Erst might just be the perfect neighbourhood spot. Set within a redeveloped warehouse building in Manchester’s buzzy Ancoats neighbourhood, the restaurant and wine bar offers a tiny but regularly-changing menu of Mediterranean dishes designed to share alongside an exclusively natural wine list.
While that might not sound ground-breaking, co-founders Patrick Withington and Will Sutton possess an eye for detail that’s rare for a low-key ‘local’ place. Overseeing the kitchen and front of house respectively, the pair deliver a laid back yet grownup experience that’s an antidote to the glitzier ‘going out out’ restaurant scene for which Manchester is traditionally known.
Withington’s colourful dishes pop against Erst’s brutalist, polished-concrete interior while Sutton’s well-judged wine choices also bring a welcome splash of sunshine to the proceedings. While it might be an unassuming place, Erst has received national recognition, chalking up glowing reviews from William Sitwell and Jay Rayner, with the latter declaring it one of his best meals of the entire year.
Last year, it entered Restaurant Magazine’s list of the top 100 restaurants in the UK for the first time. It is, by some margin, the most inexpensive restaurant on the list. Indeed, its prices might cause some visitors from the South to reconsider their choices in life – there isn’t a dish on the menu over £15 and Erst’s (delicious) house wine is priced at just £5 a glass. In an age of £200-plus tasting menus and £39 mains, that the pair can deliver quality at such a low price point is something worth raising a glass to.
A place for everyone
Erst's down-to-earth, egalitarian approach is down in no small parts to its owners’ background. Neither Withington and Sutton have ever worked anywhere approaching fancy and freely admit they don’t feel particularly comfortable in tasting menu places.
“We want it to be accessible. The food cultures that inspire our menu tend to be more democratic. In Spain, they have cafes that serve great local seafood that are frequented by painter and decorators. You don’t get that here. I realise we’re unlikely to get much of that at Erst, but I’d love to think that it’s something that could happen here,” says Withington, who has only been cooking for about seven years having initially trained as a plumber (his handiness with a wrench has saved Erst a fortune).
“A lot of my friends and family still work in the trades. Some people are surprised by the idea of a plumber appreciating good food, but I did. At Erst we’re trying to address that misconception and allow people from lots of different backgrounds to access high quality food and drink.”
Withington switched careers in his late twenties, taking a job at noted bakery and café Trove in Manchester’s trendy Levenshulme suburb where he met Sutton, then a barista. The pair launched an evening pop-up serving mainly Spanish food that was so well-received it encouraged them and Trove bakery co-founder Marcus Saide to look for a permanent site.
Erst opened in 2018 at a time when there were only a handful of operators in Ancoats, a once industrial area that’s only about 15 minutes’ walk from the city centre (it adjoins the Northern Quarter).
“Rudy’s Pizza and Elnecot were there but the area wasn’t nearly as busy as it is now,” says Sutton. “When we launched the plan was to be a neighbourhood bar with some food. But the flats above us were empty so we ended up going more down the restaurant route to pull people in from all over the city.”
With the apartments above and surrounding the restaurant now full, about 40% of Erst’s customers could be termed locals, with the remaining 60% coming from elsewhere in Manchester and further afield.
While many operators look to make their offering more involved and upmarket as their reputation grows the pair have stuck with their low-key, high-value small plates approach. “We’ve dug our heels in. Apart for a brief spell doing Sunday roasts we’ve stayed true to our roots. We want to change people’s mindsets and prove that it is possible to eat really well in a casual setting,” Sutton continues. “My death row meal would be Patrick's anchovies with some bread and wine.”
Small plates were a challenge at first as many in Manchester weren’t used to that manner of eating, but people have got used to it," says Sutton. The influx of people from London to Ancoats has also helped. While house prices have increased exponentially in recent years, it’s still a bargain compared to the South. “This is as formal as we want to get. We actually wanted to be even more casual than we are now. Not many people come in for just a drink these days, which is a shame. If we ever did anything else it would be much simpler than Erst,” he adds.
Looking to sunnier places
Withington is largely self-taught, with many of Erst’s recipes based on dishes he’s had while on holiday in sunnier climes. “I try and get away as much as I can, and food is the main driver of that," he says. "I don’t speak to the chefs or make notes, but I do have a look around for ingredients and try and work out how we can get them into Erst when I get back. Then we develop the dishes around the produce. It’s a cliché but we let the ingredients do the talking.”
He’s also inspired by cookbooks, but generally those penned by esteemed food writers such as Marcella Hazan rather than restaurant chefs (although he does make an exception for Sam and Sam Clark’s brilliant Moro books). As such his food is notably unchefy. Erst is a foam and swipe free zone, indeed Withington doesn’t even do garnishes.
Despite this, he has a good eye for creating plates of delicious-looking food. Mackerel is presented butterflied and grilled on a pool of bright green zhoug (a punchy herbed-packed sauce that his its origins in Yemen); neat chunks of beetroot sit in a pool of ajo blanco flecked with green chillies; and even a simple salad of confit tuna and grilled peppers is made to look beautiful.
More substantial dishes at Erst include spiced lamb shoulder with celeriac and farro; and plaice accompanied by fermented chilli butter. As a nod to Erst’s sister venues (there are now three Trove sites) there are always a couple of topped flatbreads on the menu. Costing just £6 each, current options include beef fat and Urfa chilli; and walnut tarator with brown butter and sage.
Natural selection
When it comes to wine, 'natural’ is a famously nebulous term but in Erst’s case it is defined as those that are well-made by people that look after the land. Rayner’s 2021 review of the restaurant took aim at restaurants pushing what might be described as more hardcore natural wines that – in the critic’s words – “smell of unwiped arse”, yet he found none of these on Erst’s 70-strong list due to Sutton’s preference for cleaner-tasting bottles.
“We’re not big on wines with a lot of volatile acidity – I’m not a fan of acetone notes,” says Sutton, who seeks out winemakers who follow organic principles for his list, although they don’t necessarily have to be certified as such. “We do have a handful of more ‘funky’ wines, but they’re well made so they are on the cleaner end. I’m aware that that style is divisive but – personally – I like them. They are structured and interesting and go extremely well with food. For example, orange wines match brilliantly with smelly cheeses.”
Erst’s list is strikingly good value. House wines cost just £5 a glass and entry-level sparkling wine – a 2015 Cava – is priced at £7.50. Still wines start at a little over £20 a bottle and there is a lot of choice between £30 and £40 (and little over £60). Sutton spends much of his time identifying natural wines that offer good bang for buck. “Our house wine is sourced from a cooperative in Sicily called Valdibella. Their ethos is the same as some of our more top-end stuff but they’re working with young vines that produce a lot of juice. That gets the price down for us.”
Erst uses around seven different wine suppliers. Most specialise in a particular country or region except for major natural wine supplier Les Caves de Pyrene. Storage at Erst is minimal, which keeps the wine list fresh as the list changes regularly as wines come in and out of stock.
“We don’t hold onto much stock. We can typically only carry one wine of a particular type, for example we only currently have one white Burgundy. We’re looking to expand our range in the run up to Christmas. We want to give people something to splash out, which will mean more wines with a bit of bottle age.”
Manchester new wave
Manchester’s dining scene has come on in leaps and bounds over the past few years. Indies of relatively low means are driving the change, serving up progressive food and drink that’s usually good value, especially when compared with what’s available in the capital.
Erst and Simon Martin's nearby Michelin-starred Mana were within the first wave of this movement, and have now been joined by others including Flawd, another natural wine specialist that recently received a rave review from a major critic (in this case Marina O’Loughlin). While some are uneasy about the rapid pace of gentrification in the area, Ancoats is having a moment right now – with its canals, former warehouse buildings and cool restaurants, on a sunny day it's more reminiscent of hip areas of Copenhagen than north-west England.
“The scene is now developing rapidly. People want to try new things,” says Sutton. “Our developer and others in the area are focused on putting in interesting independents.
"But this is still the start, it’s going to change a lot here over the next five to 10 years – there’s a lot planned for the area.”
