When the Peaky Blinders cast stormed Stockport with their smoke cannons and vintage cars, there was something missing from the row of period shop fronts and awnings they brought with them.
There was the grocer, there was the confectioner... but where was the dim sum bar?
The people behind Peter Street’s latest bar must have noticed this glaring historical oversight in the 1920s Birmingham-set drama too, teaming up with Chinese restaurant Ocean Treasure to offer a more authentic recreation of the era.
Launched in the former Sakana site late last year, Peaky Blinders Manchester is 'inspired' by the smash hit BBC drama based on the real-life Brummie gang. In the same way you might be 'inspired' by a classmate's homework if you'd forgotten to do yours.
Murals of the cast are plastered over pillars and walls, and a chap in a flat cap is enthusiastically embracing the theme as he nurses a pint on the table behind us. A laid-back daytime playlist flits from The Shins to Ezra Vine to Band of Horses (no Nick Cave) when we visit on a weekday lunchtime. So far, so very tenuous.
Settling into a comfy leather booth, we ask for a drinks menu, to be told there isn't one yet. We’re invited to go up to the bar - where the mythical menu materialises - after our waitress has taken our food order.
The themed cocktail list has drinks named things like Naughty Ada and Aunt Polly. By Order of the Peaky Blinders We Drink Pina Coladas, it declares.
Arthur Shelby wept.
The Monaghan Boy (£8.50) is a frothy pink fizz of Gordon’s gin, raspberry liqueur, lemon and egg white, and comes with an edible print of Tommy on horseback floating on top of it. What you do with this when you’re down to the last dregs and the slightly murky apparition of Cillian Murphy has shrivelled to a slippery film at the bottom of the glass isn’t quite clear. Slurp him down? Fish him out with your fingertips?
Grace's Secret (£8.50), has a more sensible garnish - a small betting slip pinned to the side of the glass with a wooden peg. It's a mix of pear cognac, orange liqueur, lemon and sugar, though it's so sweet it mostly tastes like a pear drop that's been dunked in honey and then rolled in sugar. I can just imagine Grace knocking up one of these in The Garrison between swilling out the spittoons.
Since Arthur spends a large chunk of the series slurring orders for whisky, we also attempt to order the more ambitious Whisky is a Good Proofing Water (£8.50), which involves a five minute search for ingredients, a pot of hickory chips, a blowtorch and some kind of smoking device with a long rubber tube attached.
It’s too ambitious, it turns out. Pre-mixed bottle of cocktail tracked down, all that remains is for the hickory smoke to be blown down the tube into the drink - instead, the blast of heat sends the hickory chips shooting down the pipe and into the glass bottle, rendering it undrinkable.
“That means someone last night hasn’t cleaned it or put the filter on and left me in a pickle,” mutters the apologetic bartender, who’s dressed in a flat cap and braces. Of course he is.
Our food makes it back to the table before we do, which is an extraordinary feat considering we were the only people at the bar to begin with. There's no offer for the drinks to be brought to the table when they're ready. It's very much a self-service affair for liquid refreshment in here.
Dishes on the lunch menu are all £5 - and few are worth it. More care seems to have gone into the crockery than what's on the plate.
The fried dim sum have a ‘Polly’s popped to Iceland’ air about them. The vegetable spring rolls are as generic as they come, a peppery mulch of veg encased in a beige wrapping that shines with grease when you give it a squeeze.
You’d have a more authentic Peaky Blinders experience bunging a platter of frozen party food in the oven while you watch Netflix re-runs in your pants, and you'd probably enjoy it more. Prawn won tons are marginally better, with a meaty nugget of prawn swaddled inside each golden shell.
Those prawns are also available as har kau - same bulky filling but this time wrapped inside a gelatinous steamed casing.
It's like a prawn and a jellyfish made a baby and it's a baby that actively avoided any contact with salt water. Uninspiring, but okay when plonked in some soy sauce.
Chicken satay skewers are better: flattened fillets of tender meat, gently grilled and dunked in a nutty satay sauce. It's a welcome counterpoint to the industrially acidic sweet and sour sauce served with the other dishes.
Steamed beef dumplings have a testicular look to them - obscenely round pellets of meat inside a flabby, wrinkled casing. No amount of ginger and spring onion garnishing can make them look appetising but flavour-wise they’re among the best of the bunch.
That's not saying a huge amount when they're up against the salt and pepper tofu, which is devoid of both salt and pepper but has soaked up plenty of oil like a group of tiny bland sponges. "A bit weird, aren't they?" even our waitress admits as she clears away the barely-touched cubes. She's the best thing about this place.
Better food can perhaps be found on the full menu in the main Ocean Treasure restaurant upstairs. Previously based inside the Manchester235 Casino opposite where it had a reliable reputation, it now shares the two-storey space with Peaky Blinders Manchester - a co-location that appears to be the only rationalisation for such a bewildering concept.
Altogether, it's a baffling assemblage of bumbling bar service, mediocre food and lazy gimmickry, which is a shame, because when you strip all that away, the bones of a decent bar are there.
It's a prime spot - squeezed on the same strip as the perpetually busy Albert's Schloss and popular party bars Revolución de Cuba and Dirty Martini - and if you look past the shrines to the Shelby Co on the walls to the dark wooden furnishings and leather Chesterfield-style seating, it's a smart-enough fit-out.
But in its current guise it's as lazy and as brazen an attempt to cash in on a trend as I’ve ever seen - and of that approach to business, the Shelbys might actually be proud.
How we scored it
Food: 2
Service: 3
Atmosphere: 2
Overall: 2
Update 24/01/19: The producers of Peaky Blinders (Caryn Mandabach Productions/Tiger Aspect Productions) have informed the Manchester Evening News to that this bar has no authorisation to use the Peaky Blinders brand and the bar is in no way connected to the show.
