Lennox. Manchester: ‘A boot camp of flavours’ – restaurant review

Nico Simeone is the Scottish-Italian chef behind the Six by Nico restaurant empire, and Lennox, in Spring Gardens, Manchester, is his new baby. If you are unfamiliar with Six by Nico, it’s a fever-dream version of fine dining: Simeone conjured up themes such as “The Chippie”, “Italian Road Trip” and “Ancient Rome”, then served six courses in homage to them. Tokyo! Mad Hatters! Childhood! At one point, the Six empire was growing like knotweed, and by 2025 there were 17 restaurants. You had more chance of eating at a Six by Nico than finding an NHS dentist.

Suffice to say, many adore the concept – overlooking its middling cooking skills – because it’s pocket-friendly, and the six-course format gives a night out with friends a sense of occasion not available at Pizza Express. Lennox, Simeone says, will be very different: à la carte, focused on dry-aged meat, but with the same playfulness and invention. There would be a fish finger with katsu curry and celeriac remoulade; a tempura oyster shell filled with dry-aged beef tartare and oyster emulsion; and gnocchi with deboned chicken wings and parmesan. Lennox would be personal, bespoke and absolutely unscalable. No rollout planned, no siree. But by August 2026, there will be three of them. Hang on, what? Yes, shortly after Manchester came Glasgow, and then Edinburgh. Simeone sleeps with one eye open; I salute his indefatigability.

Lennox’s gnocchi with chicken wings are ‘genuinely, strangely enticing. Does it work?’

We arrive at lunchtime and survey the menu, which is puzzling and with definite moments of delicious intrigue: mussels, sourdough, ’nduja, pickled fennel; pork cheek, gochujang, cheese on toast; sole kiev, caesar salad, burnt lemon. And for pudding, hazelnut tiramisu with dulce de leche, and pavlova with extra-virgin olive oil. There’s an open kitchen, a Japanese barbecue and a plethora of visible dry-ageing fridges for both steak and fish, because chefs seem certain that what guests want is to watch meat rot first-hand, like a weird Sam Taylor-Johnson art installation.

First out of the kitchen, and ferried by a lovely server, was the dry-aged beef tartare with oyster emulsion – a chunky, oozy little bullet of beefy fishiness, styled to look like an oyster in a tempura batter shell. Tartare purists will hate it; oyster purists will hate it more. But Six by Nico, and now Lennox, have never been about stiff rules.

The fish finger with katsu curry is the ‘shining light’ on the menu at Manchester’s Lennox restaurant.

In fact, the longer I’m in Lennox, the more difficult it is to know where one restaurant finishes and the other begins. A halloumi shawarma with baba ganoush and rosemary flatbread, for example, is really unappetising: dry, unseasoned, neither fine dining nor inventive. But then the gnocchi with chicken wings is genuinely, strangely enticing. Deboning chicken wings makes them small, but the gnocchi, on the other hand, is purposefully large, so what we have is a weird bowl of beige lumps with sheets of parmesan on top. Does it work? It’s comforting but lacks finesse. Still, it’s Friday lunchtime and Lennox is full of life, filling up with couples, groups of friends and Friday-night-out-earlies.

For me, the shining light on the menu was the fish finger with katsu curry. A charming idea: think elevated McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish dipped in those tiny pots of curry sauce. Some aged ribeye was very good, although its red wine sauce was slightly thin and bitter.

A ‘a chunky, oozy little bullet’ of aged beef tartare with parmesan game chips at Lennox Manchester.

A plate of salmon gravlax in buttermilk, dill and grapefruit was highly pretty but underwhelming. Lennox feels like being bombarded with ideas from all sides; you’ll leave fed, challenged and ever so slightly gastronomically punch-drunk. We finished with a lemon tart, inexplicably served with a red wine sorbet and rosemary. Three very assertive flavours in a death fight to dominate. My heart cried out for a smidgen of chantilly cream, as a refuge from this bootcamp of flavours.

On opening, Lennox was described as a highly personal venture, but there was no sign of Simeone when I visited, and oddly no other named chefs attached to the project. His omniscient powers and singular vision are not only running multiple Six by Nicos, but a brave new Lennox-shaped dawn, too. Hospitality would be far more boring without him, but next time, I’ll have the hazelnut tiramisu.

• Lennox Manchester, 60 Spring Gardens, Manchester M2 2BQ, 0161 832 1815; lennoxrestaurant.co.uk. Open Tues-Sun noon-midnight (1am Fri & Sat, 9pm Sun). About £70 a head a la carte for three courses (set menus from £35) plus drinks and service