The Quarter

The corner of Faulkner Street where The Quarter is situated has been a regular haunt of mine since I moved to Liverpool in 1999. I used to go to the little sandwich shop (which was situated where the entrance into The Quarter and its deli now resides) which was affectionately known by me and many others as ‘the funeral shop’ because of its black external paintwork. I also regularly visited Number Seven Deli; I’m not sure whether it was the same owners as The Quarter but the current menu certainly gives more than a nod to the old place. And I’m very glad of that.
It’s very nice to have a non-​chain restaurant you can rely on to produce proper thin crust, Italian style pizzas and The Quarter is one of those places. AND they do gluten free bases too which is refreshing. I tend to stick with the more classic Italian toppings like the Margarita, Maria or Caprese but the more adventurous pizza fan will be in heaven as well; Jerk chicken with pineapple or braised sticky beef with fennel and apple slaw? Not toppings I would ever go for but they’re certainly original!
The pastas are equally inventive, with items on the menu such as the Andalucian (king prawn, chorizo, tomato and mascarpone) or the pasta with mussels, cider and leeks. Be warned though, the portions are pretty big so unless you’re really starving get a small starter!
The desserts and cakes at The Quarter are also pretty legendary (or rather notorious for their size and naughtiness!) Dreamy Chocolate Fudge Cake? Rocky Road Bar? Wickedly good!
All in all the menu and atmosphere at The Quarter is great; even at its busiest it’s a great place to chill out and a popular choice for informal business meetings. Be prepared to have to hang around for a table outside in the summertime though, The Quarter is extremely popular when the sun is shining! And why wouldn’t it be? Sitting in the sunshine sipping a glass of chilled white wine, surrounded by beautiful Georgian buildings with a view of Liverpool Cathedral? Class.

Awful take out — salmon uncooked, mushroom risotto was not eatable (hard, uncooked again, tasted only like oil and not at all like mushrooms). A bit pricey for what it is. Would not recommend for take out.

The food is good. Not great, but good. They offer a pretty extensive range of pizzas, better-​than-​average vegetarian options, and they also do a good solid English breakfast, which holds its own against many of its local competitors.
There’s two things that sour the overall dining experience, though — the service, and the price. While the service is friendly enough, the staff are not generally very attentive at all, and seem to do the bare minimum most of the time. I get that they’re busy — the place is very popular — but sometimes their service borders on the incompetent. The most extreme example of this, in my experience, was when I visited here last week. I had ordered a pot of tea and was ⁵⁰⁄₅₀ about whether to order food or not. The (admittedly very nice) waitress came over, took my drink order, gave me a menu and said that she would be back to take my food order shortly. ‘I guess I am ordering food then’, I thought to myself. 5 minutes later, I received my tea from another waiter, without him saying a word to me, and after another ten minutes I realised the waitress from before wasn’t coming back. In the meantime, none of the waiting staff passing by bothered to check if I was being attended to, despite the fact that I had a menu in my hand. Failing to even acknowledge a customer’s presence like this is surely the biggest gaffe it’s possible to make in the service industry, and their incompetence that day cost them my business. If I was the manager/​owner, I’d be livid about a situation like that.
The price leaves a bad taste, too — the food isn’t prohibitively expensive, but it’s just not worth what they charge. The Quarter serves what are essentially £6 meals with a £10−12 price tag. They just about get away with this, as their clientèle is largely middle-​class, and it is a genuinely nice environment in which to enjoy a meal — it’s spacious, pleasantly decorated, and gets tons of natural light through the windows at the front of the building.
If you’re looking for a casual dining experience with decent quality food, The Quarter will certainly fulfil your needs, but you just might leave with the feeling that you could have got more bang for your buck elsewhere.

Unfortunately I don’t want to go back. It doesn’t matter how lovely the setting is, or how good the quality of ingredients are — when you have the grumpiest of grumpy waiters, it doesn’t feel like a «good morning». No idea if our two waiters had a particularly rough night last night but we were left searching for service and our first waiter muttered a lazy «yeah» after we politely asked if we could order some food. Never received 1 smile and were never asked if we needed anything. But he was extremely efficient with giving us our bill about 1 minute after we received our breakfast. Last but not least, he also got our order wrong. Ooh, and don’t know if this is how they just do it, but our eggs were also overdone — yolks completely cooked through. Shame when you have such quality ingredients.

Grumpy teenagers posing as waiters. A nonchalant-couldn’t-be-bothered attitude put a grey cloud over our morning breakfast in the sun. Food was kinda ok, good ingredients but the fried eggs were cooked solid and the (hungover?) waiter lived up to his attitude by getting our order wrong. I’ve had better breakfasts for the price. Doubt I’d go back or recommend.

Solid spot. Great food, well presented. Friendly service; but could probably be a little quicker.
Pretty good value.
One qualm I have is that this place stops doing brunch at noon (or thereabouts). Of course this is their prerogative and I should done by my homework, but I didn’t, and my heart was crushed when I couldn’t get any damn eggs and toast when I really wanted them.

We were in the mood for something nice on a Sunday afternoon, and The Quarter didn’t disappoint.
We had the goats caprese pizza (with added chorizo), garlic pizza bread with field mushrooms, Quarter caesar, a glass of house red, and their chocolate fudge cake with honeycomb ice cream for dessert. Our bill came to around £32.
The food for the most part was wonderful. The bread was fresh and flavorful, and the pizza was especially delightful. The meal-​size caesar was extremely generous with the chicken and still tasty, though a little bland in comparison to the other two dishes. The cake was the weak point of our meal; it was drier than expected, which would probably not have been the case had it been served cold (the server offered the choice). The wine was fruity and pleasant.
They were short-​staffed during our visit, regarding which we heard occasional grumblings from fellow customers. This didn’t affect our meal in any way whatsoever; our server’s efforts to keep up with the added demand clearly paid off.
Suffice to say, we plan on returning.

This lovely café-​restaurant currently features in third place on the Liverpool ‘Best of Unilocal’ list. For food quality and customer experience, I’ve found The Quarter very reliable over a number of years and it is my go-​to place for eating out in Liverpool.
In the beginning, I enjoyed their soups which are pretty much a meal in themselves, but still quite refined. Then I tried their primavera pizza, which is goats cheese and roast mediterranean vegetables. At just £7.50 and totally delicious, this pizza comes highly recommended. The mezze with flatbread is also good, and comes as a trio of thick dips on a long, thin plate — hummus, tzatziki, etc. Recently, The Quarter have expanded their menu and I am looking forward to trying out some of their new vegetarian options. Daily specials run from £5 for a starter to £10−15 for mains, and the specials board descriptions always have a real wow factor about them.
Everything at The Quarter is just that bit ‘more’ in a good way — Victoria Sponge is £3.95 and covered with whole strawberries pointing up and so on. They have a delicatessen on the side of the restaurant doing some great-​looking sandwiches, mezze boxes, really authentic regional foods (such as almond-​fig marzipan from a particular Italian province) and they will also sell you a lump of their pizza dough for £0.60 so you can roll it out at home!
Eyes up from the plate, things are equally fabulous. The university and LIPA nearby ensure the vibe stays lively, even at noon on a Monday, yet I’ve never found it to be overly busy. In warmer weather, the street scene is world class for al fresco dining — clean air, quiet cobbled streets, wide pavements, Georgian terraces, street sculptures and the gothic spire of Liverpool Anglican Cathedral clearly visible.
Staff are a lively bunch of 20 – 30 year olds, friendly and on-​the-​ball. The semi-​open kitchen exudes feeling of reliable artisanship, and they have a big coffee machine and baristas. (Sorry, I don’t drink the stuff so that’s all I know!) The layout is labyrinthine, as the premises have been extended by progressively knocking down the walls between previously separate units. The upside of this is that there are effectively several ‘zones’ with different ambience and degrees of formality. Quiet and corporate in a roped-​off formal seating area, but as laid-​back as can be in other areas, The Quarter is a great option for most types of eating out.

The Quarters best points are these:
— the cherry pie with hot custard even so the slices got smaller
–the mochas are delicious and at best they are the best in town
— WIFI and it’s free wifi and generally very good
— the staff have mostly been there a long time and know what they are doing
— Joghurt, musli and fruit is a small but nice snack for £2.75 and I opt for this when my budget is low, but I am trying to consume something that is not cake. Every café should have low budget options like this integrated into their menu.
–the pizza is good. Nice thin base, although sadly sometimes a touch undercook for some people’s taste (mine and several friends)
— there’s an attached delicatessen shop where you get very nice bread (although it is an odd move to place the bakery selection RIGHT by the entrance where people’s bags and coats can catch or touch the wares.
The normal /​average points:
— a lot of the food is nice but not amazing
— service fluctuates at times.
Bad points:
–noise! MY gosh it is noisy in there. Consider bringing a hearing funnel when the place is full. place one end against your ear and pass the other to your conversation partner to speak into. That may be your best chance to not lose your voice like as if you’d been out clubbing.
–My suggestion is that the Quarter stop clattering with the cutlery on the customer side of the place and do that instead in the kitchen. This alone would go a VERY long way towards making the ambient a little more relaxed and calm.
The place can get very full (too full) on evenings and especially weekends. So do call them to reserve a table. As for advice if you are hoping for a relatively quiet corner. But I imagine they don’t even notice how loud it is in there.
Parking: outside in front of the café for 70 pence per 30 minutes. Free after 6pm. BUT if it is special evening/​performance time in the nearby Philharmonic then parking gets very tricky around there. You could park by the Anglican cathedral. they have a car park and I believe after 6pm that is free also. Only a 5 minute walk. Might be a good move to calm down after the mad noisiness off the Quarter and get some fresh air. You can also park there at day-​time for a reasonable charge. Get’s full though.

A little piece of New York in Liverpool.
An independent café on Falkner Street, The Quarter is exactly the kind of bohemian café you’d expect to stumble across in Greenwich Village or Chelsea. The outside is painted pastel green and the inside is all warm wooden tables and mellow music. In the week, it’s usually packed with students and lecturers from the nearby University reading, chatting and checking their email but at weekends, it’s occupied by locals and tourists reading the papers and sipping endless cups of coffee.
In keeping with the Big Apple feel, they serve granola, bagels, croissants and scrambled eggs for breakfast and great salads, stone-​baked pizzas, pasta and meze plates for lunch and dinner. There’s also a good selection of fresh cakes, crumbles, smoothies and wine.
The thing that makes The Quarter the most popular café in the Hope Street Quarter however, is the cluster of outside tables. Aside from being one of the few places you can eat, drink *and* catch a few rays of sunshine, they’re perfect for people watching.

Not full, not half nope nope nope this is, The Quarter folks!!! This café is a refreshing alternative to your starbucks and your café nerros. Unlike the alternatives The quarter serves wine, fresh pizza and Pastas top go with your bog standard sandiwches and cakes.
It has become something of a notorius meet up place. There’s great options for your mates if they get peckish. There are more pizzas than you think on the menu, Thai curry being the stand out one, and my choice of recomendation. The chicken soaks up the Thai spices well and the red peppers and corriander add to the flavour. The bolognase is a tasty treat for all you pasta lovers and is teaming with satisfactory goodness. Round things off with a caramel slice and you’re onto a winner mon amigos.
Add to all that The quarter is actually opens 8am!!! So come get your breakfast on those fresh croissents await!!! This little café maybe a 25% affair but it does provide 100% satisfaction.

A meeting place this is. Great for meeting up with friends, colleagues, family and everyone really. I usually start with tomato, mozzarella & basil salad to share, followed by hawaiian pizza and if not totally full, I finish with raspberry cup cake. I don’t know why but I tend to be a creature of habit at The Quarter. I don’t know what it is, I am never usually like this and like to try lots of different dishes, even if I go to a place regularly I swop around in what I have. But here, I always have the same. Aw well. The cakes here look amazing and whilst I have only tasted the ones, there is a great selection and some really different ones that you don’t tend to see elsewhere, including lumpy bumpy, manchester tart and blueberry & almond cake.
Last great point — there is a free wireless broadband service!

My heathen palate isn’t used to restaurant food. In my mind, pizzas are huge and fatty, like pepperoni-​encrusted tectonic plates of lard. The pizzas at the Quarter are a lot different, as thin as cardboard but ten billion percent more gratifying for the soul. The rest of the menu consists of things I always just presumed I’d hate (olives, feta, anything pronounced with a French accent) but turned out to love.
At its busiest, the Quarter can become a bit hellish. There’s isn’t any room to breathe and the clamour of (often irritatingly posh) voices filling the air makes it feel like a Turkish bazaar at Ascot. The best time to visit is when everybody else just buggers off and calmness descends. Being nestled amongst the cobble-​stoned eminence of the Georgian quarter means sitting outside drinking a cold beer on a summer’s evening becomes a gorgeous experience. Try that anywhere else in town and you’ll be met with a lungful of bus exhaust.

I love The Quarter! It’s a brilliant place set right in the heart of the cultural quarter of Liverpool. As it’s so popular it is always always busy, and it’s often full of businessmen holding meetings. You will also find the «arty» gang as The Quarter is situated between the Everyman and the Philharmonic — or even a local celebrity.
The menu is pretty good with a wide range of brunch stuff, pizzas, pastas, salads, or something from the deli. It’s all delicious and fresh.
Prices are pretty reasonable too considering how popular the place is, you can expect to spend around £15 for a 3 course meal.

I think I am falling in love with eating out in Liverpool all over again and some of the significant reasons is The Quarter restaurant. It is superbly located for the pre theatre and concert meals and drinks if you are bound for the Everyman or Philharmonic Hall rain or shine, shine is always the best, the outside seating area has a great ambiance and location just off Hope Street and opposite the iconic Blackburn House a superb reminder of Liverpool’s educational and cultural heritage.
The true aspect of what Liverpool café culture are exemplified in the restaurant and it’s on street seating area, the food itself is of excellent quality and very good value, reasonably priced.
So if you are looking for a quality budget appendage to your cultural accompaniment look no further then The Quarter, you are also able to avail yourself of all of this throughout the day and I hope like me the reason to do so is as often as you can!

Oh me oh my, the Quarter Deli is AMAZING. A beautiful hot sunny day, what do I fancy? Hmm, a little local snack and a wander. Well, get down to The Quarter.
Perfect for making up the contents of a little wicker basket with some red and white checkered napkins to match. Seriously. Stuffed olives. Heavenly. Little jars of local preserves, sweets, cakes, parma ham, om nom. And it’s all laid out like a little village store, all traditional like you’re in someone’s cottage kitchen.
They had the biggest pink frosted glittery cupcake I had ever seen on the counter, sure it would set you back £14 but it looked Delicious! As I sauntered out smug with my luncheon purchases I cracked into the olives straight away, and they looked so good a passerby asked if I could be tempted to let him try one, of course I obliged, share the wealth! Well worth a trip!

Despite seeming to be forever expanding, The Quarter is always full. A staple of the Georgian Quarter before any of us had heard of what that was supposed to be (it was just the rough end of town before gentrification cleared that up for us), The Quarter is the hub of Liverpool’s young professionals and arty crowd as it is handily situated near the Everyman, Philharmonic and universities.
The food is classic bistro fare consisting of a brunch menu, a range of salads, pizzas and pastas reasonably priced in a bright and warm environment and all served by friendly but very professional staff. The Quarter now has a deli section at the far end of the restaurant as seems to be de riguer for all cafes and restaurants these days so there’s no need to panic when you can’t get enough pesto, pinenuts and stuffed olives at home!

SUGGS! You know you’ve arrived when you rock up outside a gorgeous café on a sunny day, and there eating his lunch with a bunch of friends is the legendary Suggs, singer with Madness. I squeeeeeeed about this to the BF when I got home, who responded, ‘I guess I’m supposed to know who that is.’
I looked horrified. ‘Yes, you are. Call yourself a bloody musician.‘
I took myself off for a while. It’d be days before I got over that one. Anyway, dreadful revelations aside, my experience at The Quarter was a great one. It’s a fine little place, located around the corner from my mum’s friend’s apartment where she was staying during some of her time in the UK. I’d heard great things already — the garlic flatbread is awesome, apparently, as is the light Italian food — and we popped in for a drink and perhaps even some cake during a little jaunt round Liverpool. In the end the cake options were too plentiful and wonderful for us to actually choose, so we settled on cappuccino and green tea, but more of that later.
The first thing you’ll notice about The Quarter is that it’s also a deli. All manner of breads, jams, buns, cakes, preserves, sauces and teas lay on those shelves, and it’s hard not to spend a good portion of your time there rattling through them all. It even sells Stokes sauces, the ones they have on the tables at Teacup in Manchester which my mum really likes. Up at the counter there are olives, salads and all other sorts of deli wonderments, but the cakes are where it really excels. The Paris Brest, a choux pastry and praline cream concoction of naughty yet light deliciousness is pretty famous here, and the history behind the bun is as such. It was created in 1891 as a commemorative symbol of the Paris-​Brest bicycle race, and its donut shape is meant to resemble a wheel.
A tempting, disgustingly lipsmacking bicycle wheel. Ommmm.
Moving swiftly on, what impressed me most about The Quarter aside from its lovely wooden tables, its ambient and homely décor and its SUPER POSH toilets (they are worth a visit alone), was its service. Picture the scenario. We’re served by a delightful, bubbly blonde and chicly boho lady. When I request green tea she says they have normal, leaf or a special tropical infusion. I decide to tempt fate and go for the tropical. I get my own little brown teapot of water. The teabag looks like something I’d hang on my doorknob as a decoration, I almost don’t want to wet it. It’s not made of anything papery. It’s MATERIAL. Like cotton. It comes from the Mighty Leaf company and seriously, I never thought I’d be getting so excited over plain old green tea but here was a concoction with a gorgeously smooth undertone of honey and pineapple, and I loved it.
Our lovely waitress comes over again and asks me what it’s like, because she wants to drink more green tea and doesn’t much care for the taste, so this might be an option for her. I recommended it, and described the flavours. She was so chatty and fun, it was marvellous. Mum went over to the deli to check if they sold it here, but all they had were multipacks of six with a selection of the tropical green and some jasmine stuff. I definitely wanted to take some home, but I would have been happy with just the green. When the waitress returned we asked if it was possible to customise the multipacks. Before I knew it she’d brought me back my very own bag with only the green tropical tea in it. I was one satisfied customer.
The Quarter is part of a family of bars and restaurants in the Hope Street area, and I must say, our experience here was so pleasant, it’s easily a five star knockout. And I haven’t even tried the food, which I’ve heard is fantastic, so there we go. This ain’t just a Quarter. It goes the whole nine yards and then some. Super place.

The Quarter is the sister restaurant to Host and No.60, and as such represents the lower end of the price scale. Recently expanded, it can now seat twice as many people as previously and even houses its own shop! The toilets are still a bit dodgy though…
If I were to describe it in one word, I would say ‘studenty’ — the atmosphere is chilled and laid back and the clientele don’t differ that much from the staff. The wine lists are all pasted onto wine bottles on the tables, and the menu is pretty basic, although it is always worth while asking for the specials. The main food is pizza, but there is also a range of salads and pasta dishes and vegetarians and vegans are catered for.
The desserts are sumptuous, and it is always heartbreaking going to the glass-​fronted display and trying to choose one. Definitely somewhere to go with a large group of friends so you can order different things and try a bit of everything!
Even if you’re not in a group and you just fancy somewhere warm to read a book and have a cuppa, this is the perfect place. Just on the outskirts of the city centre, you’re close enough to walk to the shops but distanced enough to get some peace and quiet!

The Quarter is one of my favourite places to eat in Liverpool. It lurks down a little side street in between the two cathedrals and has a fairly straight forward menu of pizza, pasta and salads. The vibe is busy but laid back, you’re never booted off your table, the wine is served in tumblers and the staff don’t fanny around you too much. I like this. It’s honest and natural and and being served good pizza by total babes ticks all my boxes.
I went back there at the weekend and they have expanded their restaurant space, making way for a little deli — this couldn’t be more awesome. Both day and night, the quarter is a lovely place to go and catch up.