The best restaurants and bars near the AO Arena

Founder’s Hall is a smartly-refurbished pub with an enviable position on Albert Square. It serves up comforting pub food and a vast range of beers.

On the Hush is a popular Northern Quarter cafe bar, winning awards for its bottomless brunch. Loyal customers and visitors to Manchester love its colourful style, imaginative cocktails and casual all-day food offering.

Located in the Northern Quarter, this friendly neighbourhood bistro and bar is the place to avanti if it’s a taste of traditional Sicily you fancy – from authentic street food snacks through to big plates of pasta to desserts and holiday memory gelato, eat in or take away.

Cult pizzeria Ciaooo may not be as well-known as some of its beautifully blistered-based brethren, but that’s all to the good. At least there’s a chance of getting a table. As it is, it’s often full of savvy locals who know just where to get some of the best pizzas in Manchester – on Swan Street at the top of Great Ancoats Street it transpires.

Service is excellent and the pizzas are even better. There is a wide selection with a mix of classics and modern inventions. Most importantly, the dough rises above its competitors. It is puffed-up pillowy perfection.

This slick 2020 addition to the Corn Exchange is determined to do something different to other contemporary Indian restaurants. And it largely succeeds, bringing flair and originality to the well-worn territory of street food and small plates.

Mackie Mayor is a cosmopolitan food hall located in an 1858 Grade II listed market building on the edge of Manchester’s Northern Quarter.

Purveyor of healthy and often vegan Indian street food and home cooking, former barrister Nisha Katona’s Corn Exchange Mowgli was the second after launching on Liverpool’s Bold Street in October 2014, so this is Manchester’s original branch and technically pre-chain.

Opened in the summer of 2022 after a hefty refurb which transformed the tired-looking New Century Hall of the mid-twentieth century into a newfangled music and dining destination in Manchester’s trendy NOMA district.

Seasonal and made from scratch – there’s a homeliness to the food at The Pasta Factory that belies its industrial-sounding name.

You’ll find Pip on the ground floor of Treehouse Hotel Manchester, decked out in the same tastefully playful theme as the rest of the building. Furniture is mismatched and the restaurant is laid out in a spacious manner whilst still giving off a cosy, homely vibe. 

As you might expect from the name, Vietnam’s national dish pho (pronounced “fuh”) is at the heart of the menu here. Just shy of 20 versions of the nutritious and aromatic noodle soup are cooked fresh daily in the Corn Exchange kitchen.

Predominantly a pizzeria, Ramona incorporates a bakery, margarita bar, coffee counter, stage and Firehouse restaurant, and is found in the rollershuttered ex-E & A Auto Services garage depot on Swan Street, complete with a tree-lined forecourt, now the campfire beer garden.

Salvi’s – or Salvi’s Mozzarella Bar & Restaurant, to give it its full name – claims to be Manchester’s first independent Neapolitan restaurant and deli, and it is certainly somewhere to head if traditional, authentic Italian cuisine is on your mind.

The Sparrows serves up a variety of fresh, handmade continental pasta and Central and Eastern European dumplings in an unexpectedly airy space underneath a railway archway in Red Bank.

The second of their city centre venues, Tampopo Manchester Corn Exchange has the same wok-fresh East Asian menu as its older sister on Albert Square, but with a bigger, more style-led setting. Think statement lighting and tiles, splashes of bright colour, and low-lit individual tables instead of the shared bench seating of the original.

We’d rather see a restaurant that does one thing well than one that does a wide variety of dishes to the same average standard. Yard & Coop Manchester is firmly in the former category. It serves buttermilk fried chicken and that’s about it, unless you’re a veggie in which case you can have halloumi instead.