Just a little over 24 hours after launching his new Dacha bistro pop-up in the city centre, chef Sam Buckley is in the middle of a Urban Gardening panel discussion in town wearing a stethoscope and ‘prescribing’ vegetables as to their ripeness.
It’s a far stretch away from the mad-dashery of a burger kitchen, where he’s spent the last month, but it also feels incredibly apt and on point for someone like Sam.
Since November, Sam, who is behind Stockport’s famed restaurant Where The Light Gets In, has been conducting a four-act and five-month residency exploring what it means to be a diner in the city.
Alongside those aforementioned panel discussions, it’s most notably also included a bar pop-up in NOMA and his most recent fast food pop-up Humbug. With people describing it as everything from performative to pretentious, the Humbug residency at KAMPUS’ Bungalow spot went viral far beyond the walls of Manchester.
Serving up ‘nose-to-tail’ burgers, which all came from one cow, the pop-up became known for its £40 price tag and Sam’s quirky comments about exploring ‘the notion of fast food in a social and historical context’.
But literally just days from the end of Humbug, Sam and his team are refreshed and rejuvenated in time to launch new pop-up Dacha (Russian for ‘country house’) - and the M.E.N was invited along for a preview of what act three has in store.
The fast food setting of the venue has been taken away - gone are the trays where your food is served and instead we now have checkerboard table covers (now officially a Bistro). If Humbug is the ‘pretentious’ burger that is meant to make you think more about where your food comes from, then Dacha could be seen as the ‘bombastic’ counterpart - wanting to instead make us look at how we can sustain ourselves and keep ourselves fed.
In speaking to Sam about the concept, he explains how he wants people to think of Dacha as that 'weekend walk in the Peaks', or a 'picnic in the park', if you will. It’s a respite from the city hustle-and-bustle and a reminder that we don’t always need to rely on convenience in order to be able to create, produce, or even pickle our own home-grown food.
With that in mind, the menu features a spotlight on both seasonal and locally-sourced ingredients, from top tier producers like Stockport’s own Littlewoods butchers and Preston’s Mrs Kirkham's Cheese. There’s also freshly grown herbs, mushrooms, and rhubarb - at least on our menu, anyway.
Aiming to ‘bridge the urban and rural’ with a ‘simple yet thoughtful’ à la carte selection, Dacha's menu will change regularly throughout the week so it’s hard to say what you’ll be offered but me and my editor opted for the venison tartare and oysters with lemon and hot sauce to start.
Both promptly delivered to our table after a very satisfactory round of fresh bread and butter was devoured between the two of us, the first course was appealing and visual feast from the get-go.
My venison tartare was bouncing with flavour, with freshly-chopped onions, pickles, and capers all on the side to tuck into alongside a runny egg yolk, mustard, and salt all ready to be layered up how I saw fit on top of some perfectly-crunchy crostini. The saltiness and tang of the sides perfectly complimented the rich and lean taste of the venison.
The oysters, meanwhile, are described as being fresh and are served on a very generous bed of salt to really help compliment their oceanic flavours with a creaminess that lingers after each bite. The hot sauce helps to take things up a notch, and it's served on the side so you can pick and choose just how fiery you want things.
For our second course, I opted for Mutton and Bean Stew, whilst my editor went for the Moules Frites (mussels and fries). Again, quickly on our table, the stew came with a comforting smell of home cooked goodness and was instantly soaked up with more rounds of bread.
Alongside Merguez sausages from Littlewoods, the stew is a little snapshot of home - flavoursome, minty, and packed with an exceptional variety of vegetables alongside minced mutton. Whilst rich and salty, it’s still subtle and scrumptious and exactly what you want when the weather, as it was on this occasion, was wet and cold.
The mussels are served in a subtle cream sauce, which adds a sweetness to the otherwise salty and briny flavours of the molluscs. A whole load of fries are served on a separate plate - just enough to dip into any remaining sauce - which makes for a hefty and fulfilling main.
For our dessert, we both opted for the rhubarb and custard. Again, packing a tanginess, the rhubarb is complemented by the sweet, thin custard which is another show-stopper. We both recalled how it had a vanilla or butterscotch taste to it, before we were informed it was instead, of course, made with raw Panela sugar. One man’s Panela is another man’s vanilla, I guess.
Rounding up the meal was a piece of Lancashire cheese with a homemade Eccles Cake. If I’m going to nit-pick here, it was more of a glorified mince pie than an Eccles cake to me, but that is also in no way a dismissal and it is better than any Eccles Cake I’ve ever had before. It’s served warm, with the dark fruits excelling and the pastry adding to the home-comforts that were found throughout the meal.
All in all, the food we had at Dacha was top-notch. In some ways, there’s a simplicity to its ingredients, but there’s also a complexity in how they are served. It’s good food done right and, in actuality, there’s nothing really stopping me from being able to make my own at-home variations on what I had there.
And I guess that’s part of the message that Sam and his team are trying to deliver with this concept in particular. Many of these ingredients and producers are on our doorstep, we can support local or go forage mushrooms ourselves if we really wanted to.
Plus it tastes all the better for it. It feels more fulfilling than a throw-away ready meal or a quick bite from a chain bakery or shop. But, yes, the convenience of being able to buy such ingredients from a shop round the corner or nipping into that glowing-oasis takeaway on the way home often becomes more appealing - and easier - to us.
Like with Humbug, dining at Dacha requires a £50 per person deposit which, like I’ve said before, does sort of sting the experience a little but it is essentially taken off your meal so you are soon able to forget about that initial loss of money. The full menu itself (including all courses without service charge or drinks) comes to £50.
So, yeah, still a little on the pretentious side of things (not necessarily a bad thing) but a very good - and thoughtful - meal, and a brilliant step into the mindset of what chef Sam Buckley and his team are trying to achieve with their food right now.
Bookings for Dacha can be made here.
