The story
Manteca on Curtain Road, Shoreditch, is built around a clear set of convictions: whole-animal butchery, hand-rolled pastas, wood-fired breads, and an in-house salumeria. The name itself is a quiet homage to a Dizzy Gillespie song, and that same spirit — serious craft worn lightly — runs through everything the restaurant does. Gambero Rosso recognised Manteca with a fork in its 2025 guide, a nod to the kitchen's consistent, disciplined approach.
Chef and founder Chris Leach keeps the sourcing as deliberate as the cooking. Whole cows, native-breed pigs and goats arrive from Taste Tradition, a three-generation family farm in the North York Moors National Park where the Ashbridge family raises livestock outdoors using traditional practices. Those animals become the salumi cured in-house, the ragus, the meatballs, and the cuts finished over the grill. Nothing is wasted; the nose-to-tail approach is not a slogan but the structural logic of the menu.
The Sicilian influence at Manteca extends well beyond the plate. In April, Chris and wine buyer Emily Acha Derrington travelled to Sicily to blend the restaurant's first own-label wine, working with cooperative Valdibella — founded in 1998 by families who have farmed the region for generations — and importer Modal Wines. The result is a limited 1,000-litre white blending grillo, catarratto and catarratto extra lucido: aromas of honeysuckle and peach, a clean finish, and a touch of bitterness from ten days' skin contact on a portion of the catarratto. The label, designed by Chris, draws on the jazz album artwork of Reid Miles — another thread connecting the restaurant's name to its identity.
The broader wine list celebrates low-intervention and classic fine wines from Italy, wider Europe and North America, while the cocktail list leans into amari. Together, they make a strong case for staying at the table a little longer.
Recognition
Ambience
Details
History
good quality, good value cooking
Frequent queues stretching out of the door are testament to the daily popularity of this trendy modern Italian, which is marked by an ornamental boar's head suspended above the entrance. Manteca is that sort of place, a Shoreditch resource named boldly after a variety of fat – lard, to be precise. Ground floor seats offers views into the open kitchen, while downstairs refrigerated cabinets of home-cured charcuterie whet the appetite (salumi and prosciutto are tip-top and not to be missed). An infectious buzz animates the whole restaurant, augmented by piped tunes that some may find passably funky. The kitchen is deadly serious about sourcing from the best suppliers, menus often change several times a day, and the chefs have the autonomy to put new dishes together on the fly. The result is a much less formulaic repertoire than is often the Italian case. A plate of line-caught sea bass crudo dressed with green strawberries was a seasonal treat on our most recent visit, while a dramatic swoop of rich, silky duck liver parfait was served with black date jam and a pile of craggy chargrilled bread. Hand-rolled pasta stars in fazzoletti with duck-fat pangrattato or tonnarelli with brown crab cacio e pepe, ahead of mains from the wood-fired oven – perhaps John Dory, plaice or a premium cut of longhorn beef. Finish with a doorstop helping of almond cake with stone-fruit and vanilla gelato. A minimal-waste approach sees some of the beef fat turning up in the fudge with coffee, while the copiously unusable bits of globe artichoke might eventually find their way into the house cynar liqueur. Service is temperamentally patchy – mostly hail-fellow, occasionally glum. However, eminently kind pricing earns the places bonus points, especially as Italian wines on tap start at £5.50 a glass. Adventurous imbibers, meanwhile, should home in the sections of the list entitled ‘down the rabbit hole’.
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