Some of my best friends are restaurant PR’s. Lots of them in fact, and they’re magnificent people. Restaurant PR’s may be invisible to the average diner, but they are vital oiled cogs in the hospitality machine, getting awareness of a restaurant out and getting paying diners in. It’s a tough job, requiring bottomless charm and steely tenacity, but since the late 1990s, when Andy Spinoza pioneered hospitality comms in the city, Manchester has been home to some of the best.
Yet whilst I revel in the social whirl of press lunches and venue launches as much as anyone, I do hold a significant candle for those hospitality businesses which tick along for decades without PR representation or even an active social media presence. It seems like an important measure of a city’s dining scene that such places still survive, demonstrating the presence of loyal, legacy diners, in addition to the hordes of neophiliacs endlessly charging from one opening to the next.
Café Marhaba is one such example. A classic Mancunian curry café and a family run-operation (over the years founder, Nazir Ahmed, has been joined by his son, Abdul), it is no more likely to invest in marketing than it would a lobster press. Admittedly it has a (self-administered) Instagram account, sporadically updated with close-ups of brown food, but don’t let this fool you. It has been open since 1992 and still has a sign above the door with an ‘061’ telephone number on it.
If you haven’t been to a curry café, or a rice ‘n’ three as they are often called, they are a unique Mancunian institution. They stem from the time when the Northern Quarter, as it wasn’t called back then, was full of textile companies, many with Pakistani owners and workforces who required quick and affordable lunches. Curry cafés acted as de facto workers’ canteens. You simply rocked up, picked three curries from a selection of a dozen or so, all bubbling away in Bain Maries, then slop, slop, slop, onto a big plate of rice and you’re away.
Café Marhaba occupies a narrow site, jammed into an edgy back street which feels disconcertingly like the setting for the 1980’s title sequence to The Equalizer. It has five sets of two-tops down the left and a long counter on the right. There is a printed menu on each wall and, at the far end, a fridge full of bottled water and cans of Rubicon. Abdul is usually toiling away at the tandoor, where you can watch the naans being rolled to order, padded onto the scorching surface of the clay oven, then hooked out minutes later, blistered and steaming, to be brushed with ghee and served.
Forget the rotating turbot cages at Brat, or The Ritz’s flambeed crêpes Suzette, this is what tableside theatre is all about. If Andrew Lloyd-Weber produced ‘Marhaba – The Musical’, I would buy tickets on repeat and sing along with every chorus.
Alongside Andy Clayfield – my first ever boss, my current business partner, and the man who first introduced me to curry cafes – and I, only Michael Di Paola has been as evangelical about Café Marhaba. Michael had long been a man about town, but is now largely a man about country, having launched Freshwalks, an organisation which recharges the minds and lungs of thousands of Mancunian businesspeople in the great outdoors. It took the lure of those naans to tempt him off the hills and back into town as my plus one for the day.
So here we both are, back in our usual seats in our old haunt, like limpets returning to their scars. My go-to dish, back when I was twenty-one years of age and twenty-eight inches of waist, was the chicken tikka kebab on naan. The spice mixes are family recipes, blended in-house to jealously guarded ratios, and here the chicken sits in a spiced yoghurt marinade for 24 hours before being charred in the tandoor and then slid from its skewer into the embrace of a fresh naan. A handful of old school chopped salad – lettuce, tomato, white onions and half-moons of cucumber – is thrown on top before being lashed with chilli sauce and yoghurt. The scent of the fresh bread gets up in your nostrils, yeasty and doughy. It’s as pudgy and biteable as a toddler’s wrists.
And then we turn to Michael’s old favourite of a big bowl of saag aloo. Its thick, oily sauce, heavy on ghee and powerful with spice, contains soft nuggets of potato which have taken on the flavour of the liquor and crush lightly when squeezed into a fold of bread. And that spinach is something special, dark green like a fairytale forest and silky as a Hermès tie. Apparently, the secret is not to cut the mix with cheaper mustard greens, and to cook it down for hours from fresh. A dish to tempt even Popeye to can the cans.
For our rice ‘n’ three we dithered briefly before choosing a dark and deeply flavoured lamb karahi, a punchy keema studded with peas and potatoes, and a lighter but softly satisfying fish karahi, made using coley, which held together nicely despite the clinging sauce attempting to drag it back into the depths of the bowl like a hungry kraken. Again and again we dug in with torn pieces of roti, like the farmers Boggis, Bunce and Bean pursuing Fantastic Mr Fox, but despite our best efforts we ran out of room before we ran out of food.
Back in the mid 90’s rice ‘n’ three here cost about £4, yet after never-ending inflationary pressure, which recently ballooned into double digit percentages, the price here has barely doubled in three decades. Yep, it’s still a mere £8 for a plateful of delicious, authentic, hot, fresh food, made with integrity and love, containing three distinct hits of palate-jangling flavours and a heap of carbs for ballast. Is there better value in the city centre? I would say that there is not.
As I left, Mike was still chatting with Nazir and Abdul, comparing notes on the Pakistani businesspeople and landlords they had both known since back in the day. Some had passed away, and family businesses had been passed onto children with varying levels of success. The local audience of regulars has maybe ebbed rather than flowed over the years, as the city has shifted on its axes around Back Piccadilly, but those threads of shared knowledge and community hold true.
Manchester often feels like somewhere which faces only forward, thrilled by the original and the radical, and rightfully so. But what rounds out a truly great gastronomic city are places like Café Marhaba, built on stories quietly told and handed from generation to generation, via nothing more than old fashioned word of mouth.
Thom Hetherington and Michael Di Paola ate at Café Marhaba, 36 Back Piccadilly, Northern Quarter, Manchester. M1 1HP
Petit Fours
- On the subject of Back Piccadilly, Café Marhaba’s near neighbour, Mother Mac’s pub, has recently reopened as the excellent Rat and Pigeon and has been packing them in ever since. Manchester needs its historical pub buildings saved and sometimes reopened, and hopefully this particular success story will bring a deluge of new footfall past Nazir and Abdul’s door.
- This month Manchester shone in the National Restaurant Awards, with Mana highest placed and the highest climber at 14, Higher Ground close behind at 16, Erst at 50 and the recently launched Skof snagging the ‘One to Watch’ award (it also got a rave review from William Sitwell in the Telegraph). Besides Manchester, Edinburgh got three entrants, but no other UK city outside of London got more than one. Not a bad night then, though sadly our luck didn’t carry over to the Catey awards just this week, where local names including Osma and San Carlo made the shortlists but just missed out on gongs. Ah well, next year, we go again.
- The hospitality love-in between Manchester and London continues, with the last month seeing a Blacklock press trip down South, and Flat Iron opening its doors up here – How do they manage to sell such a good steak for £14?! Also circling the city are possibly the best London-based restaurant group you’ve never heard of. JKS are involved in twenty-seven restaurants in the capital including (probably) many of your favourites – Bao; Sabor; Berenjak; Lyle’s; Trishna; Gymkhana; Hopper’s; Kitchen Table; Brigadier’s; BiBi etc. They are the sort of operator who would add to Manchester’s dining scene, rather than taking from it, so fingers crossed they land some sites up here soon.
- And equally, London once again echoes to the cry of “The Northerners are coming!” Following openings in the capital ranging from Tattu and Fazenda to The Alchemist and Rudy’s, Albert’s Schloss has now planted its flag firmly in the West End, taking the huge old Rainforest Café space in Soho right by Piccadilly Circus. It’s a beast of a site, and on its launch this week was full of a heady mix of London industry folk and Northern hospitality stalwarts on tour, including me, enjoying live music, good food, and an excess of Schnapps. Is London ready to get Schlossed? The early indications are, “Yes, very much so.”
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