Manteca
They break whole carcasses in the building, cure the salami themselves, and the whey left over from making the ricotta goes into the caramel on the chocolate tart (Manteca, Hot Dinners).
Why go
Andy Hayler is not an easy critic and he marks every dish out of 20. He gave the fennel salami 14, the pork sausage 14 and the fried ciccioli 14, then gave both ragus 13 and the grilled greens barely 12. He ended on this: It is, though, good to see a place making an effort to using all the parts of an animal carcass, rather than just buying in prepared portions, which happens in London more than many people realize
(andyhayler.com).
Chris Leach came off Kitty Fishers and Pitt Cue, David Carter came off Smokestak, and they ran this as a pop-up at 10 Heddon Street in the summer of 2019 and then as a long residency on Great Marlborough Street before taking a former Pizza Express on Curtain Road in November 2021 (Hot Dinners). The kitchen's own description of itself is whole-animal butchery, hand-rolled pasta, wood-fired bread and an in-house salumeria.
Michelin has it on the current Bib Gourmand list for 2026, and Jake Missing scored the room 8.4 and put a shared meal at around £30 a head before wine (The Nudge, The Infatuation).
Order this / avoid
- Order: the house salumi first, cut Rizla-thin, because it is the one thing both critics agreed on. Then the tonnarelli with brown crab cacio e pepe, and the pig head fritti for the pilacca that comes with it. Duck ragu if the pangrattato is on it.
- Avoid: a quiet meal. Hayler ate a weekday lunch and said the acoustics felt like a nightclub. Go easy on the wine list too, since he priced a Barolo at £358 against a market value of £247.
What locals & experts say
- Andy Hayler, September 2022, marking every plate:
Manteca is certainly doing well commercially, but for me there were rather too many dishes that needed some more work.
He put the fazzoletti duck ragu at 13 out of 20 for lacking depth and the grilled greens at barely 12,undercooked to the point of being almost raw
.3 - Jake Missing, The Infatuation, scored 8.4 at this address:
There's a stylishness in its quiet straightforwardness and, whether you've got four legs or two legs, that's the sign of a very good restaurant.
On the move from Soho, less warmly:Sizing up means losing other things, and the oat-toned Shoreditchness of this spot isn't quite as low-lit-and-lean-in as Manteca's old temporary home.
2 - Catherine Hanly, Hot Dinners, the week it opened in Shoreditch:
Tonnarelli, brown crab cacio e pepe, this is probably the dish you'll see most on Instagram and there's a reason for that, it's VERY good.
4 - No chef vote. All 622 lines of the London industry-vote file were searched on 1 August 2026 and no working cook or operator in the corpus has named Manteca. For a Bib-level Shoreditch room that is a hole in our evidence, not a verdict on the food.
Good to know
- Where: 49-51 Curtain Road EC2A 3PT, just off Great Eastern Street in a unit that used to be a Pizza Express. Shoreditch High Street overground, or Old Street.
- Sites: one. The Heddon Street pop-up and the Great Marlborough Street residency are both finished, and reviews of Great Marlborough Street describe a room that no longer exists.
- Size: large, over two floors, with booths, counter seats and a charcuterie cabinet downstairs. It works for a group.
- Noise: high, on a weekday lunch as well as at night, per Hayler.
- Money: about £30 a head sharing small plates and pasta without wine, per The Infatuation. Hayler paid £60 a head with three courses and a little wine.
- Diet: vegetarian options are real. Hot Dinners counted two of five pastas meatless on its visit, plus focaccia, a kale salad and a ricotta crostino. That is press rather than a statement by the venue, and nobody makes a vegan claim.
- Michelin: a current Bib Gourmand on the 2026 London list. The
michelin:field here is empty for a mechanical reason and not a factual one: our cached guide file carries stars only, so the Bib is recorded underawards:until the cache is filled. - Hygiene: FSA rating 5, inspected 16 January 2025.7
Verdict
should-visit — Go for what happens in the basement, not for what is on Instagram. Manteca buys whole animals and breaks them down in the building, cures its own salumi, rolls its own pasta and bakes its bread over wood, and Andy Hayler, who is hard to please and marks every plate, singled out precisely that: it is good to see a place using all the parts of a carcass rather than buying in prepared portions, which he says happens in London more than people realize. That is craft investment you can taste, and it is why the salami scored 14 out of 20 from a critic who gave the duck ragu 13 and the greens 12. Jake Missing scored the room 8.4 and put a shared meal at about £30 a head without wine, which for this kind of buying is Bib Gourmand logic, and Michelin agrees: it is on the 2026 Bib list. It holds at worth-the-detour rather than higher because the two independent reads are both from 2022, one of them found too many dishes needing work, the wine is marked up hard against retail, and no working London chef in our vote file has named it.