24 Bar, Manchester

This rather pretentious bar and restaurant has a great location in the basement of an impressive city centre building close to St Peter’s Square. A staircase leads you down to a small reception area where a greeter awaits you and either takes you to your table or else points the way to the bar which is over to the right. This area is a gaudy mess of a room with a long mirrored bar counter down the right hand wall and some fairly decent looking banquette booth-type formations opposite. The walls are decorated with plain mirrors and tiny framed pictures and there are corporate-style blackboard above the featureless bar back listing various food and drink options. The bulk of the venue is taken over by the restaurant which you reach by turning left at the greeter’s desk. This room has button backed banquette booths long the front walls, comfy chairs serving small tables through the centre and a long banquette down the back wall under plain walls and more mirrors. Some sort of large function room is available out the back and there seemed to be a private dining area, or maybe just an overspill space to the far left that was not being used on our visit. We came here for a meal and found the menu expensive with small portions and underwhelming ingredients. The waiting staff were pretty hopeless, bring food out which they were then unable to identify and having to rush back to the kitchen before being able to hand it over to the correct customer. Only the duty manager seemed to know what she was doing, with other staff being quite abrupt and cold. There’s no ale on the bar – just mainstream lagers like Heineken and Peroni – although fans of wine and cocktails might be better served. I really didn’t like this place much and struggle to find positives from this visit. If the food had perhaps been priced more realistically, I may have felt more favourable towards them, but I left feeling a bit ripped off and unsatisfied. As a pub, I can only imagine this is the sort of place that local office workers like to come and show-off in – with no decent beer and expensive prices, there is nothing that would induce me back in here again.

Not much to say about this one. No real ale with three pumps doubled up. Had a half of Kronenbourg at £2.10. Definitely one for the after work suit wearers.