Butter Bird

The food at Butter Bird is excellent – if you like chicken, and things cooked in chicken fat. A pleasant-looking restaurant with a buzzy atmosphere, it’s more than the sum of its parts (which is, essentially, lots of people eating rotisserie chicken).

However, if you know, you know. Roast chicken may conjure up unloved supermarket displays of scrawny birds rotating dolefully under strip lighting, but done properly it is a thing of joy. At Butter Bird, it’s done properly.

There’s a selection of plump, locally reared birds, available by the half or quarter, brined in tea, butter-basted (absolutely slathered in it), then served with a choice of house butters for added richness and light artery obstruction.

The meat is the star of the show: greasy in a good way and tender beyond measure. The rotisserie potatoes, seasoned with chicken salt, are an honourable second.

Puddings are meh, but you don’t come to Ancoats’ best chicken shop for dessert. You come to get wrist-deep in lemon and thyme butter and tear perfect, creamy flesh from the bone. This is a carnivorous sort of place, and the presence of an aubergine main on the menu does not change that one bit.