Independent Polish restaurant Platzki is bringing back its famous vodka and pierogi festival to Manchester this week, and we couldn’t be more excited for some hearty dumpling fare.
Notorious for its top-tier filled pierogi, which are made by wrapping unleavened dough around a savoury or sweet filling and cooking in boiling water, Platzki is already something of a go-to for fine Polish food in Manchester.
But now, traditional European dumpling fans have another reason to get themselves down as the restaurant will be focusing almost entirely on pierogi for two days this week.
Platzki’s famous pierogi. / Image: The Manc Eats
Image: Platzki
Taking place across Wednesday 5 and Thursday 6 October from 3pm until sell-out (or at 9pm, whichever comes first), diners will have the chance to try Platzki’s perfect homemade pierogi in a range of mouth-watering flavours.
There will be plenty of different fillings to try, including some brand new vegetarian pierogi for non-meat eaters.
ADVERTISEMENT
That’s not all, either. There’ll also be a midweek vodka tipple on standby as Platzki shows off its huge range of favourite Polish vodkas.
Think salted caramel vodka, strawberry vodka, golden black cherry vodka, hazelnut vodka and delicious cherry-chocolate vodka, all of which are (as we know too well from experience) dangerously drinkable.
ADVERTISEMENT
Each day, the team will be making hundreds of pierogi for local dumpling lovers to sample.
Karkówka roasted pork neck with spinach egg noodles. / Image: The Manc Eats
Karkówka roasted pork neck with spinach egg noodles. / Image: The Manc Eats
Elsewhere, they will also be serving up some of their favourite dishes from the menu including a hearty sausage stew with freshly-baked bread, and melt-in-the-mouth karkówka roasted pork neck with spinach egg noodles.
A fixture in the city since 2018, Platzki has built up a reputation for serving an interesting list of Polish vodka and wine alongside traditional dishes like dumplings, pork neck and meatballs.
It has a gorgeous plant-filled restaurant and a bright terrace that backs onto the Great Northern Warehouse, giving diners views over the Great Northern Square as they dig into some of the best Polish food in the city.
To find out more about this week’s dumpling festival, follow Platzki on Instagram here.
Feature image – The Manc Eats
Eats
New Manchester restaurant receives rave review as another is slammed as ‘torture’
Pip, a new restaurant in Manchester, has received a rave national review this week – a review which slammed another restaurant in the same feature.
Food critic William Sitwell wrote in his review in The Telegraph that Pip is charming, refined, and fabulous.
“Bravo, Pip. Pip pip!” he wrote in the glowing write-up on the new restaurant, which stands at the foot of the new Treehouse Hotel and has the acclaimed Mary-Ellen McTague at its helm.
Sitwell’s Telegraph review particularly raved about dishes including Lancashire hot pot (‘fabulously good’), a wild garlic soup (‘a gorgeous thing’), and an apple trifle (‘a gift from heaven’).
But while it was all good for Pip, there were significantly less positive adjectives heaped on another restaurant in Manchester.
In fact, he said that Pip is ‘a great-value tonic’ for the ‘brash (and pricey) torture’ across town.
That restaurant was KAJI, formerly known as MUSU, which he said was ‘all tummies, bald heads, tattoos and heat’.
Sitwell said that while the service and sashimi are good at KAJI, the ‘place is afflicted by some overbearing cooking that cheapens the noble name of Japanese cuisine’.
He wrote: “Lamb chops fail the tender test and are properly wrecked sitting on a vulgar pond of sticky “tomato ponzu”. No beast should die to have that stuff squirted anywhere near it.
“And Kaji is a Japanese gaff without sake. Which is like opening a British pub in Tokyo and forgetting to put an ale on tap.”
Sharing the review, Pip wrote: “Thankyou @telegraph and @williamsitwell for the fantastic feature. We’re so proud of our team here.”
Ice cream doesn’t come much fresher than those served at Milk Maids – in fact, you’ll be standing right on the family farm where the cows that produce the milk live, as you tuck into your scoop.
This unassuming dairy farm in Bolton has been in operation for decades, and in the same family for generations.
But it’s when sisters Fiona and Rebecca saw the full potential of all that award-winning milk being produced on their farm that Milk Maids was born.
This ice cream parlour on Dearden’s Farm in Over Hulton is now one of the hottest spots in Greater Manchester, especially when the weather is similarly hot.
Every month they release a whole batch of flavours, all made fresh daily (you can literally see Fiona legging it across the yard with buckets of milk to make fresh batches), with May specials including white chocolate and sea salt caramel, raspberry cookie, and passionfruit pavlova.
Milk Maids, Bolton – The family-run ice cream parlour on an award-winning farm
Cones can be filled with molten chocolate or pistachio creme before your ice cream is scooped and pressed into the cone.
Or you can have your chosen flavour whizzed up into a milkshake, served in a milk bun, or presented in an insulated take-home box for later.
We could wax lyrical about how good this ice cream is, but the queues really do speak for themselves, and you should go and get in it right now.
Georgina Pellant -
3rd October 2022 
