On paper at least, Manteca is a difficult restaurant to define. Broadly, it’s modern Italian, with a menu that includes a range of salumi cured in house; a short selection of hand-rolled pastas; and for the mains, fire-cooked cuts of meat and fish to share. In terms of sourcing, it’s almost entirely British-focused, with executive chef Chris Leach working directly with farmers and suppliers across the UK, promoting a nose-to-tail ethos by only using whole animal carcasses. And then there’s the name; taken from a Spanish word that principally means pork fat or lard.
Leach established Manteca with business partner David Carter in the summer of 2019 as the first tenants of short-term incubator project 10 Heddon Street, receiving rave reviews from The Guardian’s Grace Dent, among others. The pair subsequently launched it as a standalone restaurant on Great Marlborough Street in Soho later that year, before relocating to their now-permanent site in Shoreditch in late 2021.
The move to Shoreditch has given Leach the space to present his nose-to-tail concept as he always imagined it. This includes the installation of a subterranean hanging room – the nucleus of the restaurant’s salumi production; and an ‘evolved’ menu that include signatures from the Soho site as well as new dishes. They include a pig skin ragù topped with parmesan and served with a piece of crispy pig skin for dipping, which has become so popular with diners that it’s often only available to order now upon request as an off-menu item.
Housed in a former Pizza Express, the restaurant’s simple design combines bare plastered walls, light woods and buttery yellow tones reminiscent of its pasta dishes to create a light space by day, but one that feels quite moody and atmospheric by night when the lights are dimmed.
Come to Manteca hungry and leave with both your belly and your heart full to bursting.
