Ego, Princess Street, Manchester

I was kindly invited out for a friend’s birthday that a mutual friend was organising and they had booked Ego restaurant on Princess Street. I had no idea where this place was and hadn’t heard of it before. Normally before I go on eating excursion (all in the name of Manc Munch of course) I tend to check out the menu online to give me an idea of the food on offer, but as I knew nothing about the place I decided to go “unprepared”.

Ego got a thumbs up straight away as they gave us a complementary glass of Buck Fizz each, because it was for a birthday celebration. I’m not really a Champers sort of guy, but free booze is free booze. I started thumbing through the menu whilst sipping my “Cheryl Baker”, I’m pretty efficient nowadays at whittling down a menu, but unusually I was torn between 3 or 4 main dishes, I took it as a good sign, they all sounded extremely tasty. The birthday boy and I decided on the Spanish Share Platter to start with and opted for the Moroccan Lamb Tajine as the main, I rarely have lamb at the moment as I don’t really cook it for myself, thought it would be a nice change

The sharing platter was excellent, cheese, chorizo, calamari rings, ham and olives, a very nice selection of food and very tasty. The calamari was especially good, normally places can get this wrong ending with the calamari becoming rubbery, but Ego got it spot on.

I was looking forward to the lamb tagine but slightly worried as it was served with cous cous. I normally avoid veggie sprouting, tree hugging, hippy based foods, but as I was cancelling out the hippyifcation with a dead animal guess it would be ok. I have to say the meal was awesome the veg and pepper salsa was brilliant and the lamb was so tender it melted in the mouth, I will definitely be trying a tagine based meal again, another tick for the stomach monster to be able to have, plus you don’t have to be called “swampy” to order it.

If you fancy trying somewhere different that offers a variety of food you can’t go far wrong with Ego. The only down side is this place is slightly over priced, we got a discount of 40% off all the food (it’s not what you know, more the who), consumed a couple of glasses of wine and the meal still worked out at £30 each which seems a lot to me.