Where to spend New Year’s Eve in Manchester

Dakota Grill Manchester is the work of former Malmaison owner, Ken McCollough and it is as dark-hued and handsome as the successful boutique hotel chain. It’s an inviting place with flickering candlelight, very retro-sexy – sure to be the setting for many a first date.

The focus at Dakota is on steaks which are very good – all grass-fed, 28 day-aged, hand-cut Aberdeenshire beef cooked over hot coals.

Exhibition is one of Manchester’s cluster of exciting multi-kitchen concepts (read: food halls) that just seem to be multiplying. In the former home of the Natural History Museum, the location makes it perfect for visitors to Manchester Central, the Radisson Blu and the Midland Hotel.

Food hall meets music festival is how we’d describe Freight Island to anyone confused about what they’ll find at this regenerated rail depot beyond Piccadilly Station. 

Loom & Ladle Bistro is the restaurant in Manchester Marriott Hotel Piccadilly – and a destination in its own right.

Rain Bar is a pub from JW Lees in an old umbrella factory. It’s a beautiful building and looks even better now after its recent refurb. The jewel in the crown though, or the spoke in its brolly, is a large outdoor area to the rear overlooking the Bridgewater Canal.

The Pen and Pencil is the Northern Quarter’s cool all-day hangout, modelled on the New York bar of the same name popular with the city’s journalists and ad men in the 1950s and 1960s. It has a reputation for great cocktails, quality food and an atmosphere that makes it stand out from nearby imitators.

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.

Manchester’s highest restaurant, bar and terrace 20 Stories was the opening of 2018 and still maintains its status as one of the city’s most popular place to eat, drink, be snapped and be seen.

Probably one of the most unique cocktail bars in Manchester, Alcotraz: Cell Block Three-Four is a speakeasy ‘prison’ that requires you to be cunning in order to get your drinks. 

The upper floor of this Grade II listed Wesleyan chapel lay empty for 40 years before Mission Mars bought the building in 2012 and opened it up as a music venue. The only question is why didn’t anyone do it sooner?

Albert’s Schloss is a Bavarian-inspired fun palace of extraordinary dimensions and clever design. Behind the glistening tiles of the former Manchester and Salford Wesleyan Mission building (est in 1910) you’ll discover a vast bar, real fires, perfectly preserved original plaster, and a wall stuffed generously with flowers by floral artists’ Frog. You’ll also find a stage, DJ booth and network of beer pipes and tanks serving unpasturised Pilsner Urquell to hordes of adoring punters.

So called because the performers used to play on a stage situated halfway up the wall, Band on the Wall has been a stalwart of the Manchester music scene for about 200 years.

Banyan in Manchester’s Corn Exchange has something for everyone and one of the best outdoor drinking and dining spots in the city.

If dancing on tables with two-pint steins is what you’re after, head to Bierkeller in The Printworks. This Bavarian-themed bar is best known for its live oompah bands which play at weekends. It’s a raucous night out complete with lederhosen and copious amounts of German beer.

BLVD is the place to go if you want cool cocktails and a party atmosphere with your meal. It’s a place to get glammed up, to see and be seen with a soundtrack of House, R&B and Hip Hop to go with your Mediterranean small plates.

Boom Battle Bar Manchester is an all-in-one bright neon activity centre in the Printworks. It’s an indoor playground primarily for adults (over 18s only after 7pm) with shuffleboard, axe throwing, augmented reality darts, pool tables, karaoke and beer or Prosecco pong.

The Bridgewater Hall is where Manchester gets serious about music. The international concert venue was built in the 1990s and its huge concrete structure was engineered to ensure the acoustics are as close to perfect as possible in a coming together of form and function.

Cloud 23 is one of Manchester’s highest dining and drinking experiences. Located 23 stories up in the Hilton Manchester Deansgate at Beetham Tower, it offers exceptional views of the whole of the city and beyond. 

If it’s all-day eating you’re after, all-day eating you’ll get at Cosy Club Manchester, and as you study the menu under the watchful eye of a selection of taxidermy and portrait paintings, you’ll quickly notice that there really is something for everyone here.

Like the interloping bird that gives it its name, Cuckoo was an odd-one-out when it first opened in Prestwich back in 2013. Since then a whole flock of likeminded, indie cafe-bars have landed in this suburb, but Cuckoo is still the favourite for many.

Depot Mayfield is an events venue with raw urban grit and cultural cachet. Manchester’s former railway station, it has been reborn as a home for arts, music, industry, fashion and business.

Ducie Street Warehouse is all sorts of things, but one of those things is a restaurant. It’s an all-day affair with everything from classic brunches to late-night cocktails. On the menu you’ll find a good selection of small sharing dishes and large plates – it’s a sociable kind of place. And of course, you’ll also find Ducie Street Warehouse’s signature focaccia flatbreads.

Electric Shuffle is a fresh take on shuffleboard. Usually associated with the pubbier end of the bar spectrum or the subterranean neon of a gaming venue, this is something new.

Fenix is a simple, rustic Greek restaurant as re-imagined by World of Interiors. The palette of creams and neutral stones is minimalist and sophisticated. It’s rather pared back considering Fenix is from the team behind Tattu but still a sense of opulence prevails.

The Fitzgerald, appropriately enough, channels those Great Gatsby vibes with its vintage stylings, and its 1920s glassware sets off the cocktails beautifully.

Flight Club is a hit in London, Birmingham and Manchester, with its primary aim (sorry) to offer a contemporary take on playing a round of arrows in the pub – you can book your own semi-private area with a dartboard where two to six of you can step up to the oche.

Gorilla is tucked under a railway arch, it has a slightly industrial vibe but it’s comfortable for all that. The cocktails are good and good value too – Gorilla is as much a bar as it is a restaurant.

The Ivy Manchester is an exuberant over-the-top place that’s perfect for glamming up and going out. The décor is wild yet smart and service is smooth and professional. The roof garden is a must.

There’s an abundance about The Ivy with the costumed doorman, and the levels and levels of fun: The Ivy Asia; The Brasserie; The Ivy Roof Garden; the lurid floors; the lacquered screens; the mirrored central bar. It all adds up to a sense of occasion, a place where dining out is something special, something to dress up for.

A fine-dining restaurant inside a casino with a celeb chef name above the door? Alarm bells. Yes, James Martin has his name across the massive billboard outside, but this is not an ostentatious venue.

If you’re a fan of cosy pubs with good beer and great craic, Mulligans will be right up your alley. Located just off Deansgate, it’s full of character and is Manchester’s oldest authentic Irish pub.

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.

Peaky Blinders is a cocktail bar and pub with food which pays homage to the hit TV series starring Cillian Murphy. The show was famously set in Birmingham but several classic scenes were filmed in Manchester, hence our mild obsession with it here.

Winning small plate fusion in an iconic and glamorous setting. Housed in Manchester’s iconic The Refuge Assurance Company dating back to 1858, this DJ-run restaurant and bar is large and sassy.

The River Restaurant at The Lowry Hotel is Manchester’s classic fine dining restaurant. Huge names that have run the kitchen include Marco Pierre White, while diners have included Jose Mourinho and Kylie.

Sexy Fish is no mere minnow in the UK dining scene. It’s brought to you by Caprice Holdings, the group behind some of London’s most glam dining spots. Think of it as more of a humongous mermaid – beautiful and ever so slightly improbable.

If you’re into EDM or club culture you’ll know The Warehouse Project as one of Manchester’s biggest nights out. It opened for the first time in 2006 and has returned for its four-month seasonal run every year since.

NQ bar and eatery Wilson’s Social is equally popular with daytime brunchers, co-workers and late night drinkers. Situated on the corner of Stevenson Square and Oldham Street, this glass-fronted space is light and airy in the daytime and buzzing at night with DJs and live music every weekend.

YES is a gargantuan place with four floors of fun. Despite that, it still has a low-key cool and something approaching a homely vibe for somewhere so big.

When a restaurant’s menu features lobster dynamite, you pretty much know straightaway that it might not be everyone’s cup of chai latte, and Yours, with its special red carpet-style Insta corridor and “dress to impress” reservation confirmation, isn’t going to appeal to style slouches.