Table talk with AA Gill: Rosso, 23 Spring Gardens, Manchester
‘There was an expectation of celebrity, a posing commitment to having a laugh — everybody was auditioning for their own sexual talent reality show’
The Sunday Times
Sunday October 17 2010, 1.01am BST, The Sunday Times
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Among the special-pleading lobbyists’ car-boot sale at the Labour party conference, I was arrested by the humanists’ stand. I wanted to see how you sell nothingness. A nice, faceless boy offered me a cotton bag, “for the one life we have”. It was empty, which seemed an appropriate and neat parable. He popped in a pen, because I was a writer. Then popped in another one, just in case I changed my mind.
Sitting behind him was a jolly girl who held a baby, Lorcan. She was feeding him with a large breast.
For a moment, the depressed and furrowed Labour delegates paused to sigh over the beatific, beaming mother and child. It was such a still, clear and pristinely votive image. You see, it’s always God’s manifest sense of humour that I find so winning.
Manchester. Cottonopolis, as it was known in the 19th century, the embodiment of both the best and worst of the Industrial Revolution. Its name comes from the Celtic for breast. So it could be Bapopolis. A radical city that was the field for the great martyrdom of the workers’ movement, Peterloo. The place where Engels wrote through the smog, and the scene of the first Trades Union Congress. It was the political home for the great Cobden, who believed in free trade, universal brotherhood and peace, and brought down the Corn Laws. When Robert Peel, the Tory prime minister, broke his government and his party to repeal them, he heroically credited Cobden for having changed his mind. That sort of Athenian statesmanship would be inconceivable to this sorry lot today.
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I took a break from the Ed-ache of conference to visit the municipal art gallery, with its splendid, panoramic collection of pre-Raphaelite and late-Victorian paintings, the grandiose stuff bought by self-made men with dirty money who liked to see opulence and education and breasts on their walls.
One of them is Ford Madox Brown’s Work, one of the greatest pre-Raphaelite paintings that transcends the movement. Brown had a revelation: why should all high art be about the rich and the beautiful, the mighty and the mythological? Why not paint working people, but with the same heightened and elaborate sensibility?
So here are navvies digging a road in Hampstead, surrounded by layers of allegory, watched by Carlyle, the grumpy believer in heroic revolutions and an inspiration for socialists. It is an astonishing and brilliantly magical realist painting.
Underneath it is a grim quote from Genesis: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.” Every Labour party delegate should see this picture. But, of course, I was in the gallery all on my own.
Manchester lost its grip on manufacturing and commerce, was overtaken by Bolton and Oldham, and now advertises itself as the city of pop music and football, a sort of franchised home pitch for celebrity and ersatz culture. The place of Engels and Cobden has been taken over by the Gallaghers, Morrissey and Rio Ferdinand, who, by coincidence, has opened a restaurant here. For a city this size, the options for eating out are cacophonous but not pretty, the usual handful of ethnic restaurants, kebab and chip shops, old torpid and congealing restaurants in hotels, and then a lot of flash bars that do food. This is a city that drinks first and eats after, with its mouth open. Nights out are events that aren’t easily contained by tablecloths and cutlery.
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Rosso's menu is a lot of pizza, a lot of steak, and a lot of Italianish made-up dishes (Carl Sukonik)
Rosso is housed in a Grade II-listed Victorian bank in what it refers to as “prestigious King Street”. It has all the heavy reverence of a credit temple, masses of mausoleum marble, stonking classical allusions and a big dome like a giant cash tit. To this, Rio has added, with his own inimitable je ne sais quoi, some neon and reproductions of black-and-white photographs of famous Italians. Pavarotti, Sinatra, Pinocchio. Actually, I lied about Pinocchio. I think they’re here to remind customers that this is an Italian restaurant, and not a bank. Eat, don’t rob. At the door, there’s a pretty woman and a squat bloke. The head waiter is an Ealing comedy Italian with a stick-on accent and ponytail. There are a couple of blokes on stools with guitars, and a rhythm box playing nana’s karaoke classics. One of the blokes is a rather good Louis Armstrong impression. The other looks like the dad from Shameless. I think they’re here to conjure up an atmosphere of international sophistication.
I came early and watched the room fill. Lots of groups of girls, all done up with trowelled make-up, teased hair and strappy, crippling shoes. They drank heroically fast and laughed like they were trying to turn their faces inside out. They ate as if testing wedding menus, with an excited, exclamatory zeal. I’ve rarely seen groups of girls like these down south. The manager fawned over them like an edible strippergram. The menu is a big card with a lot of pizza, a lot of steak, and a lot of Italianish made-up dishes. The speciality is fish. So you can start with smoked salmon cornets filled with prawns in a citrus, mascarpone and chive mousse that has got no closer to Italy than a finger buffet in Alderley Edge. Or there’s grilled Cornish sardines with garlic and coriander and a chilli salsa, which was a euphemism. Cornish sardines have never been anywhere near the Mediterranean. They are rebranded pilchards, which nobody wants to order because we all think that pilchards come only in tins from the cupboards of dead pensioners.
A brick of fish the size of Ryan Giggs’s wallet had been left under hot lights to make sure it was really dead At the recommendation of the maître d’, I had something that appeared on my bill as “gamberoni al’aglio”. Prawns in garlic. It was nothing of the sort. It was actually a brochette of mixed fish on a slimy mattress of exhausted vegetables. I think some of them might have been monkfish, perhaps scampi. I couldn’t have sworn to it. It was generous in quantity, which wasn’t actually a good thing, because it was very meagre in quality. The fish was reluctant to give up the security of the skewer, but, when it did, it fell to bits into dry shards of misery. Altogether it tasted coarse and loud, like something from the party selection of the freezer cabinet.
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For a main course, I could have had the cod with creamy leak and saffron sauce.
But, again, the maître d’ tossed his tresses and pointed me towards the halibut with more garlic and spinach and a langoustine bisque. This was a brick of fish the size of Ryan Giggs’s wallet. It had been cooked for twice as long as necessary. And then left under hot lights to make sure it was really dead. The langoustine bisque was, I suspect, fish soup with cream. It was a horrible waste of what had once been a good bit of fish. A chocolate tart was a thick mouth of sticky cocoa foreplay. By southern standards, all this was very cheap — £40 for three courses, water and coffee — but people told me that up here it was really very expensive.
Rosso does three sittings. After 9pm, the dates started to arrive. Girls, strutting and pouting with tarantula eyes and siamese breasts, showed off hooker frocks and were soused in smells called things like Pepper Splayed and Moist Obelisk. They were followed by sheepishly leery blokes looking like bad boys who’d been sent to see the head. All wearing ripped, faded jeans, trainers and T-shirts, just to let us know that they were too cool for dinner, but up for sex afterwards. There was an expectation of celebrity, a posing commitment to having a laugh. Everybody was auditioning for their own sexual talent reality show. The food really is beside the point after three bottles of pinot grigio and a sov ringed-finger sliding up yer thigh.
