The best places for party and group bookings in Manchester

Panning a do with serious muso credentials? Band on the Wall is available to hire for live shows, club nights and other public events. It is also a great venue hire choice for private parties, wedding receptions and corporate events. If your guests want to appear on the same stage as artists including Pixies, Fall Out Boy, Blossoms and Joy Division, this is the place. Plus they’ve recently revamped their bar – think copper fittings, mid-century lighting and velvet – so a beer-stained carpet sort of music venue this is not.

The Beeswing is a modern wine bar in the trendy Kampus neighbourhood just on the edge of Canal Street, a few minutes walk from Piccadilly. It has a stunning terrace which is an enviable sun trap in summer months and it gets the sun until right up into the evening. You can hire the entire restaurant and bar space for events, and they can also provide a variety of Mediterranean-inspired menus to cater to whatever your heart desires.

Every bit of The Black Friar in Salford is available to hire including the whole 200 capacity restaurant. You can also hire The Tavern – a fully covered and heated outdoor space, The Garden – a large, landscaped outdoor space with loads of lush plants and flowers, The Sanctuary – a cosy intimate room with leather sofas and vintage furniture, and The Glass Room – a modern conservatory.

The Blues Kitchen’s primary focus is live music across multiple floors of a historic Quay Street building. More so, the interior design speaks to a lost age of sophisticated elegance, antique tile detailing, lots of stained glass, and atmospheric Tiffany lighting, alongside dive bar relics and reclaimed pieces. And that’s just the ground floor bar, where you’ll find blues, soul, and R&B performed nightly, artists ranging from homegrown talent to international stars. Upstairs, the concert hall hosts bigger touring acts between two and four times each week, with DJs and live bands visiting on Fridays and Saturdays. With the ‘Kitchen’ side of things serving up brunches, burgers and steaks as well as shareable small plates, this is a place to book if you want to have a good meal followed by a good boogie. Plus, there are loads of different packages available depending on your party size.

A sprawling industrial hangar of a building, if you can’t find a spot for your group in Diecast then we simply cannot help you. The place is just ridiculously vast. Leno Ex Machina is one element: a 5,000 capacity, 250,000 square foot space for eating, drinking, dancing and debauch-ing. This is where Manchester’s biggest warehouse kitchen can be found, with Pizza Ex Machina one of the main highlights. Meanwhile, Italian small plates, wood-fired Piadino, and burgers are also on offer. Then there’s the outside space, one of the city’s biggest, with various BBQs, daiquiri bars and rentable caravans for private gatherings. There’s a whole page on their website dedicated to the different spaces you can hire, depending on what sort of party you’re having.

Simon Shaw’s acclaimed tapas restaurant is a popular spot for any occasion and its rooftop terrace is always named checked in any outdoor drinking and dining round up worth its salt. But did you know you can hire the entire top floor of El Gato Negro including its famed roof terrace (with retractable roof) for a private event? Well now you do. The flexible space is obviously ideal for a special party, holding up to 100 guests and the team are on hand to provide some of the city’s best food as well as cocktails, live entertainment or business support.

One of Manchester’s most party-centric mega venues, Escape to Freight Island is geared up to host gatherings intimate, vast or anywhere inbetween. There are loads of different spaces you can hire out, like the urban oasis that is The Plant Room, the 500 capacity The Platform with excellent view of all the live entertainment, or The Terrace, with great views and a ‘calm above the storm’ feel. There’s even a 30-capacity private dining room, if that’s more the type of thing you’re after.

Located on Peter Street, the imposing building which houses the exhibition is a stand-out, even among a crowded field. It tracks: this used to be the location of Manchester’s Natural History Museum, before the learned institution moved to Oxford Road. Today, the space boasts a late night bar, 400-capacity performance space, and seven exhibition areas for visual work. That’s in addition to the carefully aligned independent kitchens Baraxaturi, Osma and Jaan – a rustic Basque-style grill, a super-sleek Scandi small plates place and a Lebanese spot where everything is served on freshly baked flatbreads. So a proper foodie-led experience with guaranteed party vibes. You can book a table, for a large party or the whole place.

Sometimes your long-overdue get together just calls for a curry night, and hardly anywhere does them better than this place. Winner of 2023’s Nations Curry Award, Best Nepalese Restaurant, among countless other trophies, The Great Kathmandu cabinet has no doubt been extended several times by now. A genuine institution in upmarket West Didsbury, it has occupied a prominent position on the tree-lined, eatery-dense Burton Road since long before the street was synonymous with hospitality. They happily accommodate big bookings, just use the enquiry form online to get it all sorted.

Deansgate’s Hawksmoor building was once a Victorian courthouse, and it’s full of evocative nods to that: parquet flooring, salvaged from another legal institution nearby, panelling from Sandwell Collage and glazed bricks from an old lavatory in Liverpool. Matched with baby soft leather-backed seating, dark woods and early-modernist light fittings, it’s a perfect backdrop for a classic steakhouse experience, only elevated. Plus, it almost goes without saying, the steaks are some of the best you’ll ever taste. So, a pretty good spot for a decadent party (we’ve seen wedding receptions in there and everything). You can book out a part of the restaurant, or one of their stately private dining rooms, depending on quite how decadent you want it to be.

Much-loved King Street bistro from the brains of Gary Usher, Kala is known for consistently serving contemporary European bistro food at a level of quality which well exceeds its reasonable price tags. Sounds pretty perfect for a group get-together then? They offer a large group dining menu for parties of nine or more, which includes main menu favourites like cod fillet and steak frites, and you can even book the whole place out too if you want. 

Maray’s French-meets-Middle-Eastern menu lends itself well to party food. Their menu is full of tempting mezze dishes like whipped goats cheese and cauliflower bhajis, as well as slow-cooked mains like lamb kofta and spiced lentil and rice mujadara. They’ve got a comprehensive vegan menu as well, so this one is ideal if you need to cater to various dietary requirements. You can book up to 90 guests, which is the whole space, or any number up to that. Disco cauliflower for 90, then?

A little bit more of a sedate affair than others on the list, Pot Kettle Black now has two venues in the city centre. PKB’s Angel Gardens venue on the edge of Ancoats is available to hire for private events. The bright, airy and flexible space with its characteristic floor to ceiling windows has room for 150 standing or 100 seated guests. Split across two levels, PKB Angel Gardens has its own in-house kitchen and an attractive feature bar making it ideal for everything from weddings to business events.

Purrezza are not just ‘good for vegans’ and ‘good for gluten free’, they absolutely excel at it. They were the first vegan pizzeria in the UK, and since then have gone on to create some rather impressive revolutions in the world of plant-based food – most noticeably spending years in their food laboratory creating a mozzarella that tastes and melts just like dairy. Experience that mozzarella (or not-zzarella, if you’d rather) sat atop a black truffle pizza or even a ‘pepperoni’ and agave one, so no-one misses out on the hot honey hype. They gladly welcome group bookings of more than eight people, so if you want to throw a gathering that’s truly inclusive, get in touch with them.

Located at an old MOT garage just off once-almost-forgotten Swan Street, Ramona is far more than just Manchester’s leading destination for Detroit style cheese and tomato pies, frozen margaritas and debauchery. There’s a roster of live party bands, DJs and roaring fire pits too, so you can find a zone which matches whatever vibe you’re after. They happily accommodate big bookings – it’s a big old MOT garage – but you need to get in touch for bookings over 14 people.

Nowhere screams baroque hedonism like The Refuge, which has a stately presence on one of Manchetser’s most important thoroughfares, opposite Oxford Road Station (so an ideal location to get your pals together for a big do). Inside is a collection of different spaces, each seemingly more decadent than the next, ranging from a games room called The Den, to an inside-meet-outside Winter Gardens, as well as the super-intimate private dining room. You can get in touch with them about all the options.

The San Carlo family of restaurants, and especially their original spot on King Street, are an established favourite for refined-but-relaxed Italian dining. If you’re planning an intimate get together of up to 35 people, their Private Dining Room fits the bill, and you can choose from an extensive set menu, as well as a special ‘Christmas Fayre’ menu with indulgent pastas and roasted meats as well as panna cotta and pistachio torte. And what’s more Christmassy than that?

Opposite Manchester Central and across an ornamental pond from The Bridgewater Hall seems an unlikely spot for a modern food hall to make sense, but make sense Society does. With a short but perfectly formed list of traders including Chaat Cart, Noi Quattro and Yoki Social Table, and the beer’s by Hebden Bridge’s finest Vocation, it’s a consistently crowd-pleasing spot for some pre-culture refreshments. They happily accommodate large group bookings, but only for up to two hours. 

Tattu is well known for its ultra modern, glossy purple and black interiors complete with a huge cherry blossom tree. Did you know that you can hire the entire venue at Tattu for an extra special event though? Now that would be one impressive party. Menu packages featuring the restaurant’s own unique brand of contemporary Chinese food and show-stopping cocktails are available, as well as other bespoke elements that you can discuss with the team.

One of the original Northern Quarter bars and still one of the coolest, Trof is famous for its Sunday roast and laid back vibes, but it also has a number of rooms you can hire to host your party. The exposed brick Bourbon Room with its own private bar, sound system, projector and more holds up to 40 seated or 60 standing and is only available to hire on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The Montana Room with booth seating, colourful flamingo print wallpaper and bright red working Smeg fridge holds 16 seated or 26 standing and can be hired Wednesday to Sunday. This room also has its own jukebox and a projector. You can also hire the whole venue, if that suits your party ambition better.