taken away to be brined for 48 hours. They’ll likely be used in terrines. The shoulders will come next, slow-cooked and used for ragu. The whole of the creature will be gradually consumed over the next month, nose to tail. Everything but the squeal, as they say.
We’re outside Higher Ground, the restaurant founded by friends Joe Otway, Daniel Craig Martin and Richard Cossins, who also happen to run Cinderwood. They also run Flawd, the natural wine bar on Islington Marina and now, Bar Shrimp, right next door to Higher Ground.
This will be a different proposition altogether. As the name implies, it’s heavy on the seafood, with British, Irish and Scottish oysters always on the menu, as well as shellfish from Fife. They’ll come alongside casually assembled (but certainly not uncomplex) dishes like Exmoor caviar served with sour cream and their own homemade crisps, devilled eggs with brown crab, and Sussex smokie fritters, of which it would be easy to eat more than a dozen in a sitting. Even the french fries come with luxurious cod’s roe mayonnaise. For the marine-averse, fear not, there’s a burger too.
As a compliment to their love of music – they once turned Higher Ground into a makeshift nightclub with party crew Rainy Heart – they’ve enlisted Ryan Shaw and his boutique Stockport sound company Mastersounds to install a bespoke system, on a recommendation by their friend, É Soul Cultura and Electric Chair’s Luke Una.
So when the kitchen closes, the music will take over, with a rotating roster of the city’s best DJs dropping by, all programmed by Homoelectric regular Lukas. It will sound every bit as good as it tastes.
“It’s a real combination of each of our passions,” says Richard, the team’s front-of-house guru, who has worked for everyone from Marcus Wareing to Simon Rogan. “My passion for music, Daniel’s passion for cocktails, Joe’s passion for seafood.
“Every time we go away travelling, we always come back and have these conversations about great bars with great sound. It’s not a sound bar, it’s not a listening bar, it’s not an audiophile bar, it’s simply a bar with good sound.”
The three met while all working at the famed, two Michelin star Blue Hill at Stone Barns in the Hudson Valley, about an hour’s drive north of Manhattan, under the inspirational stewardship of chef proprietor Dan Barber. Richard and Joe met for the first time on the very same day, as they were signing their contracts in the office. They’ve spent an inordinate amount of time together since.
Barber built the pioneering ‘farm-to-table’ restaurant on old, dilapidated farmland owned by the Rockefeller family (yes, that Rockefeller family), and remains their culinary north star. The place is a pretty big deal. What they learned there, they now do here – growing their own produce, working with local producers, hyper sustainability.
It’s why, in the harsh winter of the first lockdown, they found themselves constructing huge polytunnels in a featureless field, the genesis of what would become Cinderwood.
Restaurants across the city now proudly emblazon ‘Cinderwood’ on their menus, from Winsome to Skof to Honest Crust (‘[Honest Crust owner] Rich Carver is a fucking hero, by the way, he just gets it’). Joe laughs that he’s sat in restaurants where they’ve claimed to be using Cinderwood produce, though he knows for a fact they are not. It’s sort of flattering. Sort of.
Interestingly, Higher Ground and Flawd are two of Cinderwood’s biggest clients. They don’t just plunder what they want and take it for free. They pay the same as everyone else, a principle they are unwaveringly committed to. It’s about changing the conversation around how restaurants buy their produce rather than a revenue stream.
“We buy as much as we can,” Joe says on the drive to Nantwich. “It’s not what anyone expects. We pay top dollar too. I’m the biggest customer! We drive the prices and we’re trying to make it a viable economy. If I take anything today, it’ll be on my invoice next week.”
It’s almost ridiculously hard work. As a market gardener, half the year, you make nothing, and the other half is a feverish scramble to make the most of what’s coming out of the ground, both culinarily and commercially. They’re now on their fifth growing season, often learning the hard way. Everything is organically grown, so there’s no pesticide use whatsoever, which of course means that they’re at the mercy of blights and other similar horticultural catastrophes.
But the toil, the constant, sometimes punishing learning, the proximity to the produce you cook with; it’s invaluable. For them, there is no other way. Plus the stuff that’s been produced this year has been truly exceptional, thanks in large part to the garden’s founding head gardener Michael Fitzsimmons and current head Ollie Mather. The Sungold and the remarkable Atomic Grape tomatoes – which are green and purple like mini aubergines – would be the envy of anything grown in volcanic Tuscan soil.
A glut of crown prince and almost obscene-looking tromboncino squash were picked last week, and after a little time curing, they arrive on the plate at the restaurant. It’s how things should work, and they’re creating the micro-economy to make it happen.
“Half my career was; food comes in from the suppliers, you prep it, you cook it, you don’t think about where it comes from,” Joe says. “It was only when I started working for Dan Barber that I realised there was another way.” He adds that Barber is ‘one of the greatest chefs the world will ever see’. It was after reading his influential book The Third Plate, while working at a fish restaurant in his hometown of Brighton, that he decided to speculatively write to him and ask for a job.
“Once you’ve gone down the road of this philosophy, it’s in there. You can’t go back.” Maintaining the connection, Cinderwood also takes part in Blue Hill’s seed breeding programme, Row 7, which experiments with new vegetable strains, blending ‘old-world breeding with modern technology’, creating new hybrids with better, more complex flavours.
Joe, Daniel and Richard became great friends at Blue Hill, travelling the US together in their time off. Richard eventually became Blue Hill’s general manager, and when the time came to leave for the next adventure, Joe and Daniel ended up in Copenhagen together, Daniel working front-of-house at the now iconic Noma, with three-star chef Rene Redzepi, and Joe at the Michelin-starred Relae.
But the plan was always to do something together. “It was getting to the point where it was now or never,” says Oregon-born Daniel, whose vowels have been pleasingly flattened by the past few years in the north.
He was on the cusp of being made general manager at Noma, at the time roundly thought of as the best restaurant in the world, so for him the stakes couldn’t have been much higher. (He describes Redzepi, and indeed Barber, as ‘working on a different frequency’. As for Noma, he ‘loved it’. “We thrive off that energy, that intense pressure to make sure everything is as perfect as possible,” he says.)
They got extremely close to signing premises in Brooklyn, but the deal ultimately fell through. All kinds of alternative possibilities were floated, though all seemed to come with some sticking point or other. When Manchester was mentioned, all three fell silent. Richard knew the city from its nightlife (‘he’d always had a great time here’, says Joe), and with that the pieces fell into place.
Joe got a job heading the kitchen at Where The Light Gets In in Stockport, and the three began planning their own project. Its first iteration was at the bungalow at Kampus. In a mean twist of fate, it lasted just a few services before lockdown hit in 2020.
But things happen for a reason. They cracked on with turning the soil and creating the infrastructure at Cinderwood, and set their sights on something else. They’d already seen – and ruled out – a restaurant location on Islington Marina in Ancoats. But revisiting it through the lens of a potential wine bar project, they took it on.
Calling it Flawd, it was a pretty much an instant hit when it opened in 2022, with Daniel curating the wine, as well as organising visits and collaborations with some of Europe’s most innovative winemakers, while Joe somehow began producing stunning dishes without a proper kitchen, using just a sandwich press and a pressure cooker. It was the first place to showcase the produce from Cinderwood, often just hours out of the ground before it was on the plate.
With their eye on the restaurant they’d always wanted, it was through the landowners of Cinderwood – Jane and Chris Oglesby, the latter the CEO of developers Bruntwood – that they found the home for Higher Ground, on the edge of Chinatown.
Opening in 2023, after a few months it earned an entry in the UK’s Michelin Guide, and in January 2024, a Bib Gourmand. Dishes like their humble cheddar tarts, salads of long yellow beans and creme fraiche, pork belly from Jane’s acorn-fed pigs, scorched on the charcoal grill, and shoulder braised in milk (‘maiale al latte’), live long in the memory.
But never ones to have too much on their plates at one time, the idea for Bar Shrimp had been eating away at all three of them for a while, and when the unit next door to Higher Ground became vacant, it was time to scratch the itch.
A mix of chrome, Lynchian red velvet curtains to keep out prying eyes and some nice, mismatched mid-century furnishings for comfort, it will be a tad more casual than Higher Ground. A place to drop in, get a bone-dry martini made with kelp-infused Isle of Harris gin (Joe reckons there’s some kind of ‘chemical reaction’ that goes on when it’s coupled with an oyster), eat some seafood, and listen to some amazing music into the night.
It feels like something Manchester could have been missing without realising it. So, without further ado, here it is.
Bar Shrimp is open for bookings from 22 October.
Read more:
Seven independent kitchens and a music hall is opening beneath the tracks of Salford Central station
Manchester is getting a luxury indoor golf club with bar, kitchen and retail under one roof
From Nobu to ‘Nikkei’ – the Chotto Matte founder on opening Manchester’s biggest rooftop restaurant
