Buzzy Britalian Manteca Leaves Soho to Bring Yolky Pastas and a Glass Salumi Room to Shoreditch

Buzzy Britalian restaurant Manteca, known for a brown crab cacio pepe and doing unholy things with pig skin, will depart Soho when it opens its new Shoreditch restaurant this October. Co-founders Chris Leach (Sager and Wilde) and David Carter (Smokestak) have told Eater that the restaurant on Great Marlborough Street — heralded as a first permanent restaurant when it opened in 2019 — comes to the end of a two-year lease in November 2021, which will not be renewed. The expected doubling up of the brand is not to be.

But with this new opening at 49-51 Curtain Road, formerly home to Pizza Express, comes the opportunity to redesign a space from the ground up, That means a terrace, a pasta bench, and most strikingly, a glass-walled salumi room, in which cured sausages seasoned with fennel pollen; or lambrusco and black pepper, can hang alongside larger cures like coppa. And while new dishes like zampone, the poached, stuffed pig’s trotter loved at Christmas in Emilia Romagna; a stuffed pig’s snout; and a pig skin ragù with Parmesan and crispy pig skin are, well, all pig, some of the stars of its early life like that (not *that*) brown crab cacio pepe and a snack of pig head fritti with apple mostarda will make the journey east, as well as the restaurant’s focus on putting amaro in people’s glasses alongside natural wines.

Manteca

The design will be a kind of tempered industrial, with “buttery” yellow tones and blonde wood softening steel kitchen islands, the dark wood pasta bench, and a new wood-fired oven in the kitchen to go with the transparent meat cave below.

At the height of the city’s summer of fresh pasta in 2019, the duo’s Mayfair residency at 10 Heddon Street was seemingly everywhere — at least on Instagram. Photogenic dishes like the aforementioned tonnarelli with crab; sweetcorn ravioli with girolles; and the artful splat of pig’s tail ragù propelled it into its Soho guise; the duo will hope that these new arrivals, both on the plate and in the design, will fuel the next stage of its life.

More soon.