The Spanish group - which has four tapas restaurants in the Capital - said the 200-cover Spinningfields venue will offer main dishes alongside its established menu of small plates and sharing platters.
“In the same way that we adapt the design of our restaurants to suit the area, the building they are in and the customers, so we also need to adapt our menus,” Ibérica’s managing director Fernández Pardo told BigHospitality.
“In Manchester there are still a lot of people who like a more traditional meal, and the small plate culture is not so well developed as in London, so we will be serving four or five main dishes alongside our tapas.”
Fernández Pardo said the main dishes will offer Manzano’s modern twist on traditional Spanish food, with favourites such as fried bread crumbed veal with cheese and ham reinvented to give them a new, lighter lease of life.
"After all these years we have quite a solid recipe bank and we will be using Nacho's latest restaurant, Gloria in Ovideo, as our lab," he explained.
Prime location
Located on a prime corner site on The Avenue, Ibérica Spinningfields will join other high-end eateries such as The Alchemist, Hawksmoor and Artisan in the heart of gastronomic Manchester.
“Manchester is a vibrant, cosmopolitan city with an amazing restaurant scene and a sophisticated population that knows Spain very well – between Liverpool and Manchester there is a flight to Barcelona every day,” said Fernández Pardo.
“So it is a great city to be in and Spinningfields is a real restaurant hub that I would equate to London’s Covent Garden. It is the place where it is all happening.”
As with Ibérica’s other restaurants, the 518.70 sq m space will feature a unique design by Barcelona-based designer Lázaro Rosa Violán, drawing inspiration from the city and its residents.
“It is going to have a much stronger Spanish look than the other restaurants. We will be mixing very traditional features such as mantón de Manila - which are Spanish silk shawls - with quite a modern design with lots of glass and wood,” said Fernández Pardo.
The restaurant will be split into a ground floor with a large bar as a focal point, and a mezzanine area with further seating and an open kitchen that is visible from the street.
“We will also have two large covered terraces on either side of the main entrance that will be open all year round,” said Pardo. “We are really trying to pull the restaurant out onto the street.”
UK expansion
Spinningfields will be the fifth site for Ibérica, which currently has restaurants in Marylebone, Canary Wharf and Farringdon, and plans to open a sixth site at London Victoria in May 2015.
Fernández Pardo said that the group hopes to continue expanding outside of the capital and is aiming for ten sites in the next three to five years.
“Bigger cities like Glasgow, Edinburgh, Leeds and Liverpool are the obvious choice, but we are also looking at smaller places like Bath, Bristol, Oxford and Cambridge,” he said.