Having bowled in from Fallowfield in ancient times to specialise in booze and brunch, Trof is part of the fabric of Manchester’s Northern Quarter (immortalised in Mhairi McFarlane’s swoony skewering of office misogyny, If I Never Met You); it’s as NQ as “rice and three” cafés, overstuffed bins and contemporary denim. Current custodians Jamie Pickles and Matt Nellany had a hit in 2024 with their open-fire restaurant, Stow, on the other side of town. Their rebrand of Trof, which separates drinking from eating space while conjuring the spirit of nice pubs everywhere, feels like an opportunity to tweak the menu upwards.
Getting anyone to use the definite article might be the biggest challenge of its repositioning as The Trof Pub & Dining Room; everything else feels effortless. A jeweller’s premises in a former life, it has cosy bones, and in the first-floor dining room the bare brick and candlelight offers an easy welcome. Beers on tap are from Peaks brewers Thornbridge, and the wine list is neat and European.
Pub snacks mark a return to the fryer for chef Pickles, who left boiling oil behind at smoke-dominated Stow; he’s not lost his touch, as a magnificently peppery, crisp-shelled Scotch egg with fudgy salted centre demonstrates. There are also cheese toasties, pork pies and crispy potatoes with tartare sauce for drinkers. The pursuit of decadent texture and deep savour continues upstairs on a menu that shoots for classy but approachable.
Seasonal inflections include asparagus with sauce gribiche or salmon with beurre blanc and monk’s beard, but the backbone is returnable classics, including exuberantly cheesy burgers on fashionably tiny plates, bavette with beef sauce and pork collar with cabbage and bacon.
Highlights on opening night included a deep pile of hogget mince spilling off dripping toast with an emulsion of anchovy and preserved lemon (with a carpet of chives, for health), and a salad of apple, celeriac, fennel and Devon crab with its feet in a delicately pink take on Marie Rose. The veggie main, a dryish tart of shallots, beetroot and goats’ curd, could have done with a bit more love and a livelier salad alongside, but a chicken schnitzel showed off all the classic attributes, plus a well-balanced remoulade. It’s worth noting that The Trof’s opening chip game is extremely strong: cooked in beef fat, bigger than Jenga blocks, with lacy ends and fluffy middles, they set a crunchily high bar.
Puddings take crowd-pleasing as the principal objective; if you don’t want rice pudding, Bakewell tart, chocolate mousse or sticky toffee pudding, should you even have left the house? The mousse is light to counter the darkness of the chocolate involved and comes with pools of olive oil that work better with the chocolate than the whipped cream alongside. Sticky toffee pudding with milk ice cream is fluffier than it has the right to be, with more deep pools, this time of glossy butterscotch.
It’s been a rocky week for Manchester’s hospitality ecosystem, with the closure of Climat and a question mark over the future of Stow’s flashy neighbour Kaji. Eaters in the city needed some good news, and on this early showing, the rejuvenation of Trof – local, independent, replete with good intentions and even better chips – could well be it.
