The best bottomless brunches to try in Manchester city centre this weekend
Bottomless Brunch in lockdown may have been a daily occurrence for those at home but now Manchester's restaurant scene has reopened, customers can finally have their avocado and poached eggs on toast with some never-ending drinks!
What beats a bottomless brunch?All the food. All the drink. Slap bang in the middle of the day.
It’s the perfect way to spend a Saturday or Sunday; bonding with pals over grub and booze before slinking off for an afternoon snooze.
More than a few of us might have created our own boozy brunches at home during lockdown, but now Manchester’s restaurant scene has reopened, customers can finally have their avocado and poached eggs on toast with some never-ending drinks.
Here’s a few of our top picks for bottomless brunches being hosted across the city right now.
Fress
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Fress is an award-winning white-subway tiled restaurant on Oldham Street that’s earned a stonking reputation for whipping up a seriously good bottomless brunch.
They have just reopened and are raring to go with a hearty menu featuring all the favourites – including the classic full English and posh beans on toast.
There’s also a mouth-watering selection of waffles and pancakes to alongside that… if you can manage it.
You can order drinks throughout your 1 hour 15 minute slot and choose from as much Prosecco, Mimosas, House Wine and House Lager as you like for a set cost of £15 extra per person.
You don’t need to book before going to Fress and their bottomless brunch is available 9pm – 4pm, seven days a week.
BLVD – the Spinningfields venue without the vowels and all the flavour – put their own unique spin on the bottomless brunch.
Available at the weekend, these dishes aren’t your traditional breakfast bites.
BLVD small plates include some tangy treats, from vegetable tempura to chicken penang spring rolls. This is ideal for those still wanting the luxury of a bottomless date but with a more sophisticated menu.
You can choose to drink Bloody Mary’s, Bottled Beers, BLVD Gin Cocktail or a Glass of Prosecco in your 90 minute slot and it costs £35pp.
Brickhouse Social opened in March last year on New Wakefield Street, but they’ve only been running their brunches since January this year.
The brunches are a bit special as they are themed and run every Saturday from 12pm – 6pm.
For the rest of July and August, the mood is ’80s style – which applies to the drinks, food and music!
Some of the cocktails inspired by the decade include the ‘Space Raider’ and ‘Purple Rain’, for example.
Later in the year, the restaurant will time travel to the ’90s, flipping the music to Spice Girl mixes with a ‘Wannabe’ or ‘Genie in a Bottle’ cocktail.
It’s priced at £30 per person and each guest receives a whole pizza of their choice, banging 80s/90s tunes and two hours’ worth of bottomless drinks (including prosecco, wine, and bottled beers)
Foundry Project moved into the Northern Quarter in 2018 and has quickly settled in its surroundings with some suitably superb food offerings.
Their bottomless brunch, in particular, is a real treat.
Customers can choose any dish from the burger, pizza or salad menu, indulging in unlimited Prosecco, Bellini’s, Mimosas or Bloody Marys for two whole hours.
The cost is £25 per person.
Foundry calls itself the “happiest place in Manchester”; you’ll certainly be feeling good after all that booze and grub at that price.
Shack
Shack Brunch
Open for walk-ins, the trendy Shack bar serves up some great brunch options designed to be enjoyed with bottomless Bloody Marys, Bellinis, Prosecco or Mimosas for £25 per person.
Their traditional brunch deal is banging, but from Monday they’re set to announce a new spin on their midday meals – including a fresh disco theme.
Gaucho is a cool and classy kinda place. And its electro brunch sees the venue come alive.
The Argentinian restaurant on St Mary’s Street has attracted hundreds of guests for its long-running music-fuelled all-you-can eat midday feast; with bar staff pouring cocktails to the sound of DJs spinning tunes.
The standard price is £45 each, of your can upgrade to unlimited food and cocktails for an extra tenner.
Choripan sandwiches, smashed avocado and steak & eggs are all on the menu.
Gaucho’s famous brunch runs every Saturday 11am right through to 4pm.
The Manc is supporting Manchester’s independent businesses with the hashtag #buzzingtobeback so if you fancy exploring more of what the city has to offer. Let’s continue supporting local independents to get the region buzzing once more!
Read more about what we’re doing for the industry here.
Lupo Caffe Italiano – a taste of sunny Rome on a Prestwich industrial estate
Daisy Jackson
The sun is beating down on you, there’s a couple of luminous orange Aperol Spritzes on the checked tablecloth, Italian pop music is trickling out over the speakers and you’ve got two heaping bowls of pasta on the way.
The setting could easily be a cobbled street in front of the Colosseum in Rome. But it’s not. It’s an industrial estate in Prestwich.
Lupo must be one of Greater Manchester’s most hidden gems in a very literal sense.
To get here, you have to drive or walk a strange looping circuit around industrial warehouses peddling everything from splashbacks to burglar alarms to grow tents.
One of these warehouses, located in the very furthest yard, looks a little different to the others, festooned with bunches of garlic and dried herbs strung up from the ceiling.
There are shelves full of pasta, sauces and even crisps, a fridge packed with delicious Italian wines and beers, and retro football shirt-inspired merch hanging from the walls.
Its awkward location does nothing to hold back its loyal customers, who repeatedly return for the authentic taste of Rome on offer here.
Lupo is operated by Nico Pasquali, who first ran it as a tiny Italian cafe on Chapel Street in Salford (before all the high-rises appeared), then shifted it over to the odd shiny-commercial-office-land that is Exchange Quay, then took it almost entirely remote to trudge through the pandemic.
Lupo’s charming interiorsNico has added outside seating to LupoThe pasticceria selection at Lupo
At one point, Caffè Lupo existed mostly on WhatsApp, with customers texting in their orders ready for a doorstep drop on a Friday night.
But now the large-ish commercial unit is its main business, and it’s a special one.
You are greeted, always, with a friendly wave, then given the sort of service where you’re very gently guided to order all the best things on the menu that day, feeling like you’ll personally offend Nico if you order differently and stray from his recommendations. Thankfully it’s pretty easy to trust this man.
It’s extremely hard for me to see amatriciana on a menu and not order it – so I don’t try. One bowl of rigatoni amatriciana for me, and make it cheesy.
This is a textbook example of the deceptively simple pasta dish. Fatty guanciale cooked right down so that all that delicious pork fat melts into the tomatoes, then it’s seasoned with, I presume, several generations of secrets and love from Italian nonnas.
Rigatoni amatriciana, and fennel sausage orecchietteA spread of Lupo’s Italian foodPepernata – Nico’s mum’s recipeThe Pizza Lupo
The sweet, salty, meaty sauce is available on a pizza too, which will be top of my list next time I visit.
Across the table it’s a special (but it’s been on the menu for a while now) of orecchiette with fennel sausage and romanesco broccoli.
Nico tells us a customer once refused to pay for this dish because it wasn’t ‘saucy’ enough. Heathen.
That’s the running theme with Lupo – don’t come here expecting Neapolitan pizzas, or flat whites, or hot honey dips for your pizza crusts. It isn’t the Roman way, and Nico isn’t about to veer away from his proud roots to mould into any passing fads or trends.
If you’re after authenticity and tradition though, this is comfortably the top Italian in Greater Manchester.
If you can come to Lupo and walk away without ordering something sweet from the counter, you’re a stronger person than me.
PasticceriaOwner NicoLupo’s famous millefoglie
They’re famed for their doughnuts (rightly), with bouncy dough filled with flavours including pistachio cream, lemon, and homemade jams.
Also displayed in neat rows are fruit tarts with a glossy glaze, towering cream cakes in neat layers, and puff pastry cannoncini.
But Nico is adamant, absolutely adamant, that we order a slice of his millefoglie. It’s a sell-out, he says. We’re lucky he even has some in stock, he tells us. Who are we to argue?
And if you’ve made it this far, just stop reading right now, get in the damn car and go get yourself a slice before it sells out again.
Layers of lighter-than-air homemade pastry are sandwiched together with delicately sweet cream, hints of almond throughout, and it’s good enough to bring a tear to your eye.
We leave with a doughnut in a box too, so that we at least have a snack if we get completely lost finding our way back out of the industrial estate.
Aldi is back looking for another taste tester to send FREE crisps to
Emily Sergeant
Aldi is looking for a special someone to become its official crisp taster, and will send the lucky winner a bunch of bags to try for free.
Calling all self-confessed crisp connoisseurs, this one’s for you.
That’s right, Aldi is ready to make savoury snack food lovers’ dreams come true, as the supermarket retailer is back on the look-out for another official ‘Crisp Taster’ to join the team, especially after the inaugural search last year proved to be so popular with shoppers, amassing hundreds of applications.
The highly-anticipated return also follows interest from local celebrities last year too, with Manc actress Michelle Keegan declaring to her 7.5 million Instagram: “IS THIS TRUE @aldiuk? Because I am READY and available with lots of experience.”
Last summer, it was 39-year-old NHS worker George Critchley from Sheffield who became Aldi’s first-ever Official Crisp Taster… but now it’s your turn.
Aldi is back looking for another taste tester to send FREE crisps to / Credit: Aldi UK | Esperanza Doronila (via Unsplash)
The successful applicant will receive a selection of Aldi’s most popular crisps to sample at home for free, including Aldi’s Specially Selected Lightly Sea Salted Hand Cooked Crisps, Specially Selected Mature Cheddar & Red Onion Hand Cooked Crisps, the Snackrite Delta Strips, and Snackrite Cheese Flavour Cheezios.
All that’s required in return is a set of exclusive reviews rating the crisps’ taste, crunch, texture and appearance to help guide the supermarket’s Buying Team on potential future flavours.
“After the success of last year with hundreds of entries, we welcome our shoppers feedback once again to make sure our latest products provide the quality, taste and price they deserve,” explained Julie Ashfield, who is the Chief Commerical Officer at Aldi UK.
“Our range of crisps are going down a treat this year, so launching the role for a new Crisp Taster is the perfect way to encourage innovative ideas and delicious products onto shelves.”
Fancy it then? To apply, you’ll just need to be aged 16 or over, a legal UK resident, and create a short application video, that’s no more than a minute long, explaining why you should be Aldi’s next ‘Crisp Taster’.
Applications are now open, with a closing deadline of Thursday 21 August.
You’ll need to share your application video via the email address [email protected], and you can find out more information on the official ‘Crisp Taster’ webpage here.
Jess Walmsley -
15th July 2020 
