If you want to see the athletics finals, you may already be too late. Tickets have been selling, by phone and internet, faster than they did before the Sydney Olympiad – the model of excellence against which all succeeding Games will be judged. After so many sporting cock-ups, and the national laughing-stock of the Millennium Dome, the Government scarcely paused last July in approving the £105m hand-out that guaranteed the Games would at least go ahead.Now that Manchester’s endeavours are financially secure, the public is warming to the Games in spectacular fashion. Since then, there’s been the political farce of Britain dropping the baton in the race for the 2005 World Athletics Championships, and the bulldozing of Wembley Stadium without having anything to put in its place, which showed the red card to England’s hopes of staging the 2006 World Cup.The eight-day festival of sport that begins on 25 July is not merely Britain’s first truly global sports jamboree of the 21st century – it is the last for many years to come, which explains why everyone from Tony Blair downward is so desperate for the city to get it right. Then there were two ill-fated and costly bids for the Olympics by Manchester itself – comfortably beaten by Atlanta for the 1996 Games, and trounced by Sydney four years later. In fact, in terms of a successful recent attempt by Britain to stage a global multi-sport tournament, there’s virtually no act to follow at all – unless you count the World Student Games at Sheffield in 1991.The last time the Commonwealth’s elite gathered in these islands, at Edinburgh in 1986, it rained for a fortnight and we were treated to a boycott by many African and Asian countries over Britain’s sporting links with South Africa, plus the unedifying sight of Robert Maxwell settling the bill. By British standards, Manchester has an easy act to follow when it stages the 17th Commonwealth Games in just three months’ time.
No silly squiggles or fancy garnishes; it’s all for eating and comes in enormously generous quantities.. Chef and owner Mark Prescott spent years working with the Roux brothers, but his heart’s in Lancashire and he adapts French techniques to a region with its own culinary traditions, cooking with soul and skill. Lancashire pork terrine with piccalilli will make you rethink that peculiarly British pickle. Starters in the dining room are £5-£6, mains from £8.50 to £17.95, puddings mostly £4.50.Oh yeah, and the food Sensational. Kicks off with a French Minervois for £11.60 a bottle, covers the globe fairly, and there’s a short “proprietor’s selection” for connoisseurs, big spenders and not only Francophiles: the 1997 Eileen Hardy Shiraz from Australia is £59.Price Eat at the bar and you will spend about £20 on three courses. You can bet that chicken Kiev with Caesar salad will have real class, that the custard will be French-style not lumpy English, that cr? caramel with prunes and sultanas in Armagnac will be beautiful and boozy.Wine list Not ridiculously long, but it has depth and breadth.
Bar and restaurant staff dress formally in black aprons, white shirts and ties, but this is Lancashire: they’re professional, not po-faced.Menu Ingredients are local, the range of dishes impressive. The fact that there are so many football clubs in the area and few places as good as this to eat may have some bearing on the evening clientele.Service Even if you spin out lunch into the bar staff’s afternoon off they don’t shoo you out. That’s when you’ll get suits from local pharmaceutical companies lunching on business. Not quite the typical village pub, but it does sell beer as well as fine bar food and restaurant meals.D?r Just a touch of the furniture showroom; this is not a traditional, dingy beamed country pub, but more smart roadhouse with its emerald and red colour scheme, carpet patterned with mulberry trees, and light oak furniture.Ambience and clientele The sun pours in through the mullioned windows into the bar during the day. There are weeping willows around the carpark, fields of lambs and hills beyond. Location Mosslea Road, Wrightington, near Wigan, Lancashire (01257 451400).
