Mark Addy Salford Restaurant-review by John Lanchester

A common complaint about pubs that focus on food is that they aren't sufficiently pub-like. I think it's safe to say that nobody in Salford has ever said that about the Mark Addy. This canalside boozer opened in 1981 on the site of a former ferry landing stage and waiting room. (Just to clear something up straight away, it's named after a Victorian municipal hero, not after the likable tubby one from The Full Monty.) It has a narrow exterior on the waterside, and inside it's long, low, dark and manky – the website says they finished a full renovation in 2009, which makes you wonder what it must have been like before. Not that the Mark Addy has an air of menace or anything – it just hasn't been primped and floofed, and there is still a serious clientele of drinkers. On our way one Saturday evening, we passed two blokes heading for the stairs in that particular state of total, glassy-faced, marinated pissedness you get only from drinking steadily all afternoon. But there was also an oldster looking at flights on a laptop and a hen party using champagne to rinse down a meal before going on the lash. A nice urban mix.

The Mark Addy
Stanley Street, Salford
M3 5EJ
0161-832 4080


Open all week, lunch Mon-Fri, noon-3pm, ­dinner 5-9m, Sat noon-10pm, Sun noon-6pm. Meal with drinks and service, from £50 for two.

For the food, you go up the far end, past the bar area. A laminated plastic menu arrives and you're transported to the world of Robert Owen Brown, "executive chef" of the Mark Addy and a fully-signed-up member of the retro English culinary revival. The menu doesn't say "come and have a go if you think you're hard enough", because it doesn't need to – the list of bar snacks does that. Pickled eggs, pork scratchings and Spam fritters. Spam fritters! Now that is hardcore. I was tempted to order them out of nostalgia, until I remembered how nasty they were first time around.

The menu proper is noticeably good value, with starters from under a fiver, mains from under a tenner and a range of sandwiches bigger than the average diner's head. It's an engaging combination: ordinary, pub-like pub with dead serious cooking. It's a particular kind of cooking, but if you like Fergus Henderson's menus, you'll like Owen Brown's: steak and cow heel pie (which sounds like something Desperate Dan might go for), Welsh rarebit, toad in the hole.

Having liked the place and the idea, I found I didn't like the food quite as much as I wanted to. The problem was the execution, which verged on the rough and ready. Devilled kidneys is a nice thing to see on a list of starters, but the outcome was both too chewy and too bloody, and came dumped on a thick slice of white bread – a real flavour-neutraliser. I also liked the thinking behind reinventing prawn cocktail using signal crayfish (an evil American invader), and the bloody mary sauce, as a version on sauce marie rose, was a nice twist, but again it was a bit bland and coarse on the plate, served with brown shrimps and lots of lettuce. Delicacy isn't a virtue in the kitchen, but precision is, and it was sometimes lacking here.

Still, the flavours are present, and in a big way. Hogget is year-old mutton, which in an ideal world has the tenderness of lamb and the stronger taste of older sheep. The roast hogget here was a hefty dish, served with an enormous amount of thyme in the sauce, and glazed root vegetables. There was something sticky and gloopy about the plateful, but it had immense impact. Crown of pigeon again had lots of flavour, but it was outshone by the huge accompanying portion of very high-quality black pudding. I love black pudding, but it's tricky to make it the star of a dish.

Puddings, a strength of the English kitchen, are a strength of the Mark Addy, too. Eccles cake was made with beautifully light flaky pastry and a really kicky sweet filling, set off by cool, acidic Lancashire cheese. I think Fergus Henderson resuscitated this combination, and this take on it was a blinder. Warm treacle tart had the perfect texture, resistant but not over-dense, and the lemon and thyme ice-cream with it was another clever off-sweet juxtaposition. A fine ending to a good pub meal, though you sense Owen Brown is capable of the next level up, if he could be bothered.
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