THE EATERY – 3 Stevenson Square, Northern Quarter

Salmon and cream cheese wholemeal baguette with tomato, black pepper and side salad with peppers £4.05 (eating in).

An innocuous looking sandwichery from the outside nuzzling in the bosom of the Northern Quarter The Eatery is a sandwich shop with a difference: their food is fresh.  After gnawing my way around countless stale baguette dispensing cafes, sandwich shops and delis in the city centre here’s one where the staff take pride in their work, and where the food genuinely feels and tastes as fresh as you’d hope.

I don’t often go for salmon and cream cheese – not because I dislike it, just because there’s usually more manly meat further up the menu to grab my attention first.  In this case the tasty-looking beef was already bagsied by a certain bagginsy fellow ‘muncher.  Still, I quite fancied something slightly different and that wasn’t a jacket potato.

The staff were all smiles as though they were actually happy to see us, another rare occurrence in the food industry.  Opting to eat in seems to net you a bonus side salad that I’m not sure you get if you take your food away.  In any case it was most welcome and consisted of lettuce, cucumber, tomatoes, peppers and, would you believe it, onions.  In my experience onions are something city centre salads seem to shy away from, yet which deliver most of the flavour of the salad (you’d never find an onionless salad at Mr Tum’s house).  I was ever so slightly miffed that I didn’t get offered a nice Caesar sauce like the rest of the customers, but this kind of thing tends to happen to me so I put it down to my requesting extra peppers and made up for it with salad cream instead.

Recall that sinking feeling as you look through the glass at the cold meat in, say, a certain cafe on York Street, wondering to yourself how many days it’s been out under those lamps?  Well, here you can sit back, relax and enjoy the dimly lit, slightly bland but spotlessly clean environs.  The salmon was moist and succulent, the cream cheese spread generously but not overwhelming, the salad unsullied and clean tasting, and the bread was fresh and wholesome.  Name one supermarket which can say that about their offerings!

Usually I’d balk at that price for a sandwich, but you know what?  After all those crappalata sarnies I’ve eaten in Manchester it was finally worth it to invest a little extra and just calm down and actually enjoy the meal.  Great stuff, good recommendation, I’d go back in a jiffy.