Adam Ain't Cooking

As the name suggests, Portland Grill is on Portland Street in Manchester City Centre, but despite being a popular and busy street, it's easy to miss, nestled behind a small shop front.

As you walk in, you start at a stairwell with "Welcome" written in a variety of languages, and a date stone with the year 1910 carved into it, giving a nod to the heritage of this building, and an explanation as to the small entrance and downward staircase, because once you get downstairs it opens into a very large cellar space.

The space is very surprising, and furnished with tables, chairs and booths but not cramped in, taking advantage of the space. It was also a very curious thing to sit looking at your menu but see up through cellar windows onto the streets above, and people walking past.

We are greeted and taken to our table. We note that it's quite quiet for an early Saturday evening, but our waiter informs us that it gets busier as the night progresses.

We are given a wonderful meat-centric menu, which has some great choices of burgers, steaks and chicken, all for very reasonable prices for the city centre, and even offering an Early Bird special. Our party chooses to start by ordering buffalo wings, nachos, and onion rings. American classics.

The food arrives in good time and is both fresh and tasty. The onion rings are crisp, the buffalo wings are succulent, tasty, and wonderfully messy to eat, and the nachos are crunchy, but could possibly have done with some more cheese, or a melted cheese sauce rather than melted grated cheese, but they are accompanied by a really tasty fresh salsa, which our entire party shared.

Our waiter is friendly and attentive, making sure we're enjoying each course. For our mains we all decided we were very much in a burger mood, and two of us ordered the mushroom burger, whilst I ordered a classic American cheeseburger, all of which again arrived in good time.

The burgers were excellently presented with no messing around, no wooden serving planks, just good food as it should be, and were tasty, well seasoned, and used fresh ingredients. They also came with lovely hot crispy chips, which is always good... too many places are let down by lukewarm soft chips.

As we enjoyed our meals, we saw another table had some huge stacked burgers turn up, which must be The Portland Tower burger. They looked great, definitely one for next time!

We really enjoyed our visit here, as we only decided to pop in on a whim, and weren't expecting anything special, but ended up leaving having had good food and good service in a pleasant and spacious environment for a really good price. We'll definitely return.