Scran: Maray in Manchester

Hung up near the bar at Manchester's truly sublime Maray restaurant are T-shirts for sale. “Maray,” they say, “home to the disco cauliflower.”

"Hm? What's a disco cauliflower?" I ask founders and owners James Bates and Tom White as we sip schooners of Track Brewing's Sonoma pale.

"Hah", they say, "you'll find out later."

In the meantime, allow me to cut straight to the chase. Of all the ventures that have appeared in this (hallowed?) slot over the last three years, this Parisian-style, Middle-East inspired, Mediterranean-influenced small plates bistro is right up there with the greatest. Guardian critic Jay Rayner once visited the Liverpool branch and subsequently frothed about the falafel, flatbreads and fried chicken thigh. “God, but it's good,” he wrote.

“That night!” remembers James today. “We knew he was coming in so we put loads of specials on to try and impress him. He didn't order one of them.”

Nonetheless: “we were packed with Guardian readers for months after,” he adds. “They were all asking questions about the wines which we didn't know the answers to. But they were great. We were still learning and they made us up our game.”

That was a decade ago.

At that point Maray was only a couple of years old and didn't really do beer. It had no taps. It was more about cocktails.

Yet today, as we sit in the Manchester venue (there are now two in Liverpool, one in Manchester and a newly opened venture in Chester), the craft menu is like a small who's who of the north-west's finest breweries. Think Black Lodge, Colbier and Neptune from Liverpool; Glen Affric from Birkenhead; Pomona Island and Seven Brothers from Salford; Track and Cloudwater from Manchester; and Spookton Brew Co from Chester.

“We were led by the customers, really,” says 36-year-old Tom. “A lot of people were wanting beer so our thinking was that if we lean into that, we lean into it properly. That means working with breweries that share our values: independent, local, obsessed with quality.”

The anecdotes come thick and fast with these two but the food's beginning to arrive.

The original idea for Maray was a simple falafel joint (“before we got more ambitious”) and, so, today, we start with the falafel sharer. It's a delight: little globes of crumbling earthy goodness served on fattoush salad, pickled cabbage and warmed pitta, all complimented by a trio of hummus, harissa and tabbouleh. Next up, the pastourma sausage — cradled on a subtle spinach borani — is a magnificent thing, all smoke and spice while the sea bass sits amid a creamy cap of remoulade and capers, and is equally wonderful. The lamb koftas, overlaid on pop-pink tahini and red onion, are tennis ball-sized taste-bombs. The Pomona Island Factotum pale and Cloudwater's Picadilly Pilsner cut through the flavours with delicate understatement.

And then, of course, there's that disco cauliflower; an entire roasted cauli head garnished with chermoula, harissa, yoghurt, tahini, pomegranate, parsley and almonds. It's a multi-coloured monster —think Jackson Pollock if he did brassica — that positively hums with its own herb-spice vibrancy. In short: worth boasting about on a T-shirt.

In fact, so is the whole experience here. We finish with the medjool date bread and butter pudding alongside a Seven Brothers New England Pale. It's as lush as the rest.

“God,” as another critic once said, “but it's good.”

https://maray.co.uk/