SLEUTH: Dockyard Bar For Spinningfields | 7 New Restaurants | Trafford Centre Love | Sexy Spuds

SleuthSleuth is a sideways glance at the city every week, it's the truth, but Sleuth's truth. He's several people all at once. We give £25 for every story/rumour and piece of absurdity you find for us to publish. Sleuth sometimes even gets serious. We ask for the money back if any legal action follows. Follow Sleuth on twitter @mcrsleuth

The Dockyard In Spinningfields

So in January the current Manchester Food and Drink Festival pub of the year, The Dockyard at MediaCityUK (main image above), will like an amoeba resort to binary fusion, split itself, get on a barge and float down to Spinningfields where it will raise the old, cold, dead corpse of Cafe Rouge (Cafe Rouge, by the way, is French for pastiche). Sleuth is pleased. The Dockyard at MediaCityUK has revitalised a get-in get-out Quays development by giving Beeb people a place to linger and chat and flirt before scooting home. It will be interesting to see if The Dockyard can prove as attractive in the city centre. Sleuth reckons it'll be just fine and Spinningfields will be all the better for it.

Dockyard, MediaCityUk

Cafe Rouge to turn Dockyard

Dockyards Spinningfields sketch

Room And Snails And Just The Fact Of Grandeur

Sleuth loves snails. To eat. Slugs he can't stand, slimy shell-less idiots, but escargots are little loves. So Sleuth is prepared to fall in love with Room Restaurant all over again because it's doing snails, oh, and not least because its 1871 Gothic dining room is simply one of the best historic dining spaces in the North West. It's grand. Makes you feel heroic. As does the cooking of ex-Grosvenor Hotel, Chester, chef, and new Room chef, John Retallik. The 'corned oxtail, snails, parsley and liquid ravioli' sounds just grand, as was this 'scallops, pigs trotter, white pudding and Earl Grey infused raisons'. 

Scallops. pigs trotters and the rest

Grand Room

Corn Exchange - Give 'Em A Chance Eh?

Since the IRA bomb gave it a good hiding in 1996, the Corn Exchange has had a sorry old time. Reopened as 'The Triangle' shopping centre in 2000, the building had a dismal stint in retail. So Sleuth was pleased this week to join a colleague for a walk-around the developing Corn Exchange, this building has deserved more for two decades and a £30m 'all food' renovation from owners Aviva should have it looking spick and span again. There's currently up to 100 workers on site beavering away to get the place ready for a June 2015 opening.

During the tour developers revealed the twelve restaurants that have already snapped up two to three storey units in the all new Corn Exchange, these included seven new names for Manchester (revealed here). Ok, ok a good number are chain'ish and some not terribly exciting, but Sleuth is going to reserve all judgement until summer 2015 and thinks you should too. Give 'em a chance. Chain or not, Sleuth has heard good things about London-operators Wahaca and Pho, and is looking forward to seeing Individual Restaurants (Piccolino, RBG, Zinc) release a brand new concept on Manchester.

Developing Corn Exchange

Trafford Centre Makes The Financial Times

Sleuth loves Manchester to be part of the urban global network. So he was delighted that in last weekend's Financial Times, correspondents round the world were asked which building they would demolish. Entries dived in from Berlin, Beijing, Cairo, Mumbai, London, Paris.

And Manchester.

Kate Allen suggested the Trafford Centre was 'a testament to triviality both in form and function. Its design is a rococo pastiche, a multi-coloured marble and glass temple to consumerism. Built on the site of that industrial marvel, the Manchester Ship Canal, the centre symbolises Britain's shift from a global industrial leader to a country with diminishing influence and an economy dependent on high levels of personal debt and frivolous spending. I would demolish it and build something more socially useful in its place - a factory, perhaps.'

Sleuth loves the Trafford Centre. He reckons there has be a place for garden centre sculpture to end its days

The taste exercised by the Trafford Centre, as evidenced by this huge light fitting, is beyond reproach

MCR's Most Tenous Cocktail

Sleuth's colleague, Neil Sowerby, taking a break from intense research into wine and beer, checked out the new winter cocktail list at Cloud 23. The Hilton’s panoramic eyrie has long designed cocktails on a Manchester theme, but it was still a surprise they’ve come up with a belated alcoholic tribute to Becks, the football icon not the lager. The '7’s Club' cocktail nods to the significance of the No7 shirt worn by Manchester United heroes. So for David Beckham we get a mix of Haig Club whisky (he advertises it), Dubonnet (remember the brief shopping trip at Paris St Germain?), Rosemary and Demerara Syrup (Milan?) and walnut syrup (Los Angeles).

Neil thought all this a mite tenuous but was won over by the presentation – each cocktail comes on a small astroturf pitch, about the size of Tottenham Hotspur’s. Oh yes, and the ice cubes are moulded to resemble footballs.

7's Club, Cloud 23

World's Tallest Cocktail

More spectacular still is the 'Stratospheric', a self-referential homage to the Beetham Tower. It’s probably the tallest cocktail in Britain (the price is pretty steep too at £23 a go). Sowerby liked the citric rush of Citroc Red Berry, Tanqueray 10 gin, hibiscus, raspberry, passion fruit and champagne in a tiny silver goblet at the top of a 3ft plus glass pumping out dry ice. Barmen restrained him from using it as a lightsaber.

The Stratospheric

Movement On Stubbs Mill

Developers Urban Splash have finally unveiled plans for the derelict Stubbs Mill in Ancoats by the Ancoats Canal, a site they acquired in 2003. Stubbs will be transformed into 30,000 sq ft of industrial office and workspace with a 'raw feel'. Though, looking at this marketing image, Sleuth reckons 'raw' could at least include a desk. Suppose wi-fi is out of the question?

Stubbs Mill

Sleuth's Best MCR Building Recreated In LEGO Of The Week

To commemorate Remembrance Sunday model builders at the LEGOLAND Discovery Centre in Manchester have built a new model of the Imperial War Museum North. Following a public vote in 2013, LEGO fans in Manchester voted the iconic finned building at Salford Quays their favourite modern building in the city. Sleuth reckons they must have missed the new Premier Inn on New Quay Street...

IWM North and a little LEGO version

LEGO IWM North

Those Sleuth Manchester Awards For Senseless Red Cards In Full

Chris Smalling (special commendation for not remembering he'd been booked a couple of minutes earlier and his team needed to win).

Fernandinho (another special commendation for forgetting his team needed to win and getting sent off after being booked a few minutes earlier).

Yaya Toure (extra special commendation for forgetting that his team needed to win, they were losing and down to ten men and playing nine against eleven wasn't going to help).

Red-faced Manchester based players

Sexy Potatoes

Sleuth has always found the Germans to be a funny lot: Currywurst, merciless-punctuality and unreasonably long words, Geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung for example - which basically just means speed limit. But even this one is weird for them, a 2015 'hot potato' calendar by the Bavarian Farmers Association which includes a number of nudey women writhing around on that most dumpy of veg, the potato. You wouldn't catch Aunt Bessie doing that...

Oooooo German potatoes