Manchester is having a moment that London hasn't fully clocked yet. Higher Ground's farm-to-table bistronomy, Layr's hole-in-the-wall tiramisu hatch, Hong Kong dim sum at Tai Wu, laminated baked goods at Half Dozen Other, and the understated seasonal cooking at Erst — this is a city operating with genuine confidence rather than chasing the capital's approval. If you haven't been, go before everyone else figures it out. The most interesting fresh trend is the unironic rehabilitation of Angel Delight. This isn't nostalgia as irony — Public & Plants' strawberry Angel Delight croissants and George Egg's Guinness riff suggest something more interesting: a generation of cooks who grew up with these flavours and aren't embarrassed by them. Whether this matures into something lasting or stays a novelty sprint depends on whether anyone finds a use for the texture beyond the joke. Related: the 'silly crisps' wave from Alex Castaldo of Tonge Tied Hot Sauce, which lives entirely on Instagram reels and is funnier than it sounds. Causing genuine excitement in the right circles: Calder Cheeses in Todmorden has matured a triple cream Delice de Bourgogne with Lao Gan Ma chilli crisp. This is the kind of cross-cultural ingredient collision that actually makes sense — the fat of the cheese absorbing the toasted chilli oil, the fermented depth playing against the cream. Separately, the pivot to fresh fenugreek and fenugreek seeds is overdue. Aktar Islam's dahi paneer at Oudh, the Georgian chkmeruli with blue fenugreek at Kinkally, and the spiced fenugreek baba dessert at Akub by Fadi Kattan all point to the same thing: bitter is genuinely having its moment, and it's more interesting than the sweet-salt pendulum that dominated the last decade. The tropical vinegar wave has legs. Suka Pinakurat — the fiery Filipino coconut vinegar — is the pantry find of the season; if you haven't made adobo with it, you're missing its best application. Acid League's mango-jalapeño living ACV dressing and the maple smoked pineapple vinegar from Kai by Matblak extend the logic into dressings, which is where most people will actually use them. Angostura bitters getting the same treatment — into bolognese, buttercream, hot chocolate, chip shop chips — is either genius or chaos, and the honest answer is probably both. Some arrivals deserve a sceptical eyebrow. Astragalus root (milkvetch) is being hailed as the new lion's mane at Erewhon, described here with the useful qualifier 'allegedly' immune-boosting and the honest note that it tastes like wet twigs. The adaptogen supplement cycle has a predictable rhythm: obscure, hype, mainstream, debunked, repeat. Lion's mane hasn't left yet and astragalus is already queuing. Pottery dining — eating in studio-restaurant hybrids pairing handcrafted ceramics with food — is either the logical endpoint of the artisanal-everything decade or a beautiful thing, depending entirely on whether the food is good. Fecund Supperclub and Kiln in Newcastle are worth watching. The stale column is doing real work here. Burrata has crossed the tipping point — the piece says so directly, and it's right. The replacement candidates are better: Stinking Bishop, Epoisse, and La Tur Alta Langa all have the autumnal funk that makes a cheese plate worth building a meal around. The micro-restaurant wave (eight to ten covers at Gwen in Machynlleth, Appalachia in Shoreditch, Juno Omakase in Notting Hill) reflects genuine cooking ambition uncoupled from volume economics, which produces better food and worse booking odds. And the formal retirement of brutalist cafe minimalism in favour of lace doilies, mismatched crockery and bric-a-brac boho is either a correction or a new tyranny — early days. The piece calls 'no added sugar' stale, which is a defensible but arguable read. Brown sugar lattes, muscovado brownies and jaggery rice pudding aren't really in the no-added-sugar category — they're craft sugar as flavour, not health signalling, and the argument that unrefined molasses-rich sugars are the flavour story of the moment sits better in the fresh column. Dot cakes — school cake in a pot, the return of lemon drizzle and coffee-walnut — are correctly stale, which doesn't mean they're bad. Sometimes things go stale because they were good enough to reach saturation. The smashed-everything moratorium is long overdue.
