Climat

Eighth Floor, Open Kitchen, Clear Priorities

Most rooftop restaurants in British city centres sell the view first and work backwards from there. The food arrives as an afterthought, the wine list a commercial obligation. Climat, on the eighth floor of Blackfriars House on Parsonage, inverts that formula. The panorama is real — a wrap-around interior gives every table an unobstructed read of the Manchester skyline — but it functions as backdrop rather than headline act. What commands attention is the open kitchen at the room's centre, its aromas establishing the register before a single dish arrives.

Getting there requires a degree of intention. The entrance is dedicated but discreet, the kind of address that rewards those who have already done their research. That self-selection is not accidental. Climat is the younger sibling of Covino in Chester, and it positions itself further up the ambition register: larger, more architecturally deliberate, and more overtly wine-focused than its predecessor. The rooftop garden, complete with working beehives, provides additional seating when Manchester's weather permits, which it does less often than the city's al fresco dining scene would prefer.

What 'Parisian Ex-Pat' Actually Means on the Plate

The kitchen's self-description as 'Parisian ex-pat' cuisine is worth taking seriously as a menu architecture statement. It signals a Gallic orientation without a commitment to classical rigour, leaving room for retro British references and international inflections to co-exist on the same sharing-plates spread. That structural flexibility is the menu's defining characteristic, and it explains why a prawn cocktail with avocado mousse and baby gem vol-au-vents can sit beside salt fish beignets with aïoli and herb salad without the combination feeling confused.

The sharing format imposes a certain discipline. A concise fixed-price menu keeps choice bounded, which tends to concentrate kitchen effort rather than dilute it. Dishes like halibut with spinach and sorrel velouté demonstrate the kitchen's ability to let ingredient quality carry the argument , the sorrel's acidity doing precisely the structural work that a heavier sauce would obscure. Vegetable and salad courses receive serious attention: a combination of beetroot, whipped tofu, charcoal vinaigrette and mustard cress reads as a study in contrasting textures, with bitter, creamy, earthy and sharp elements held in deliberate tension. This is the kitchen at its most confident.

Not every course lands with the same assurance. An excessively oily dressing on purple sprouting broccoli undermined what should have been one of the more direct plates, and a plum tarte fine lacked the definition the rest of the menu implied. The cheese course, however, recovers well: four sourced selections including a sheep's milk St Helena, a Roquefort-adjacent sheep's milk Regalis, a lactic goat's milk Elrick Log, and raw milk Baron Bigod form a more considered finale than the dessert that preceded them. Well-sourced cheese at this level requires a supplier relationship and a point of view; Climat demonstrates both.

The Wine Side of the Equation

Manchester's serious dining scene has grown a wine culture to match, with venues like Another Hand and Bell treating the list as integral to the food proposition rather than ancillary to it. Climat sits in that current, but leans further into it structurally: one entire side of the room functions as a bar, and the list's scale and curation earned Star Wine List recognition as the number-one entry in 2023 and 2024, with an additional top-two placement in 2023.

Burgundy anchors the cellar without monopolising it. The list demonstrates a willingness to range across lesser-travelled appellations: a Xinomavro 2018 from Macedonia paired with lamb leg, roasted cauliflower and kale in a combination that showed real thought about weight and tannin structure. The Xinomavro grape's characteristic acidity and dark fruit density suits braised and roasted meat preparations in a way that more familiar red Burgundy might not. That kind of matching intelligence is what separates a serious wine programme from a well-stocked one.

The qualification is the service. Wine descriptions on the list trend generic, and the floor team's ability to guide a choice across unfamiliar regions falls short of what the cellar itself implies. A list this considered deserves either a dedicated sommelier or serving staff with the vocabulary to activate it. As the operation matures, closing that gap would bring the wine experience into alignment with the quality of what's in the bottle.

Where Climat Sits in Manchester's Current Dining Tier

Manchester's upper dining tier has become more defined in recent years. Mana operates at the progressive end of Creative British, while Skof and Adam Reid at the French occupy different quadrants of serious, technique-driven modern European cooking. Climat does not compete on the same terms as any of those. Its fixed-price, sharing-plates format with a broadly Gallic orientation and a wine-led philosophy places it in a different but coherent peer set: restaurants where the overall proposition matters as much as any single dish's technical achievement.

That positioning carries its own logic. Rooftop dining in British cities tends to commodify the view and underinvest in the kitchen. Climat refuses that trade-off, which is the more interesting editorial argument. For context, wine-led rooftop restaurants of equivalent seriousness in the UK are relatively rare; most venues that invest in elevation invest in cocktails, not Burgundy and Macedonian Xinomavro. The Star Wine List double recognition in consecutive years is a verifiable signal of where the cellar sits against national peers, even if the floor service has not yet caught up.

Compared against UK restaurants where the food ambition is similarly calibrated , venues like Moor Hall in Aughton or L'Enclume in Cartmel at the leading of the Northern England tier, or London operations like The Ledbury , Climat is operating at an earlier stage of refinement, with unevenness that the more established kitchens have already resolved. That is not a dismissal; it is a location on a trajectory. The kitchen shows consistent intelligence in its better moments, and the wine programme already punches at a level the food is working to match.

Planning Your Visit

Climat occupies the eighth floor of Blackfriars House, accessed via a dedicated entrance on Parsonage in Manchester city centre. The fixed-price format means the visit structure is determined on arrival rather than negotiated course by course, which suits the pacing of an evening that is as much about the wine as the food. Given the location and format, booking in advance is advisable , walk-in availability at the upper dining tier in Manchester has tightened as the city's reputation has grown. The rooftop garden seating operates seasonally, so timing a summer visit around that space adds a dimension the interior cannot replicate. For further context on what else Manchester's dining scene offers across different formats and price points, see our full Manchester restaurants guide, alongside our Manchester hotels guide, bars guide, wineries guide, and experiences guide.