It had been quite a week.
Due to a broken pipe in the flat above, our apartment was flooded and we had to vacate. It never rains but it pours, as they say. We took refuge in Manchester’s Treehouse for a few days until the deluge subsided, grateful for a dry space and a chance to experience the newest hotel in town.
Attached to Treehouse is Pip, a Michelin-recommended restaurant run by the award-winning chef, Mary-Ellen McTague. She is very much the chef of the moment having won Most Loved Chef at the I Love Manchester Awards, and I am a great fan of her food. It was, therefore, a privilege to be invited to sample her new festive menu. An added bonus was that I didn’t have to walk far to get home.
As the name suggests, Treehouse wears its green badge on its sleeve. Its commitment to sustainability is evident everywhere. It is a bit like staying in a tree house with wood as the dominant theme, down to the bedside table made from a sawn-off tree trunk. McTague brings the same environmental concerns to her cooking. All of the ingredients are locally sourced as much as possible and the carbon footprint reduced to a minimum. Equally, McTague is a champion of regional cuisine, as her signature Lancashire Hotpot testifies.
In the run-up to Christmas, the festive menu is as diverse and innovative as you would expect from a chef of McTague’s pedigree. I was delighted to see cheese gougères arrive though disappointed not to see them followed by her famous split pea chips with mushroom ketchup. But the British charcuterie and house pickles made up for it. The second course arrived with a superb Bacchus English white wine. Roasted squash, dill cured trout, and mushroom velouté matched the grassy bouquet of this eloquent wine.
Unexpectedly, the mains were based on pies and as northern as the Pennines. Vegetarian Christmas Pie consisted of shiitake mushrooms, onion stuffing, sprouts and chestnuts with a vegan red wine gravy. A delicious slice of festive vegetation. For the pescatarians among us, pan-roasted turbot in a shellfish bisque was equally as tasty. And a hearty Yorkshire Christmas Pie stuffed full of all the trimmings was the season encased in pastry.
But the standout dish was Lyme Park Venison with a suet pastry stuffed with faggot, moistened with a venison fat sauce. Gamey and tender, it was a taste of old England before the Victorian invasion of the bland bird of America. 
All in all, Pip’s festive menu was a wonderful take on the traditional Christmas fare that only Mary-Ellen McTague could pull off with her customary flair and culinary talent. After a traumatic week, I returned full and happy to the dry sanctuary of my treehouse.
Words and images by Robert Hamilton
