What Manchester eats that nowhere else does, and where to order it this week

The beef in the corned beef hash at Mr Thomas’s Chop House on Cross Street is cured over ten days, and the hash arrives under a soft-poached egg with the kitchen’s own brown sauce for £21. It is the most Mancunian plate you can order in the city centre this autumn. The rest of the city’s food is the same kind of thing: pub snacks, chop-house mains and a pudding from the school canteen, plus a purple drink from 1908.

The hash and the hotpot

Mr Thomas’s Chop House has been on Cross Street since Thomas and Sarah Studd opened it in 1867, and it is still a family business. Besides the hash, the August menu has Lancashire lamb hotpot (£24.50), steak and kidney pudding (£22) and a cheese and onion pie, the cheapest of the three at £15. Two Timothy Taylor casks are always on at the bar.

Cross Street, by St Ann’s Square · hash £21 · food until 8.30pm Mon–Thu · book, or walk in for the bar

The egg

In 2010 a web designer called Ben Holden was drinking in The Castle Hotel on Oldham Street with a pickled egg and a bag of crisps when he wrapped the egg in pork and Bury black pudding, coated it in breadcrumbs and fried it. He called it the Manchester egg, and for a while sold them over the bar. The Castle’s 80-capacity music room, opened the same year, still has gigs listed this month. The egg has moved on: Elnecot, the Ancoats bar and kitchen on Blossom Street, lists a Manchester egg with piccalilli at £9 on its evening menu.

Blossom Street, Ancoats · Manchester egg £9 · evenings · book

The tart

Mrs Beeton printed a “Manchester Pudding” in 1861: puff pastry, jam, custard and a dusting of sugar. By the 1970s it had become the Manchester tart of school dinners, on shortcrust, with desiccated coconut and a glacé cherry. Mr Thomas’s pudding list this autumn runs to Bramley apple crumble and sticky figgy pudding instead. The version you can order in the Northern Quarter is a cocktail at The Morris: vodka, Swedish punsch, coconut, raspberry and butter biscuit, £12, with an alcohol-free version on request.

Thomas Street, Northern Quarter · Manchester Tart cocktail £12 · closed Mon · walk-in

The Eccles cake

Eccles is in Salford, about 6 km west of the centre, and James Birch sold the first commercial Eccles cakes there in 1793. In December 2025 Salford Now went looking for one in Eccles town centre and found them only in supermarkets, a pack of the factory-made ones for £2.40. Albert Street Bakery still bakes Eccles cakes in Eccles, by hand and with its own candied peel, but it has no shop: it sells through pre-orders and a café in Monton.

The drink and the beer

John Noel Nichols, a wholesaler of herbs and spices, made a tonic called Vim Tonic in Manchester in 1908; it was Vimto by 1912. Boddingtons was the city’s beer, from the Strangeways Brewery, founded in 1778 and closed in 2005. You can still drink a cask Boddingtons Bitter at The Circus Tavern on Portland Street, one of two cask beers in a pub the size of a front room.

Portland Street · Boddingtons on cask · no food · walk-in

Checked October 2026.