Friday 14 March 2014

Meat feast

Last weekend my sister and her boyfriend were staying with us and we decided to go into Manchester and check out a new restaurant that I'd heard about that sounded amazing, Christiana shares my love of food and I knew that she would love it too, the place in question was Red's True Barbecue on Lloyd street, Manchester.

Red's is a American style barbecue grill restaurant, think 'man v food'! This is not the place to go if your a vegeterian-  it's meat, meat and more meat on the menu!
It sounded as though it could be popular and you couldn't book so we decided to go on an earlyish into Manchester. We got there at about 7 and it was already very busy as we'd expected but we were told they could fit us in for 9.30 and took our number so if they could call us if they could fit us in earlier. We had a little wander around some pubs and bars nearby for some drinks and they called us at about 9.10pm to tell us our table was ready. 
We'd already been looking at the menu online so I had a fair idea of what I wanted, at first we'd agreed we'd probably just have the mains but we were so hungry and the starters sounded so good we had to try them. We ordered one each but shared them out between us, we had jalapeño poppers, pork crackling, homemade beef jerky and something called hush puppies which were a kind of a sweetcorn and jalapeño fritter with a warm chilli cheese dip. I really enjoyed them all, there was loads but we managed to eat it all! 


The mains were lovely too, I had pulled pork, with coleslaw and macaroni cheese, Christiana and Luke got sandwiches and shared them - the texas smoked sausage sandwich with barbecue pit beans and huge onion rings and the smoked brisket sandwich with bbq gravy with grits, then Matthew had a burger with fries, everyone enjoyed their food but Matthew said that if he was to go again he wouldn't have had the burger it was nice enough but he would've tried something a bit different. The trouble was that by this time it was about 10pm and we were all getting quite full , so I'm afraid we didn't eat it all. 

The style of the restaurant was quite cool, grungy with neon lights, you can see right through to the kitchens through wire fencing to the grills. It works on the idea of bbq food as a religion, the menus are like bibles and the toilets are even like confessionals, there is also a selection of sauces on the table to use with suggestions of what they work best with. It's a good atmosphere and there was a lot of good r'n'b and soul tunes playing, the only negatives I found were that the music was a bit too loud it makes that hard to hear one another or the waitress, and also I wasn't really keen on the cocktail I had but apart from that it was great. The meal cost about £80 for 4 people including drinks and tips so not too bad.
We will definitely be returning although next time we will go earlier to book in so we wouldn't be waiting so late to eat, also we probably would share two starters instead of four.
All in all it was a really lovely night! 
Thanks for reading, 
Abigail x