Manchester’s massive street food venue Hatch has been given a dose of 80s nostalgia in time for Christmas, with traders launching a whole raft of festive specials.
The huge Oxford Road hub of street food and independent retail has been kitted out with fluorescent lights and disco baubles for the festive season.
Hatch has said it wants to ‘transport customers back to a different era when iPhones and ‘furlough’ were yet to enter our mainstream vocabulary’, which sounds good to us.
As well as retro events, there’ll be festive food and drink from its many traders to dig into too.
Pigs in blanket parmos from Parmogeddon at Hatch. Credit: Jody Hartley
Seasonal specials will include a pigs in blanket parmo from Parmogeddon, topping a classic chicken parmo with pigs in blankets and deep-fried stuffing.
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The duo will also put their spin on the Christmas sandwich, with bacon, melted brie and cranberry sauce loaded onto a parmo and served in a toasted brioche bun.
Vegan street food legends Herbivorous have created plant-based festive alternatives like a sage and onion seitan roast served in brioche bun with braised cabbage and red onion gravy, and a ‘turkey’ and stuffing burger.
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Grandad’s Sausages will be on hand with their take on traditional German bratwursts, while Biscuit and Brew have created festive cookie dough pies with spiced ice creams.
Festive desserts from Biscuit & Brew. Credit: Jody Hartley
Then Sicilian street food experts T’arricrii have created a menu of specialty arancinos with fillings like bolognese sauce and ham and cheese.
There are – naturally – plenty of winter tipples to work your way through at Hatch too, like Kir Royales (made with O’Donnell’s berry moonshine and prosecco), Christmas Manhattans, and Clementine Cosmopolitans.
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Hatch bar Miami Ice have created festive espresso martinis – expect flavours like Black Forest, gingerbread, Terry’s Chocolate Orange and Biscoff.
A Biscoff espresso martini. Credit: Jody Hartley
Hatch has also opened its own hot drinks bar, which will serve mulled wines, hot cider and hot buttered rums, which can be grabbed from the Oxford Road entrance for takeaway too.
Craft beer bar ÖL, one of Hatch’s very first traders, will be supplying a number of Christmas themed beers.
The festive specials are all available now right through until the end of the year.
Events over the festive season will include Christmas Carols, 80s discos, and live music.
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.
Daisy Jackson -
23rd November 2021 
