Forbici Manchester Review: Award-Winning Neapolitan Pizza and Small Plates
This Forbici Manchester review begins in a city hardly short of excellent pizza. Manchester has embraced everything from traditional Neapolitan dough to oversized New York-style slices, giving discerning diners an enviable choice of places in which to indulge.
Yet every so often, a restaurant arrives that makes even the most familiar food feel exciting again.
Forbici Manchester is one of those restaurants.
News that Forbici’s master baker, Davide Argentino, had been recognised in The Best Pizza Awards 2026 prompted this Forbici Manchester review. More precisely, the organisation ranked Argentino at number 84 among the world’s Top 100 Pizza Chefs, while his official profile highlights his expertise in fermentation and biga dough.
It is an impressive accolade, but awards and press releases can only tell you so much. The more important question was whether Forbici could deliver when faced with a family arriving for dinner on a hot Friday evening.
Ultimately, the answer is an emphatic yes.
More importantly, this was not simply an excellent meal or even an excellent pizza. My Tonno e Cipolla special was, without exaggeration, the best pizza I have ever eaten.
Why Everyone Is Talking About Forbici Manchester
Situated at 86 Cross Street in Manchester city centre, Forbici specialises in Neapolitan-style pizza made with carefully sourced Italian ingredients and its signature biga dough.
The name Forbici translates as “scissors”, a reference to the restaurant’s distinctive practice of cutting each pizza into four quarters with a pair of scissors. It could easily have felt like a gimmick. Instead, it contributes to the restaurant’s playful but assured identity while helping to protect those gloriously inflated crusts.
The team appears to have considered every detail. This is not a restaurant attempting to manufacture authenticity through checked tablecloths and theatrical declarations of mamma’s secret recipe. The sense of Italy comes from the open kitchen, the energy in the room, the quality of the ingredients and the obvious respect shown to the craft of pizza making.
A Friday-Night Slice of Italy in Manchester
We arrived at 6pm on a Friday, by which point Forbici was already alive with the hum of conversation.
There was a genuine hustle and bustle to the restaurant: glasses being raised, families settling around tables and couples easing into the weekend over pizza and cold drinks. It felt animated rather than chaotic, with the kind of convivial atmosphere that encourages you to relax, order generously and stay for dessert.
Forbici has the easy confidence of a stylish Italian café. It is informal enough for a family dinner yet sufficiently polished for a date night, celebration or leisurely meal with friends.
The Open Kitchen Adds a Little Theatre
The wood-fired pizza oven and preparation area are on open view, bringing movement and theatre to the dining room.
Watching the team stretch dough, assemble toppings and manage the intense heat of the oven creates an immediate connection between the kitchen and the table. There is nowhere for indifferent ingredients or careless technique to hide.
It also reinforces the impression that Forbici takes its pizza seriously without taking itself too seriously.
A Cold Manchester Lager on a Hot Summer Evening
Outside, the temperature had climbed beyond 30°C. Thankfully, the restaurant was beautifully air-conditioned, making it an extremely welcome refuge from the summer heat.
A cold Shindigger Manchester Lager proved to be the ideal opening order. Crisp, refreshing and dangerously drinkable, it was exceptionally good and perfectly suited to a warm evening.
It may appear to be a small detail, but it reflected the wider experience at Forbici: the team seemed to have chosen everything, right down to the beer selection, with quality in mind.
The Forbici Starters Set the Standard
Forbici’s menu is deliberately focused, bringing together Neapolitan pizzas, small plates, snack bites and a concise selection of desserts.
We began by sharing olives, Padrón peppers and croquettes. It proved to be an excellent introduction to the meal.
Olives That Deserve Your Attention
Olives are often treated as little more than something to occupy the table while the kitchen prepares the main event.
These were different.
Deeply savoury and incredibly moreish, the olives at Forbici were among the best we have tasted. They had enough character to command attention in their own right rather than merely serving as a prelude to the pizza.
They set the tone immediately: simple ingredients, selected carefully and served at their best.
Padrón Peppers with a Clever Citrus Twist
I have eaten a great many Padrón peppers over the years, but Forbici introduced something new: a squeeze of lemon.
It sounds almost inconsequential, yet the citrus transformed them.
The lemon sharpened the peppers’ gentle bitterness, lifted their sweetness and cut through the oil, creating a brighter and more elegant plate. It worked so well that it is an addition I will actively request when ordering Padrón peppers in future.
The finest cooking details are often the simplest. This was a perfect example.
Golden, Comforting Croquettes
The croquettes completed the trio of starters beautifully.
Crisp on the outside and satisfyingly soft within, they brought a comforting richness alongside the salty olives and fresh, citrus-dressed peppers.
Together, the three dishes created a well-balanced opening: something savoury, something vibrant and something indulgent.
Then the pizzas arrived.
Familiar Favourites, Elevated
One of Forbici’s strengths is its ability to appeal to different appetites without compromising its identity.
There are recognisable classics for those who believe the finest pizzas require very little embellishment, alongside more adventurous combinations for diners who enjoy discovering something unexpected.
A Margherita That Lets the Ingredients Speak
My daughter chose the Margherita, the definitive test of any serious pizzeria.
There is little room for disguise when a pizza is built around tomato, cheese, basil and dough. Every element needs to earn its place.
Her delight was immediate. The Margherita demonstrated that Forbici’s appeal is not dependent upon lavish toppings or novelty. The foundations are every bit as impressive as the restaurant’s more elaborate creations.
The Diavola Brings the Heat
My wife opted for the Diavola, bringing spice and deeper savoury notes to the table.
It delivered everything she had hoped for: bold flavour, satisfying heat and the same light, beautifully risen crust that defined all three pizzas.
There was no polite family consensus required. Each of us was genuinely delighted with what we had ordered.
Tonno e Cipolla: A Special Worth Travelling For
I have always been a sucker for tuna on pizza, so the Tonno e Cipolla special was an obvious choice.
This was no ordinary tuna pizza.
The special combined anchovy cream, fior di latte, tuna fillet, pickled red onion, spicy ve-du-ya and miso-sesame mayonnaise. Ve-du-ya is a plant-based interpretation of ’nduja that provides the smoky warmth and chilli depth of the Calabrian original without the meat.
I added burrata, because restraint has its place and this was not it.
A Masterclass in Balancing Flavour
On paper, there is a great deal happening on this pizza. In less capable hands, the combination could easily have become confused or excessively rich.
Instead, every ingredient appeared to have been carefully considered.
The tuna brought a clean, substantial savouriness, while the anchovy cream provided a deeper seam of salt and umami. Pickled red onion cut through the richness with welcome acidity, and the spicy ve-du-ya introduced warmth without overwhelming the more delicate fish.
The miso-sesame mayonnaise added another layer of savoury complexity. Rather than competing with the Italian ingredients, it broadened the flavour and gave the pizza a more contemporary character.
Each bite seemed to reveal the toppings in a slightly different order. Sometimes the anchovy arrived first; elsewhere it was the sharpness of the onion, the gentle chilli warmth or the rounded richness of the sesame and miso.
It felt composed rather than merely topped.
Extra Burrata Makes It Luxurious
The additional burrata turned an already exceptional pizza into something genuinely luxurious.
Cool, creamy and gloriously soft, it mellowed the salt and spice while bringing a rich, almost decadent quality to each slice.
Burrata can sometimes dominate a dish or make it feel unnecessarily heavy. Here, it became part of the balance. It softened the sharper flavours without diminishing them and provided a beautiful contrast to the heat of the freshly baked pizza.
Hot Honey Delivers the Final Flourish
A little hot honey provided the finishing touch.
Its combination of sweetness and chilli worked brilliantly with the tuna, pickled onion and smoky ve-du-ya. It did not need much; just a restrained drizzle was enough to add another dimension.
Salty, sweet, creamy, spicy, smoky and sharp: this pizza touched every part of the palate without losing coherence.
That is exceptionally difficult to achieve.
The Forbici Dough Deserves Its Own Applause
Creative toppings may attract attention, but the dough is what separates a memorable pizza from a merely enjoyable one.
Davide Argentino’s reputation is rooted in fermentation and the development of Forbici’s signature biga dough, an Italian pre-ferment used to build flavour, structure and lightness.
The result is remarkable.
The crust rose in generous, cloud-like folds, with the heat of the oven leaving small areas of char across its surface. Yet despite its impressive height, it remained beautifully light.
There was tenderness, a gentle chew and enough structure to carry the toppings without becoming dense or bready. Even the crusts felt like an essential part of the pizza rather than something to abandon at the edge of the plate.
Forbici clearly understands that a pizza should not be divided into “the toppings” and “the crust”. The pleasure comes from the relationship between the two.
Tiramisu: The Only Proper Way to Finish
After starters and pizza, dessert was hardly necessary.
Naturally, I ordered it anyway.
For me, tiramisu remains the undisputed GOAT of Italian desserts. It is familiar, comforting and capable of being either deeply disappointing or completely irresistible.
Forbici’s version belonged firmly in the latter category.
It was every bit as good as the finest tiramisu I have eaten, providing an appropriately indulgent conclusion to an exceptional dinner. Familiarity was part of its charm: after the creativity of the Tonno e Cipolla, this was a return to a classic executed with confidence.
Skipping it would have been a mistake.
Does Forbici Serve the Best Pizza in Manchester?
Restaurant superlatives are easy to write and much harder to justify.
“The best” is subjective. It depends on personal taste, past experience and even what you happen to be craving at that particular moment.
Nevertheless, an honest Forbici Manchester review must state exactly what happened.
The Tonno e Cipolla at Forbici Manchester was not simply my favourite pizza in Manchester. It was the best pizza I have ever eaten, and by a considerable distance.
The award, press coverage and restaurant’s confident branding did not shape that verdict. It comes from the balance of flavours, the quality of the toppings, the extraordinary lightness of the crust and the sense that every element had been developed by people who understand pizza at the highest level.
The Margherita and Diavola inspired equal enthusiasm around the table, while the starters, beer, atmosphere and tiramisu ensured that the experience was impressive from beginning to end.
Forbici Manchester Review: The Final Verdict
Our Forbici Manchester review found an outstanding restaurant that deserves its growing reputation.
It combines the warmth of a bustling Italian café with the precision of a kitchen operating at an exceptionally high level. The setting is relaxed but polished, the menu is accessible yet ambitious, and the pizza is unlike anything we have previously experienced.
There is style here, but also substance. There is innovation, but never at the expense of pleasure. Most importantly, there is a clear understanding that luxury in food does not have to mean formality. Sometimes it is a perfectly fermented crust, an immaculate burrata and a cold local lager on a hot Friday evening.
On the evidence of our visit, Forbici has everything required to become a defining name in Manchester’s restaurant scene for many years to come.
Our recommendation could not be higher.
Book a table, explore the specials, add the burrata and leave room for tiramisu.
Forbici is, quite simply, a cut above.
Our Forbici Manchester review makes one point clear: serious pizza lovers should put this restaurant on their list.
Forbici Manchester: Essential Information
Address: 86 Cross Street, Manchester, M2 4LA.
Cuisine: Neapolitan-style pizza and Italian small plates
Best for: Stylish family dinners, relaxed date nights, celebrations and serious pizza enthusiasts
Do not miss: The rotating pizza specials, Padrón peppers with lemon, Shindigger Manchester Lager and tiramisu
Yorkshire Pudd verdict: Outstanding and highly recommended
