Pass a sleek bar with plush, jade-green booths and a list of Japanese-inspired cocktails (shiso-infused gin with blueberry, lychee and Champagne is a winner) and then take a table by the gleaming, open kitchen, where head chef Mike Shaw creates skillful, thoughtful kaiseki menus that start at £110. There’s impeccable sashimi of red sea bream and aged akami tuna; red shrimp in featherlight tempura; and rosy duck breast with plump gyoza and beetroot curls.

Spätzle is the specialty at the Spärrows, a tiny Alpine-accented restaurant incongruously tucked into an old railway arch on Mirabel Street. Ask for your egg noodles to be sauced with guanciale or with Swiss cheese and braised onions, or go full-throttle après-ski with Tyrolese goulash, spätzle and pickles (£17.50).

Michelin-starred Mana is the domain of ex-Noma chef Simon Martin, and you’ll find major Scandinavian influences throughout. A choice of set menus (£95 and £195) at lunch and dinner show off the chef’s precise, multilayered cooking. Langoustines are accented with cured egg yolk and spruce, and venison salami is served with attention-getting cauliflower fungus. Tables in the lofty dining room are well spaced, and all face Martin’s open kitchen.

Erst is the kind of industrial-chic, small-plates wine bar that wouldn’t seem out of place in Shoreditch, London, or Brooklyn. Scorched, pillowy flatbreads are a specialty, perhaps slathered with beef fat and Turkish chili flakes or simply anointed with whipped lardo. Ingredients are impeccably sourced: charcuterie from Cobble Lane, anchovies from Cantabria, oysters from Carlingford Lough. Plates, with prices ranging from about £4 to £18, are designed to go with the list of mostly natural wines.

Adam Reid has been cooking for a decade at the French, a gloriously over-the-top, belle epoque restaurant in the historic Midland hotel, but the place still feels fresh. A noticeably down-to-earth accent attends the £125 menu: “A warm Northern welcome” is a combination of malt bread, beef butter and broth, while “Today’s tea” might include loin of shorthorn beef from the nearby Lake District paired with garlic gravy and beet root. Dessert, or “Afters,” might be baked English custard with rhubarb

Simon Shaw is one of the major players in Manchester’s restaurant scene. His stylish, affordable tapas joint, spread over three floors of a beautifully converted townhouse on King Street, has for seven years been pulling in a lively, cosmopolitan crowd. Crisp salt cod croquetas come with piquillo pepper purée and aïoli; octopus is char-grilled and paired with new potatoes and capers (£14); and churros are dusted with cinnamon, ready for the chocolate toffee sauce that comes with it.

Located inside the six mighty brick arches of the Spirit of Manchester distillery, Three Little Words is the chic spot for imaginative, well-crafted cocktails. Behind the marble bar, expert drinkmakers are ready to mix Silver Linings (apple spirit, flax seed vodka, clarified lemon and orange blossom bitters, for £12), or Above Board (mezcal, yellow chartreuse and olive bitters, £13). A menu of small plates stocks addictive bacon sausage rolls and moules marinières to accompany the beverages.