Wood, Manchester: ‘There’s a lot to love’ – restaurant review | Grace Dent

MasterChef winner Simon Wood’s new restaurant serves up dishes that are devoured in moments and talked about fondly for weeks

During my 14 hours in Manchester, for seven of which I was asleep, four people warned me off walking the 0.9 miles between my hotel and Piccadilly station. It seems the spice-smokers of Piccadilly Gardens have imbued the locals with a weary, unvarnished tilt on tourist info. Manchester’s social problems don’t affect my tastebuds in the slightest, or my yearning for the culinary scene to flourish in my beloved north-west, so I’d booked to eat at Wood, the new baby of 2015 MasterChef winner Simon Wood. Still, how do exciting, scene-building projects such as Wood or Aiden Byrne’s forthcoming 20 Stories, or indeed all Manchester’s great newcomers, prosper in this curious landscape? Do all out-of-towners flocking to the wonderful Adam Reid at The French get this same frightening pep talk?

I reassured said Mancs that there’s a certain Shaun of the Dead quality outside a lot of fancy restaurants down in London, too. And that I’d made a Radio 4 documentary on the zombification of synthetic cannabis users in Strangeways, and felt confident that, even in mid-heels, I could outrun one. But then I gave up and took a minicab.