What Makes a Stylish and Upmarket Restaurant in Manchester?
The intricacies of fine dining vary from restaurant to restaurant, but some common characteristics denote an upmarket establishment. When you’ve visited a few fine dining establishments, you start to pick up on these cues to appreciate a luxury dining experience and be able to spot a stylish venue a mile off.
What is the essence of upmarket dining? In this article, we help you look out for the best restaurants in Manchester with a stylish, upmarket edge.
Sophisticated Restaurants in Manchester
Here are our top picks for upmarket and stylish restaurants in Manchester. Perfect if you’re planning a romantic dinner, want to impress visiting friends or family, or just fancy a treat.
Vermilion
If you’re looking for a venue that can take complete care of you and your guests, allowing you to bask in finery and luxury, Vermilion should be your number-one spot. One of the most beautiful restaurants is found in the walls of this totally unique three-storey event and hospitality establishment.
Guests to Vermilion’s restaurant will be presented with an exquisite menu of fusion Asian cuisine crafted by Head Chef Chatchai Jamjang. Enjoy a theatrical cocktail at the hands of Vermilion's experienced mixologists, too.
Contact Vermilion for more details about its luxury restaurant experience.
Mana
Probably one of the most fashionable restaurants in Manchester, Mana is an abstract culinary experience that takes luxury dining to new heights. Mana says “the perpetual cycle of the seasons defines our menu” and brings a highly selective presentation to its guests, celebrating only the finest produce of the British Isles.
The iconic restaurant in Ancoats is headed by Chef-Patron Simon Martin and his team, who constantly develop and test ingredients, cooking techniques, and pairings to create unique experiences.
The French
Searching for amazing and cool restaurants in Manchester with a luxurious edge to them will always show up The French. This restaurant is known as having been awarded one of Britain’s first Michelin stars and has since seen a slew of celebrity visits, including The Beatles. It has also won four AA rosettas.
Adam Reid, the current resident head chef at The French, offers contemporary styling of British favourites and traditional dishes, using produce only from an exclusive list of select suppliers.
Tast Catalana
Once a casual grazing snack, restaurants like Tast Catala have been responsible for raising tapas as a dining experience of luxury. Tast Catala offers “delicious authentic Barcelona-style food” in a three-storey building featuring a fine dining restaurant. Tast Catala uses the finest ingredients and high-quality cooking methods, such as their charcoal oven, to add rich and diverse flavours to their dishes.
Tast Catala combines its exquisite menu with one of the largest collections of Catalonian wines in Manchester.
Hawksmoor
Searching for the best steak in Manchester? It has to be Hawksmoor. This winning steakhouse arrived in Manchester following prominent approval and popularity in London. Find dry-aged steaks, sustainable seafood, and seasonal produce from a hand-picked list of approved high-quality suppliers on this menu which can be paired with top-shelf wine.
Start the best night out in Manchester with an upmarket, lavish meal where you get treated like royalty. If you’re planning a date or a small-scale dinner, we recommend any of the venues in the article. For larger parties, weddings, anniversaries, birthdays, and other luxe celebrations you’ll want a space suited to your guest list. Vermilion houses six event spaces, each one unique in size, atmosphere, and aesthetic. All of them, however, are steeped in opulence worthy of a luxury outing.
Get in touch with Vermilion for a tour or to speak to a dedicated event planner and start working towards your dream event.
What makes a fine dining experience?
Here are some clues that consistently indicate an upmarket restaurant.
The Quality of the Service
Number one on the list because it is perhaps the most obvious way of telling a luxury spot: the level and quality of service guests are afforded in upmarket restaurants far outweighs the service in casual dining settings. Here’s a comparison of these types of services.
Casual Dining | Fine Dining |
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Menu Presentation
A fine dining menu will look a lot different to a casual dining one in many cases. Where many casual dining establishments make it possible to offer a very large menu by using frozen and pre-prepared dishes or components, you won’t find this in an upmarket venue.
A genuinely amazing restaurant will place great importance on the quality of the food and drink it serves, which means less is more. Fresh produce, sourced from select suppliers and prepared in skilled and unusual ways, means that restaurants can’t offer an extensive menu.
This isn’t just because of logistical limitations either. Serving a limited menu allows the restaurant to focus on quality, not quantity, and builds a sense of exclusivity and premium around its offering. This type of menu is often called a prix fixe menu. A ‘fixed price’ menu consisting of several dishes in a set menu style for a fixed price.
The Finer Details
The devil is in the details when it comes to luxury dining. Where some casual restaurants can get away with cutting corners, upmarket restaurants need to convey their quality, style, and taste; and that involves an excellent eye for detail.
Some sensory details that luxury restaurants use to convey their status:
Original art on the walls
High-quality materials
Soft, understated, or usual lighting concepts
Complementary fragrances
Soft, classy music or live music
Smart server uniforms
Doormen
Trendsetters in the Restaurant World
Want to know which are the upmarket dining spots in your area? Check Instagram. Luxury venues are the trendsetters in the hospitality space with aesthetics, dining experiences, and food and drink ideas that can take the world by storm. Just look at Duck and Waffle in London, a restaurant with a dish so popular the whole restaurant is now named after it.
Celebrity-frequented restaurants are guaranteed to be some of the most elite venues available, too, so if you spot a celeb out or notice they’ve been sighted at a restaurant near you, you’ll be sure you’ve found a valuable recommendation.
