
Hamish Smith reviews Manchester restaurant-bar Fenix. There's a lot of style, but is there substance?
At some indefinable time as the noughties segued into the twenty-tens, style bars went out of style.
There was a sort of slow-release epiphany in which people stopped visiting bars for their visuals and vibe and gazed down into their glasses, for the first time considering what the hell they were drinking. Bars became less fancy, but drinks, well, they got fancier.
But the style bar didn’t die, it just changed its name and moved to Mayfair. They follow the money, you see, surviving off the rich, like manufacturers of red trousers.
But the sweep of giraffe-patterned flooring before me is not in west London, it’s in Manchester. There is money here – serious money – and that is the most rational explanation for Fenix, a restaurant-bar venue which looks like it’s a troglodytic network of caves carved out of a chalk mine.
In the large ground-floor bar, back-lit thickets of dried wheat hang from the ceiling, random over-sized animal statues make for Mafia-boss vibes and flickering faux fires take us straight to a 4-star lobby.
This latest offering from restaurant group Permanently Unique (the owner of Tattu) is themed around Greece, but it’s all Dubai. In décor and vibe, the downstairs space here is a modern-day style bar.
But I’m told, among a certain demographic, this is the place to be. At the business end of the week it positively crawls with Love Island acolytes, pout-snapping their way through their hospitality experience. Thank the Greek god of mercies that on this quiet Tuesday night, the VIP rope hangs limply by the bar. Clearly, trade hospitality show NRB at Manchester Central isn’t a big date in the micro-influencer calendar.
What the barren expanse takes from the atmosphere it adds to our seating options. We take up a prime cave booth with wraparound view of the venue, just out of sight of a few straggler ’grammers loitering around the toilets, next to the bar’s showcase staircase.
DRINKS
I’m not one for drawn-out explanations, but when the menu arrives it does need a little introduction. It’s divided into four sections – Earth, Water, Fire and Wind – with each cocktail anchored to a tale of Greek mythology. This is all thoroughly explained in the kind of small print that makes you question the designer, or if they're hiding something.
Balance was certainly missing from the Dirty Old Fashioned (£14.75 – Macallan Double Cask 12, Maker’s Mark, oregano and olive oil), which came in a cloud of dry ice CO2 (thankfully billowing from outside of the glass) and an equally smoky, olive and oregano-heavy taste profile. One of those spins that made a better argument for the credentials of the classic than its own.
Circe’s Poison (£13 – El Dorado 3, sour cranberry, Cointreau and lime), inspired by the mythological sorcerer who could metamorphose enemies into animals, was a Cosmo – obviously. One pepped by rum and given an acidic boost with sour cranberry, but the Cointreau still won, to a rather-too-sweet end.
Clockwise from top left: Dirty Old Fashioned, Circe’s Poison, Heracles’ Eighth Trial, Hedonist Temptation
Hedonist Temptation (£15.50 – Haku vodka, Everleaf Mountain, Syrah, chocolate and Laurent Perrier champagne) was an ode to Dionysus and attempted to unify “two of the planet’s most indulgent ingredients”, champagne and chocolate, in what was a dry, uneventful collision. It was – and I always think this is the challenge with champagne cocktails – less than the sum of its parts.
Then there was Heracles’ Eighth Trial (£14.75) which, through the dubiously appropriate Signal Hill Canadian whisky, Italian red vermouth, watermelon oleo and lemon, attempted to tell the story of Heracles’ heroic capturing of fire-breathing, man-eating horses. It had the potential to be a real killer cocktail. No really, the dry ice – furiously pluming – was inside the sweet red liquid we were about to ingest. This cocktail should have been paired with a paramedic.
To this, I address all bartenders: please stop putting dry ice in your cocktails. If it really is “what the customers want”, tell them how and when to drink it – oh and tell them if they get it wrong, there’s a small chance it could violently kill them.
The prospect of internal injury does have a unique way of dampening the vibe, but putting that to one side, the cocktails here probably hit the brief. In a facile sort of sense, they’re thematically coherent with the bar and in aesthetics they certainly play to a crowd who are more interested in being seen with drinks than drinking them.
They weren’t bad cocktails, but in 2024, they really weren't great either. There's still a market for Fenix, no doubt, but when you’ve witnessed the wheel turn so far forwards, it’s an uneasy feeling to see it grind ever so slightly into reverse. If not a throwback, it certainly has echoes of a time when bars were more about style than substance.
ON THE SCORE BOARD
Hospitality 5/10
Drinks 5/10
Atmosphere 6/10
Décor 6/10
Value 5/10
TOTAL 5/10