Two very special Manchester banquets will take place next month at Manchester’s Italian food festival Festa Italiana.
Running from 27-29 August, the free-to-attend festival will bring a host of street food traders and fine Italian produce, as well as a brand new movie screen showing Italian film classics to Manchester’s Cathedral Gardens.
It’s now been revealed the festival will also welcome some of the UK’s top Italian TV chefs to host two ultra-indulgent, ticketed dining events designed to showcase the very best of Italian cooking.
This year’s Festa will incorporate a brand new movie screen showing Italian film classics / Image: Festa Italiana
Taking place on 28 and 29 August, three top Italian TV chefs will be coming down across two evenings to prepare and serve three courses of authentic Italian cuisine from the Festa’s open dining space.
The first banquet, which kicks off at 7.30pm on the Saturday, will be hosted by Gennaro Contaldo (of Saturday Kitchen, Two Greedy Italians, Jamie and Jimmy’s Friday Night Feast fame) and Giancarlo Caldesi (Return to Tuscany, Saturday Kitchen, Sunday Brunch).
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These legendary Italian chefs and authors will join Salvi’s owner and festival founder Maurizio Cecco in the kitchen for an evening of live cooking and feasting, talking their guests through the evening’s menu and answering questions as they go.
Gennaro Contaldo, of Saturday Kitchen, Two Greedy Italians, Jamie and Jimmy’s Friday Night Feast fame, will be cooking at one of the dinners alongside Giancarlo Caldesi / Image: Festa Italiana
On the following evening (Sunday 29 August) Maurizio will be joined by another Italian foodie icon – San Carlo’s executive chef Aldo Zilli.
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An award-winning restaurateur in his own right, Zilli has appeared on numerous UK TV shows such as The One Show, This Morning and Celebrity Masterchef – not to mention having created some absolute star dishes for glitzy Italian restaurant favourite San Carlo in recent years.
The view from the banqueting area at the last Festa Italiana / Image: Festa Italiana
On both nights the renowned chefs will prepare and serve three courses of authentic Italian cuisine for their guests from inside the Festa’s open dining space.
Menus are being kept strictly under wraps for now, but we are expecting big things from these top-class foodies.
Tickets are on sale now for £65 which includes a welcome drink on arrival. We don’t expect they’ll be around for long, given the star-studded line-up that Festa has pulled in this year.
If you want to get your hands on one, you can do so here.
Food & Drink
A pub in Stockport has launched a full Scotch egg menu
Daisy Jackson
It’s one of the world’s greatest snacks, especially when paired with a decent pint – and now a local pub is doing a whole Scotch egg menu.
The Davenport Arms over in Stockport is running a ‘Scotch Egg Week’, with a whole host of different Scotch eggs.
There’s even a dessert one, made with a Creme Egg instead of a real one.
The historic pub, which is known locally as The Thief’s Neck (and displays both names on its signs), is filled with cosy corners and snug rooms.
It’s an independently-run pub that operates under the Robinson’s Brewery family, with beers brewed just down the road in Stockport.
And now the local boozer is doing a full menu of homemade Scotch eggs, for one week only, each served with the perfect condiment.
There’ll be ‘The Classic’, where pork meat is wrapped around a perfect jammy-yolked egg, served with house piccalilli.
The Manchester EggA classic Scotch eggThe Davenport Arms, known locally as The Thief’s NeckInside the pub
Or you can get the much-loved Manchester egg, which features black pudding and a pickled Scotch egg, served with mustard mayo on the side.
Fish fans can grab a smoked haddock Scotch egg served with a curried mayo.
And for vegetarians, there’s one made with cheese and onion instead of meat, served with a house tomato relish.
There’s even a sweet one – a Creme Egg encased in brownie mix, and then wrapped in a Biscoff crumb, served with ice cream.
And if you really can’t decide, The Davenport Arms will do you a full platter of all of the above, for £29.95.
The Scotch Egg menu is available from Monday 30 March until Saturday 4 April and you can see more HERE.
One of Manchester’s grandest restaurants has finally reopened TWO YEARS after fire
Daisy Jackson
One of the most historic restaurants in Manchester has reopened at last, two years after a fire forced its closure.
Mount Street Dining Room & Bar – which many of us may remember as Mr Cooper’s – stands within the Grade II-listed Midland Hotel.
The grand dining room dates all the way back to 1903, when it opened with the hotel as the Grill Room.
The restaurant was at the epicentre of the Industrial Revolution and was frequented by railway travellers, perhaps best-known for hosting a lunch between Charles Rolls and Henry Royce in 1904, who went on to form the world-famous Rolls-Royce brand.
The Midland’s restaurants has gone through several changes in the decades since, undergoing a major £14 million refurb in 2020 to relaunch as Mount Street Dining Room & Bar.
Its interiors are inspired by the hotel’s early 1900s art deco and railway heritage, with a menu that focuses on locally-sourced British produce.
But the restaurant has been shut since early 2024, when a fire damaged the entrance and trellising around its main entrance on Mount Street.
The beautiful bar areaA glimpse of the menu at Mount StreetCocktails and British food
The Midland has finally managed to get the restaurant back open again this month, with a new food and cocktail menus, which aims to offer refined but simple British dining.
Expect dishes like pork and black pudding bonbons, white onion soup with crispy potatoes, smoked British salmon with lemon gel and dill mascarpone, and slow cooked beef daube with confit garlic mash.
Plus desserts such as rice pudding with Anise glazed pearsand Bakewell pudding with cherry syrup.
It’s been a long time since we’ve seen inside this beautiful, storied dining room – and it looks just as beautiful as we remember.
Georgina Pellant -
30th July 2021 
