What they say
Don’t take our word for it, here are some of the things other people have to say about The Modern Caterer at Gabriel’s Kitchen and the Gallery Cafe.
The Good Food Guide 2009
The Gallery Cafe - ‘Best Family Restaurant 2009′
This lunch spot has revitalised the Whitworth Gallery’s atmosphere and brightened breaks for the university and hospital staff who work nearby. Peter Booth cooks from a tiny kitchen facing on to a sunny yellow room hung with a changing selection fo artwork. The menu is simple, cheerful and exactly what’s required.
Breakfast dishes include boiled egg and soldiers. For lunch, soup might be green lentil with vegetable, and there’s always a simple hot dish like pasta with new season’s courgettes, sweet peas, Parmesan and lemon zest. Sandwiches might include a house club or a wrap of smoked mackerel and salad leaves, and desserts are brownies or towering, homespun sandwich cakes. There’s an emphasis on local produce, with a chart on the wall indicating what’s in season. Kids get a fresh, appealing menu and gallery resource kit for £5. Fairtrade wine is £3 a glass, or try the organic cider or lager from Liverpool.
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The Guardian Guide
Gabriel’s Kitchen
18 April 2009
Long before the credit crunch kicked in, Peter Booth was pouring his energies into democratic, casual dining. His Whitworth Gallery café (best Family Restaurant in the 2009 Good Food Guide) produces flavourful dishes, at fair prices, using quality seasonal, regional ingredients. It attracts, not just art lovers, but many clued-up Mancs. However, new venture, Gabriel’s Kitchen (daytime only), takes Booth’s ethos to the streets. A bright, white tiled canteen, in which you eat at simple, parquet-topped tables, the food is as neat and fresh as the venue. A salad of steak (from renowned Glossop butcher, Mettrick’s), zingy endive, balsamic and good, salty Pecorino is simplicity itself. Across the table, proper chips and a punchy sweet pepper relish gild a great, juicy burger.
Tony Naylor
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City Life Food and Drink Greater Manchester 2009
Gallery Cafe - ‘Top 5 for a Sandwich’
As far as Citylife is concerned, no one makes better butties than the Modern Caterer. Committed to using the freshest local ingredients to concoct fast, healthy lunchtime food “of restaurant quality”, daily doubled breaded wonders include a September special of Organic smoked Lancashire cheese with tomato and white onion marmalade. Bolster your sarnie selection with a lip-smacking seasonal soup.
‘The Gallery Cafe’
Operated by local food hero The Modern Caterer aka Pete Booth, this top quality café picked up the award for Best Family restaurant in the good food guide 2009. For four years now, the Gallery Café has carved its niche as the best lunch venue on this stretch, and is consequently busy six days a week - even when the students are away…. The Gallery has pretty outdoor seating with parasols. The small seasonal menu reflects a commitment to quality and ethics.
‘Gabriel’s Kitchen’
Expect exceptional fast, healthy food in the form of sandwiches soups and Med-influenced dishes – plus old fashioned café favourites like banana splits and kickerbocker glory.
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The Metro North West
Gabriel’s Kitchen - ‘Restaurant Review 4*’
February 2009
Gabriel’s Kitchen is already well known to Manchester’s food fans. Liverpudlian Peter Booth runs the Whitworth Gallery Café, and this new venture at the rear of the Royal Infirmary is named after his son.
The food is superb. Booth is known for promoting local suppliers, and Gabriel’s Kitchen certainly does that. There’s a huge map behind the counter, marking out such names as Derbyshire’s Mettricks butchers or Chipping’s Leagram cheese. Confidence in the quality of the food is supported by an open kitchen, where you can watch the food being crafted.
Gabriel’s Kitchen also offers a range of sandwiches, soups and breakfast dishes, but there’s a detail and care to proceedings that marks it out as more than a great lunchtime destination. Tempted by more unusual options such as smoked mackerel wraps or broccoli and pine nut bruschetta, I went for the hot pot of mutton shoulder, served with pickled cabbage and bread from Chorlton’s Barbakan bakery. It was a wise choice. A layer of thinly sliced potatoes hid some perfectly cooked chunks of meat, vegetables and gravy. Accompanied by a Fentiman’s Dandelion and Burdock, it was a nostalgic treat.
Finishing off with a home-made apple danish, I left Gabriel’s Kitchen delighted. Worth seeking out when a trip to the sandwich shop just won’t do.
Aaron Lavery
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The Daily Telegraph
The Gallery Cafe - ‘Three of a Kind - Best of the Brunch’
8 November 2008
Cosy and unpretentious, this open plan café serves restaurant quality food in a simple, cheerful atmosphere. Culture vultures, hospital staff, university students and families all love it.
Cuisine: Gutsy and good value
Belinda Richardson
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City Life Food and Drink Greater Manchester 2008
The Gallery Cafe - ‘Top 5 for Soup’
On a cold winter’s day, you’d be hard pushed to find a more pleasant spot - or a more heartening soup - than you find with Peter Booth and his crew. Here in the quietness of the Whitworth Art Gallery foyer you can sit and slurp a steaming bowl of traditional soup made fresh with carefully sourced ingredients every day and served with bread from local Barbakan bakery for just £3.25.
‘The Gallery Cafe’
For three years now Peter Booth aka the Modern Caterer’s little cafe within the Whitworth Art Gallery foyer has carved a niche as the best lunch venue on this stretch, and is consequently busy six days a week - even when the students are away. In 2006 the cafe won Manchester Food and Drink Festival Coffee Bar and Casual Dining Venue award. This year Peter is planning a sister venue in Gabriel’s Kitchen nearby, and the Gallery Cafe has pretty outdoor seating with parasols. The small seasonal menu reflects a commitment to quality and ethics - gourmet snacks and soups are about a fiver and there’s not a cucumber garnish in sight. Specials include wrap of smoked trout (Port of Lancaster Smokehouse), lemon and fresh herb cream cheese and rocket (£5.25) and the Gallery Cafe Club Sandwich - roast Goosnargh chicken, avocado puree and crispy bacon (£4.75). “We’re a cafe but we like to think we can create food of a restaurant quality,” says Peter, who also stocks Cain’s beer to “stay true to my Scouse roots”.
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Metro Life - Food and Drink Awards 2007
12 December 2007
FOOD HERO OF THE YEAR
Peter Booth
At the Whitworth’s Gallery Café, it used to chalk up the provenance of its ingredients on the blackboards; chicken from Goosnargh, cheese from Kirkham’s. Now, it doesn’t need to bother.
‘We used to mention where the products come from,’ says Peter Booth, aka The Modern Caterer and Gallery Cafe boss, ‘but now we’ve defined ourselves as a little business which has its heart in the quality of the food, so we’ve stopped mentioning it. People have come to expect that when they come in here, if they’re getting a piece of chicken it’ll be off the top end of the market. I’m very happy that we’ve come to that point where there’s trust.’
Booth opened the café in 2005, and has built a reputation for quality and a thoughtful, ethical stance. Customers are often seen scribbling down details of seasonal veg from the chart on the wall, and his second café on Upper Brook Street – Gabriel’s Kitchen – will continue his commitment to energy-saving and recycling when it opens early next year. It’s all eminently sensible, as is Booth’s quiet habit of making links with the community around the Whitworth; the schoolchildren who troop through the gallery, patients and staff from the hospital and local representatives from Fairtrade and Food Futures.
The changing artwork, too, plays a part. ‘We’ve been working with someone from the Fairtrade Foundation who is going to Ethiopia taking photographs of coffee growers. We’re going to be bringing some coffee back, and selling the same coffee as in the pictures on the wall.’
This year saw The Modern Caterer’s second Real Food Fair, in the grounds of the gallery, named best festival event of the Manchester Food And Drink Festival. ‘It was all developed on a bit of a whim,’ admits Booth, ‘and, last year, we invited a lot of the people we purchase from to come and create a bit of a market. It was an excellent day, so this year we did it again. We showed Black Gold, and a friend of mine is a Pilates instructor so we did a class. One of the best parts was a divine chocolate cake competition. A lady from the gallery won, and the second prize went to one of my waitresses.’
Gabriel’s Kitchen is named after Booth’s five-year-old son, and feeding children good food is a priority for Booth, whose £5 children’s menu looks pretty tempting even from an adult perspective. ‘We’ve got a big connection with the education department here; for the fair we did two sessions and made flapjacks with the children. My mother made them all little aprons and hats. It’s important, that’s what I do with my own son. He’s very enthusiastic in the kitchen – he’s always been sitting on the worktops.’
The Modern Caterer was named on an impulse when Booth was filling in forms to apply for the Gallery Café space, but it has come to represent something to customers of the café and the outside catering arm (which does weddings, university and Manchester Museum events). ‘The name has come to have a little meaning as we’ve grown. It’s developed itself a little bit, because we like to think that we’re cooking in modern ways. You could still go into many a kitchen and find an old-style chef thickening the soup with flour, but it’s not the done thing in this day and age.’
Sadly for those who like the idea of eating Booth’s food for dinner as well as for lunch, Gabriel’s Kitchen won’t open in the evening (with the exception of the odd themed event). There’ll be more equipment and extraction, allowing for him and chef Jason Kosh to ‘move the cooking on a bit’. ‘I think we can do what we want to do in the lunch times without getting greedy. A lot of people do come in here for a bowl of soup and a glass of tap water, and that’s the kind of business we want. We won’t ever look down our noses.’ And there you have it – spoken like a true food hero.
Emma Jean Sturgess
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Moving Manchester
The Gallery Cafe - ‘Artistic Pleasure’
June 2007
You might not know about the small cafe situated at the Whitworth Art Gallery. You might not know that it’s the current holder of Manchester Food and Drink Festival Coffee Bar of the Year title. You might not even have visited the internationally renowned gallery itself. Following our (first ever) visit, I can highly recommend the whole experience.
The cafe is run by Peter Booth (or ‘The Modern Caterer’), who has been bringing a fresh and reassuring spirit of good food to the gallery since the 1980s. Not only does he provide a seasonally changing menu with a focus on local produce, delicious organic drinks and Fairtrade coffees, Peter is planning his own vegetable garden at the university allowing him to grow his own produce: ‘I went out and bought all the stuff to do it,’ he told us, ‘but then realised that there’s quite a few procedures to go through, so as soon as it’s all sorted we’ll be away’.
His attitude is certainly reflected in the overall feel of the cafe, which is cosy with no hint of pretension or jumping on gastro or eco bandwagons. The food is carefully sourced and selected but they don’t make a big deal of it. A subtle example of this appreciation of seasonal produce is presented in the form of a giant blackboard containing a detailed and meticulously drawn chart indicating when every imaginable vegetable is in season. It was in perfect view of the kitchen and you could tell all the staff knew it like the back of their hand. I imagined that literally the second something came into season they’d source a load of it and that would instantly inspire the menu for the following week.
We visited quite early but were permitted to choose from the lunch menu. All the menus are displayed on big blackboards. We chose two cappuccinos, a Wensleydale and caramelised carrot chutney on tomato bread sandwich, aubergine cous cous with fried halloumi and lemon zest, all washed down with two of the most purely refreshing juices I have ever tasted.
My sandwich was perfect. Having been a bit unsure about ‘carrot chutney’ I was pleasantly surprised to find that this was a sweet, delicious complement to the creamy and also slightly sweet flavour of the cheese. It was served with a gorgeous salad of diced carrots and herbs (a million miles nicer than it sounds).
The cous cous was presented in a large bowl filled mercilessly with an overly generous mountain of the delicately flavoured grains. A perfect balance of sharp tomato, light pepper sauce and zesty lemon tang, interspersed with chunks of aubergine. The whole thing was topped with meaty strips of grilled halloumi adding weight and substance to the whole dish. A perfect balance and a joy to eat, it’s just a shame that my partner’s appetite couldn’t quite match the generosity of the portion which lead to slight disappointment at his inability to finish this wonderful healthy fresh tasting creation.
Even if you’re not interested in the art hanging on the walls, I heartily recommend a visit to the cafe, solely to appreciate what one paper described as ‘the fine art of good food’ - I’m no art expert but I totally agree.
Siobhan Hanley
The Independent Magazine
The Gallery Cafe - ‘Side Orders - Culture Vultures’
30 June 2007
One of the UK’s best resources for antique wallpaper and textiles has also earned praise for its cafe, which serves a seasonally changing menu using the freshest locally sourced produce. The cafe was a prizewinner at last year’s Manchester Food and Drink Festival.
The Independent
The Gallery Cafe - The Information - ‘The 50 Best UK Cafés’
11 March 06
Even the bananas used in the fruit loaf are Fairtrade at this café at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester. The tiny kitchen is now run by Peter Booth of The Modern Caterer who has installed a seasonal blackboard menu featuring local fare such as Mrs Kirkham’s Lancashire cheese and Goosnargh chicken. Breakfast could be toast and jam or a dry-cured bacon sandwich, with organic fruit juice.
Metro North West - Food and Drink
The Gallery Cafe - ‘The Fine Art of Good Food’ 4*
1 June 05
Where can you get great pasta in Manchester? Low-lit, buzzy Piccolino does dense, chewy spaghetti. In the noisy circus of San Carlo they serve it a bit softer and sauce it nicely. The best we’ve tried this year, though, was cooked by Peter Booth and served in the plain, rather boxy environs of The Gallery Café at Whitworth Art Gallery.Booth’s company, The Modern Caterer is in its ninth week of service at the café. He serves pappardelle with purple sprouting broccoli, cherry tomatoes, toasted pine nuts and pecorino cheese (£5.25) as part of an enticing menu chalked on to boards surrounding the proscenium arch-style hatch at one end of the room. It’s a tiny kitchen from which to produce breakfasts of baked flat mushroom, fried free-range eggs and hot buttered toast (£2.45), specials such as roast Goosnargh chicken leg with black olives, rosemary and chickpeas (£5.25) and desserts that could include Belgian chocolate and crunchy peanut butter cheesecake (£2.25).Booth, whose last Manchester job was at Obsidian, is the only chef, assisted by two waitresses. He’s constantly on display and subject to interruptions from his customers. It’s a difficult way to work. Why did he want the Whitworth contract?’It was a great opportunity to do some really good food here, and it was already kitted out,’ he says. ‘The customers enjoy watching; they like to see that there are scones coming out of the oven. The audience are here and it’s a question of doing good things for them and getting the custom back.’
Getting the custom back should be relatively easy for The Modern Caterer, because of the contrast with what’s gone before. The last operator was a catering giant serving bad sandwiches. Before that, Booth says: ‘The lady who had it had a good name for her cakes, but it was always a quiche-and-coleslaw business.’
The key to this is integrity, and responsible sourcing to satisfy an educated consumer. ‘We do try to give them what they want. We pay that bit more for the chicken from Goosnargh. We use a Fairtrade tea blend and the coffee is imported and roasted by a company in Bury.
‘It’s easy to say we will work with local and seasonal products, and it’s easy to get lost within that and not really do it, but we’re trying to continue on those grounds. And we have a saying that the only things we don’t prepare are the ice cream and the bread, although we’ve been known to make some ice cream and we’ve been known to make a loaf.’
A new menu will go up today, but the late lunch we tried is testament to Booth’s hard work and the fact that everything is fresh and when it’s gone, it’s gone. My friends risotto (£5.50), chalked up as new-season asparagus, courgette and mint, transmuted into plain courgette and mint and was delicious, with a comforting texture and a summery freshness. My pasta (£5.25) was linguini from the universally wonderful De Cecco range with broccoli, cherry tomatoes, pine nuts and grated pecorino: a really lively, fresh bowl of goodness with no need for red sauce. Slices of Victoria sponge (£2.25) and banana and sultana bread (£1.25), were wrapped up and made a great at-desk diversion later in the afternoon.
The Whitworth is due to spruce up its entrance hall, adding sofas and coffee tables to make the airy space more inviting and less institutional. As a modernising influence though, the new look will be important, but not as important as the arrival of The Modern Caterer.
Emma Jean Sturgess
Testimonials
‘Thank you for the lovely buffet you did for us yesterday. I have already had an email from one of the participants to
say how much she enjoyed the visit and what an excellent lunch it was!’
Janet Nelson, Whitworth Art Gallery
‘Many thanks for catering so well for my leaving do last night - impressive attention to details and friendly and
efficient staff.’
Andrew Tullo, The Royal Eye Hospital
Just a quick note to thank you for the quality of the food, the inspired cooking and cheerful service at lunchtime today.
Having read the brief review in the Independent which puts you in their list of the UK’s top 50 cafes, we had no idea
of what we would find; you exceeded our expectations by a mile! You said that you were going to repeat these special
lunch menus again, please let us know in advance; we’ll be there!
John Davies