The likes of Italy, Dubai, Ibiza and California have all had involvement in the Manchester success story
A beloved Manchester dessert bar which first opened as a cereal café in a ‘far-side’ of Afflecks Palace is celebrating its tenth birthday this week.
First opened in time for Pancake Day in 2015, Black Milk, on Oldham Street, was launched as a cereal café akin to the likes that had only at the time been seen in London. But in the ten years since, it has revolutionised into a fully-fledged dessert bar that even now supplies its own creations to the likes of Selfridges and Co-op.
Led by Oliver Taylor and Andy Young, Black Milk started life as a way to bring the type of ‘incredible’ desserts offered at fine dining restaurants where Olly used to work into an ‘accessible café setting’ with no pretences.
“Whilst I was at university, I worked at Lounge 10, which was quite a high-end restaurant in the city centre,” Olly explains to the Manchester Evening News. “I used to be a bartender and a waiter and I’d be the one that would take these impressive desserts to the table and get to see the instant reaction on people’s faces when they first saw them.
“It was those kinds of reactions that made me realise the connection people have with desserts and that’s what basically inspired Black Milk all those years ago. I had a very very strong plan from day one that I wanted to basically have a café that would be like a window into the imaginary.”
But trips around the world also helped contribute towards the foundations of what Black Milk would become. Its name, for example, was inspired by a squid ink pasta dish served at a meal Olly had with his family on his 21st birthday in Ibiza, whilst their ‘decadent’ milkshakes took sight from the night-time bars of Dubai.
“One of the first places I came across the milkshake trend was when I was in Dubai nearly 20 years ago,” Olly explains. “In fact, it was so long ago that the Burj Khalifa was still being constructed. After we were at a restaurant, we went to this bar and everyone was enjoying these milkshakes overloaded with cream and everything. I was just like “what is going on?”.
“It made me think why it wasn’t a thing here in the UK. And having family who had businesses where they would import from Italy, I would often hear these fantastic stories about my uncle, who had a sparkling water business, and would often go to discover these herbs that they would then incorporate into their flavours. That kind of thing was always lodged in my brain and I always wanted to try and recreate that magic myself in my own way.”
With Olly and Andy basically putting around £1,500 together, they set up their original Black Milk Cereal Dive café premises in Affleck’s with just five tables – located in an area of the second floor where people ‘had to know where we were to find us’. The concept was there, even if it was a little rough-around-the-edges due to expenses.
“We were bootstrapped to the extreme,” Olly laughs. “All our money was spent on kitchen equipment but even that didn’t go very far. It was all beg, borrow and steal to begin with. But it was about bringing cereal outside of breakfast times and celebrating it – we wanted to keep the love of cereal alive, basically.”
But with their offerings featuring classic cereals that many of us will recognize – like Coco Pops, Rice Krispies, Shreddies and Golden Nuggets – alongside lesser-known favourites from around the world, it was a haven of sugary delights that quickly took on.
Helped by the fact that cereals could be even enjoyed in a chocolate bowl, the café became increasingly popular with queues often outside the door. Along the way, they branched into cakes, pancakes, waffles, and all sorts of other sweet treats that they continue to serve today.
With their own café premises now a little further down Oldham Street, and calling the likes of Koffee Pot and Bada Bing as neighbours, Black Milk exists today as a dessert bar and supplier. But whilst they may have evolved, some things never change.
“Our number one best-selling item to this day is still the Kinderella milkshake,” Olly explains. “It’s basically our version of the Kinder Bueno. It has never changed. We’ve had all kinds of things on our menu since we opened but it’s just remained the out-and-out favourite.”
And now, they also make a lot of their own products that are sold elsewhere too – notably a range of hazelnut and pistachio creams and spreads and their own granola, made with Yorkshire’s famed Yockenthwaite Farm. They are sold at the likes of Booths, Ocado, General Stores, Co-op and Selfridges.
“The pistachio and hazelnut spreads are just flying off the shelves,” Olly explains. “It took a while for the pistachio trend to catch on, but people became really accustomed to the hazelnut right away thanks to it already being a thing.
“We’ve noticed that whenever the big bakeries in the likes of Melbourne, Paris, or New York do something new, you do tend to see this big seismic change in people’s buying habits.
“We saw that really happened with the pistachio – it went from these small cafes into the Marks and Spencer ice cream aisle almost all-of-a-sudden. One of our biggest suppliers now sells more than 350 jars of our pistachio cream each week. It’s bonkers.”
The pistachio cream too came as a result of trips abroad with Olly visiting the the likes of California, which accounts for 99% of the entire pistachio yield in the United States, to see how farms and local traders were using the ingredient.
And, of course, the granola is their way of continuing that cereal tradition that Black Milk was started on. “We’ve always kept cereal as a running theme in some form,” Olly explains.
“We make our own granola over in Yorkshire and we still serve it in chocolate bowls in the cafe or just as a normal bowl. Throughout the years, we’ve also collaborated with big names like Kellogg’s and served Coco Pops-flavoured ice cream at Selfridges in the Trafford Centre.
“Meeting these sorts of creatives who share our same passion has always allowed us to work on these amazing products that we can showcase in our café and then go on to bring them to the likes of Co-op and Selfridges.”
And, going forward, that’s what Black Milk intends to do. With lots of top secret projects in the pipeline, Olly says they will continue to try and impress people with new creations and twists on old classics like they have done ever since they started.
“I have always been very laser-focused on having a café that evolves into a retail brand and I’m so proud of us for being able to achieve that in the way that we have,” Olly explains.
“I’m still taken back by the initial response to it all. I never thought announcing a bakery that would be doing cereal would ever get the attention that it has!”
Black Milk is on 88 Oldham Street, Manchester, M4 1LF.