The Spärrows, Unit 3, Mirabel Street, Manchester M3 1PJ (07711 300 116). Most dishes £5.50-£8; dessert £3; and wines from £22
If you were to make a simple dough with flour, eggs and a little salt and then scrape it into roughly shaped twigs, straight from a wooden board into a pan of boiling water, perhaps while singing folk songs to yourself about lascivious goat herds and lusty maidens, you would soon see them rise to the surface. At which point you might agree that they looked just like tiny sparrows in flight, bobbing there in the water’s rumble and turn. Or, as they would call them in the Swabian dialect of High German, they would be spätzle, those endlessly comforting rugged noodles found across Bavaria, Austria, the South Tyrol and a few points further east.
You would also have an explanation for the name of the Spärrows, a Lilliputian venture tucked away down a lane near Manchester’s Victoria station. While it is named after the translation of the word spätzle, its interests lie with the wider family of dough-based products: with ribbons of pasta and dumplings many and various. It is one long middle finger thrust towards the entire keto diet lobby. If you don’t do carbs, do not come here. If you think gluten is the enemy, do not come here. If you disapprove of cheese, do not come here. If you are joyless and miserable, with lips that are liable to fall into a fleshy knot resembling a puckered arse, definitely do not come here. The rest of you, get in.
Is it the kind of food you would want to eat every day? No, unless every day your main meal is followed by a long lie down. But sometimes in a complex and brutal world, when we are assailed by idiots and ideologues and stupidities of every stripe, this is the food we need to make everything right again.
The Spärrows occupies a converted railway arch opposite the site of Umezushi, the small Japanese restaurant I enjoyed very much back in 2016. They took over this arch to create a prep and development kitchen and perhaps a deli. One of their sake suppliers, the Polish-born Kasia Hitchcock, convinced them the front space would be much better used as a carb-fest of a restaurant with her chef partner Franco Concli in the kitchen, investigating his Tyrolean heritage. There is space here for a dozen diners, if you don’t mind getting cosy. But then this restaurant is all about getting cosy.
If you come here for lunch, dispense with breakfast. The menu starts with a list of sauces to go with their spätzle and gnocchi, though if you choose anything other than the braised onion and cheese to go with the spätzle, Hitchcock will politely suggest you are out of your tiny mind. We do indeed have the spätzle with a mess of long-braised onions, cooked down to that point where they are trying to decide whether their future lies in being a purée, under an armed assault from gruyère and emmental. The noodles look pleasingly like white worms, in their thick glossy overcoat. For £6 you get a generous plateful. I challenge you not to finish every last strand. Any leftover sauce can be mopped up with pieces of their airy-crumbed focaccia, just freed from the oven.
As well as ravioli, the fillings for which change weekly, there are both Russian and Polish dumplings. The latter, the pierogi, are sizable items, heartily stuffed with minced wild mushrooms and sauerkraut. I am even more taken by the pelmeni: small, dense dumplings filled with minced veal, and then covered with breadcrumbs fried in garlic butter. Here, there is a little international cooperation. As they’re working alongside colleagues from the Japanese restaurant across the road, the breadcrumbs are panko and all the better for it. I begin to understand why large Polish men can be moved to tears by a plate of dinner. I also understand why I spend all that bloody time in the gym, treating the stair machine as my confessional. The Spärrows is where I want to eat; the gym is where I repent.
The most expensive dish, at a vast £12.50, is a Tyrolean goulash: hunks of beef braised until they are only maintaining their integrity out of good manners, in a glossy gravy that a city like Manchester properly understands. It’s served with both chopped gherkins and silverskin pickled onions, with a few spätzle for company. We are heading into summer, but it’s deepest winter every day at the Spärrows.
Alongside all this we have their sauerkraut, served at room temperature. Theirs will make you look anew at the very idea of fermented cabbage. It is crisp and bright, and is spun through with pumpkin seeds and ribbons of carrot. Fermenting has become such a cult that it’s easy to forget it need not produce something designed to bash your teeth out. This is soothing and delicate.
At the end there is a list headed “Coffee and Cakes” including the legend “Daz’s Wife’s Brownie”. Daz is their postman. When they opened, he suggested they try some of his other half’s baked goods. It was a good steer: the icing sugar-dusted crisp surface gives way to a soothingly gooey centre. There is a thimble-sized bowl of custard to dip it into. There is also tiramisu and a chocolatey panettone. Alongside this Hitchcock offers us coffee, served black. I don’t for a moment think to object and say I want it with milk. What Hitchcock suggests is what we get. She is quite the conviction host, in the loveliest way. The wine list is very short but supplemented, rather gloriously, by sakes because, well, that’s what Hitchcock does. She may also try to get you on to the brandies and liqueurs. Don’t look at me for advice. I’m not your mum.
This is a labour of the right sort of love, which means it is not perhaps the fastest place to eat. If you go, bring your patience with you, it will be rewarded. Right now, its home on Mirabel Street is a bit of a nightmare to access. Massive building works mean you have to go literally round the houses to find it; brilliantly, their response to this was to introduce a cooked breakfast including pickles, spätzle and smoked sausage. Now every morning they are full of builders, calorie-loading for the day ahead. In truth, you don’t need to be a manual labourer to eat at the Spärrows. But it probably helps.
News bites
The Spärrows is a new arrival; St Moritz is anything but. It opened on Wardour Street in London’s Soho, in 1974, making it one of the capital’s great survivors. Their spätzle are served with bacon, cabbage, cheese and cream. Move on from that to one of their famed fondues, for two, including the classic Neuchâteloise. Slip quietly into a cheese-induced coma (stmoritz-restaurant.co.uk).
Once upon a time, Kettner’s was one of the great democratic restaurant options in London’s Soho. You could eat cheap pizza under shimmering chandeliers. Then it became a more expensive brasserie, before being taken over by the Soho House group. They promised to keep it open to everyone. No longer: the restaurant is now only open to Soho House members and hotel guests.
A couple of weeks ago, I reported that chef Aiden Byrne of Manchester’s Restaurant MCR was to launch the Metropolitan Bar and Grill Rooms in Liverpool. Not any more. Having done their due diligence, they’ve pulled out.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
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