Social Refuge

You're walking into Ancoats and stumbling onto Great Ancoats Street—one of the neighbourhood's best-kept corners right now. Social Refuge isn't trying to be anything other than what it is: a coffee shop that takes both its coffee and its ethos seriously. The space has that industrial-warehouse vibe you'd expect from the area, but it's warm rather than cold, with the kind of thoughtful touches that make you want to camp out for hours. Their coffee is properly excellent, the sort of thing that'll ruin chain coffee for you forever, and the food is genuinely inventive without being pretentious—they're doing proper brunch, lunch, and everything in between.