Manchester’s £1 taco restaurant El Capo appears to have quietly shut its doors after nearly a decade in the city centre.
The Mexican-inspired taco and tequila bar and restaurant has been a fixture on Tariff Street since first opening its doors in 2014, but now it looks like its years of Northern Quarter service may have come to an end – for now, at least.
A closure notice has been posted on its website homepage and its Instagram appears to have been deactivated, despite the notice advising customers to visit the page to ‘keep up to date’.
The business’s Facebook page, meanwhile, has not been updated for over a month with the last update – advertising £1 tacos and £6 margaritas – shared on 12 April.
El Capo’s website has also seen its booking page removed, with a notice on its homepage that reads: “CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.
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“Unfortunately, due to electrical issues encountered we have made the decision to close for the forseeable.
“In the meantime, keep up to date on our Instagram and we will see you soon. EL CAPO.”
The bar and restaurant’s Google Business page has also been updated to say that it is ‘temporarily closed.’
In recent months, El Capo has received positive press coverage for its brilliant £1 taco Tuesday deal – with many local media outlets praising it as one of the city’s best dining deals.
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The kitchen also recently released a chippy tea burrito that had foodies in Manchester talking, but sadly – despite its popularity – it now appears that the venue has shut its doors.
First opened in 2014, the South American street food-themed restaurant first appeared as a bar before launching its hotly-anticipated basement eatery later that same year.
In response to a request for comment, El Capo confirmed to The Manc that the site’s closure was temporary whilst the business worked on a refurbishment of its kitchen and basement and that it was planning to open in the winter of 2023.
A spokesperson said: “We plan to reopen by winter 2023, with a new refurbed basement and large kitchen extension, so that we can successfully reopen our doors and welcome back our regular customers to a new and improved El Capo.”
Featured image – Google Business
Eats
The Manchester restaurant serving ‘Tipsy Tapas’ with bottomless sangria
Daisy Jackson
Did you know there’s a restaurant in Manchester that does a bottomless ‘Tipsy Tapas’ menu every week?
That means you can pair your tapas dishes with endless helpings of sangria, alongside a number of other boozy delights.
The Tipsy Tapas menu at Canto, the modern Mediterranean sister site to award-winning El Gato Negro, includes three tapas dishes and unlimited mix-and-match drinks.
For your 90 minute booking in the beautiful Ancoats restaurant, you can tuck into bottomless pitchers of sangria, Aperol spritz, limoncello spritz, or peach bellini.
And if cocktails aren’t your thing, the Tipsy Tapas deal also includes Victoria Malaga lager, house wine, and fizz.
For £40 per person, you also get three delicious tapas dishes each, from their traditional Portuguese petiscos to meat to fish.
You’ll find tapas favourites like padron peppers, patatas bravas, and fried calamari with lemon aioli, plus a whole host of other small places from across the Mediterranean.
You can get bottomless sangria with the Canto Tipsy Tapas menuCanto has a menu of Mediterranean small platesSalt cod croquettes on the Tipsy Tapas menuCredit: The Manc Group
Other menu highlights include spiced lamb Merguez meatballs, chargrilled Peri Peri chicken, and salt cod fritters.
And for a more substantial bite, there are even pregos included in the deal – beef steak sandwiches in rustic bread with caramelised onion and rocket.
Vegetarians aren’t hard-done-by either with veggie dishes including classic Catalan bread with fresh tomato; caramelised cauliflower, with lentil stew and Italian caponata; hispi cabbage with parsnip puree and blue cheese vinaigrette; and butternut squash with curried cavolo nero.
The Tipsy Tapas menu gives you the option to have two savoury plates and a dessert too, with sweet dishes like almond tart with marscapone mousse, pastel de nata, tiramisu, and vegan chocolate tart with miso and caramel ice cream.
Costing £40 per person, the Canto Tipsy Tapas deal runs every Friday and Saturday between 12pm and 4pm.
Can we please make 2025 the year of the ‘wide burger’?
Danny Jones
In 2025, I have just a few resolutions/goals that I’m determined to achieve this year: one is to lose a bit of weight, another is to improve my marathon PB and arguably the most important one is to champion the trend of the ‘wide burger’.
Yes, I’m fully aware that the burger thing doesn’t quite chime with the first two but I intend to reward myself with said burger after I hopefully smash the other ones.
First off, I want to begin this by making it clear that I am in no way calling for the end of the trusty dirty burger convention that has spanned more than a decade now (Manc pioneers like Almost Famous remain one of my go-to spots to this day), but I am advocating for some innovation.
I want this year to be the year of the wide burger, someone else can come up with a better name for it if anything comes to mind, I’m just a hungry ideas man.
If it isn’t already plainly obvious as to what I’m talking about, let me explain.
The culinary world often feels like it can get stuck in these cycles, be it people slapping pulled pork on things, salted caramel-flavoured everything or the current hot honey craze; they’re exciting for a while but, eventually, things move on as they should to keep our interests piqued and mouths salivating.
On the other hand, there are some food and drink staples that are so tried and tested that they rarely evolve that much, mainly because people will always eat them no matter what.
Case and point, burgers.
That being said, although there’s something undeniably enticing about a towering, food-porny mess of a burger dripping with cheese and grease, the advent has become so overly saturated in modern cuisine.
Besides the ‘smashed’ style enjoying its time in the spotlight – which we’re also really enjoying, by the way, this isn’t a diss on any perfectly cooked patty – I don’t think there’s been much evolution for a while and it’s almost starting to feel like we’ve seen most takes on burger a dozen times before.
Again, there’s no doubt that all of these bad boys are delicious – we’ve eaten them all, so we can definitely vouch for that – but we can’t pretend we haven’t seen similar creations not only in Greater Manchester but at countless places up and down the country.
Moreover, at what juncture are we feasibly going to stop and say, ‘Sorry, but this mountain of bread and meat is officially too tall and tackling it is more a challenge than it is the simple act of enjoyment that we hope for out of a burger’?…
We all know how appetising these things look at first glance in a picture and they certainly stand out from the other options on any given menu, but there has to come a point where a burger is just too unwieldy to even attempt eating and simply whacking even crazier, unexpected toppings won’t cut it.
That’s why I’m posing a rather straightforward change of tact or direction, rather: don’t go up, go out; don’t make it taller, just make it wider.
It’s also worth noting that this is by no means a totally original thought, but it is one I’m fully behind.
The proof is right there on the internet for everyone to see: the people have been asking the same question, ‘Why tall and not wide?’ for ages now and I think it’s time we put the prospect to the test.
The Two Markets Girls channel even built what they called ‘the BEST wide burger ever‘ to test their theory.
Big dirty burgers stacked high with an immense surplus of extras are great on paper, especially when one of those overly indulgent days comes along and you want to pig out, but are they the most practical? I would suggest perhaps not.
I don’t want to have to disassemble a burger’s excessive layers or unhinge my jaw like a python to try and get my chops around my tea, I just want to take a big bite of a big burger with lots going and, as far as I can tell, there’s no reason this couldn’t happen with a burger that has greater width instead.
They don’t need elevation, they need surface area – as proven by the resurgence of delightfully crispy smash burgers – and it could open up a whole new avenue for those naughty cheat meals.
You could argue wide burgers or at least ‘wide-leaning’ offerings already exist, with one example being the viral and cult favourite Fergburger, made popular over in Queenstown, New Zealand, which tends towards a larger circumference rather than height.
Better yet, if you’ve ever been to a greasy spoon, old school caff or just a local butty shop and ordered a large barm or seen someone ask for a ‘bin lid’ (if you know, you know), then finding bread/buns/baps/whatever you want to call them big enough doesn’t even factor into the equation.
Another bonus upside is that this will in theory make big stacked burgers less of a tired novelty but rather a push-the-boat-out treat and once again see them restored as a worthwhile variation on one of the most popular foodstuffs on Earth.
Manchester has the chance to be the pioneering city at the forefront of a new craze, which is an opportunity that is really rare in gastronomy these days.
So how about it? How about we make 2025 the year we give wide burgers a go? And if I’m wrong then I’ll happily slink back into my chair and keep my mouth shut – most likely because there’s a burger in it.
Georgina Pellant -
18th May 2023 
