A walk on the wild side (Manchester in General)

Member Name: tagheur

Product:	Manchester in General
Date:	13/09/02 (701 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: best of the best

Disadvantages: dodgy area

Take the train to Manchester Piccadilly. If you must start from somewhere, then pick somewhere in Yorkshire. Say Huddersfield or Leeds, that way you get to ride up through the Colne Valley on the train, one of the best jouneys I know. Passing places with names like Slaithwait, Linthwait and Marsden (the locals pronounce them as "Slowit", "Linfit" and Marzdin) and finally through the long, long tunnel that connects the White Rose with the Red. It's thirty minutes of sheer beauty from Huddersfield to Manchester. If you prefer 30 minutes of shit you can use the M62.

Leave the train and set off down the hill towards Piccadilly square with its shops and its bustle. As you join London Road, instead of following it towards the square, turn right onto Ducie street. It leads away east, into a far less savoury part of the City. However at this time of day (lunchtime) you have nothing to fear except the odd beggar or perhaps a hooker, plying her wares behind China Lane. Some of the lasses get up remarkably early in this part of the world.

I hope you are hungry because we don't have far to go...

Head along Ducie street for a block and turn left into Dale street. This is the same Dale street that bisects the Arndale shopping mall, right where an IRA Bomb blew away the heart of the city some years ago. But that is a mile or more from here at its lacklustre southern source. The street is home to a series of forbidding nineteenth century mill buildings. We are entering the Cloth Area and while the buildings and surroundings are bleak, you will see more Mercedes, Ferraris and Rolls-Royces doubled parked here than you will anywhere else in the city, with the possible exception of Old Trafford on a match day. You can smell the money being made. Everywhere, vans and trucks are being unloaded and loaded, always under the sharp eyed gaze of well dressed individuals, mobile phones apparently glued to their ears.


Many are quite clearly of Middle eastern or Asian extraction and they are natural traders. Their fathers and their forefathers before them must have made their living in much the same way. I am going to take you to one of the places where they eat their hurried lunches, snatched from the hurly burly of the working day.

After a few hundred metres look for an alley on your right called China lane. Walk down this narrow canyon next to the JD Williams Mail order building and turn left onto Hilton Street. There's a pub on your right called "The Crown" and it serves a fair pint of Boddingtons if you fancy an appetiser. As Pubs go, it's as rough as a Badger's bum, so just be polite, drink your beer and don't draw attention to yourself. You'll be fine. Onward bold pilgrim.

North up Hilton street, across Newton Street and Lever Street, and we're almost there. Hilton street does a strange thing at this point, it becomes Stevenson square for a little while before reverting to Hilton Street once more.

A lot of the people who work in the area are Moslem and so, over time, a series of Halal eating places has sprung up just for them. Unfortunately, over the last few years they have become very popular with the "suits", however we are going to one of the less well known. It's also the best, in my opinion. You get to eat Asian food as the Asians eat it and not the Anglicised pap you get in your local "Indian". These places are not "restaurants" in the way that you might think. For a start, most of them are closed in the evening. In the main they open around eleven in the morning and close around five. Their natural English equivalent would be the "greasy spoon" cafe's that we all know and love.

In the Manchester cloth area there about a dozen of these little curry cafe's. They are all very small, the largest boasts around ten tab
les. Most of them h
ave "open" kitchens where you can watch the food being prepared and without exception, they are all scrupulously clean. The one other unusual thing about them is that they all have a wash basin situated in the dining room itself. This allows patrons to wash their hands both before and after food. You'll see why this is important shortly.

Hilton Street, without warning, becomes Thomas street which, in its turn, ends rather sloppily in a hotchpotch of little alleyways and back streets. Central Manchester's equivalent of The Shades. We aren't going quite that far. Thomas street has a multi-story carpark on the left as you enter it. Walk past the car park and turn left into the little alley called John Street that runs behind it. There on the corner of yet another alley on the right, you will see a little curry shop with a big blue sign above it that announces to the world that it is the "Kabana" It's the best curry shop I know.

The smell hits you as you walk in the door. A wonderfully savoury, yet aromatic delight. It smacks you in the stomach like a two-pound lump-hammer. Ignore the menu hung carelessly on the wall, it doesn't mean a damn thing - you can have what they've cooked or go hungry. The place is always jumping. Mobile phones going ten to the dozen and guys running back and forth to move their cars as the "yellow peril" walks by. A big jovial guy with jet-black skin waits at tables and warns customers when the parking wardens are about to swoop.

They cook the food continually so it's always fresh. You can have a bowl of curry or perhaps a kebab cooked on the open range - no, not one of those disgusting electric thingies - they make these kebabs by hand. They take fresh raw keema and they mold it onto big steel skewers which they place over red hot charcoal. The locals call 'em "dog turds" because of the way they
look when they come off t
he fire. With a little mint raitha and a dab of fiery chili sauce, they are to die for. If lamb doesn't take your fancy they will cook you marinated fish or chicken in the same way. It's all gorgeous.

They always have at least four different kinds of curry; Lamb, Chicken, Keema and a vegetable (usually a mixed veg of potato, spinach and dahl or channah). On Wednesday, they have a special which is curried Quail on the bone. Yes, I know it sounds like nonsense but they really do! It's bloody marvelous if you can put up with all of the little bones and you don't mind getting totally messy. Take a bib on Wednesday!

My favourite is the lamb. I sit here salivating in a sad parody of one of Pavlov's dogs as I recount my tale. On alternate days they cook dahl (lentils) or channah (chick peas) as a veg accompaniment and you can have a "dob" (as they call it) in the bowl with your curry if you wish. The chick peas go particularly well with the lamb. The friendly owner will fill your bowl in front of you at the counter. You can have rice or popadums if you want but they're generally regarded as being a bit effete - The locals don't eat them. Furthermore, because both are a pain in the ass to cook they have them pre-prepped and they just warm them through in the microwave. Your choice but I wouldn't bother.

The lamb is just that. Bite sized chunks of meat in a thick gee-based gravy or sauce, depending upon your class roots. Nothing else. Just lamb. On Wednesdays they have two variants, you can have it on or off the bone. All other days they just do it off the bone, which I prefer anyway.

But how to eat it? This can be a bit daunting if you aren't familiar with local etiquette. Knives and forks, although available from a tray in the corner, are somewhat frowned upon in the Kabana. You are encouraged to eat "commando", which here means
with your fingers, and in par
ticular, the fingers of your right hand only. Watch the regulars. The lamb is ordered with chapattis and eaten by tearing off a chunk of the unleavened bread and using it to wr
ap and scoop up a piece of meat from your bowl. Which brings me nicely to the piece de resistance of the Kabana and indeed, all of the eateries in this little area of Manchester; the chapattis.

When you think of chapatti you probably conjure up an image of thin insubstantial soft thingies which they fold into four and place next to your plate. Think again. The Manchester items are the XR3i nutter bastards of the chapatti world! These buggers have attitude. For a start, they are as thick as a Nan bread. Thrown against the side of the Tandoor, they come out with a crisp, in places brown, exterior and a beautiful soft interior. They are about the size of a dinner plate and if you were to hit someone with one of them then that unfortunate would almost certainly require immediate medical attention. They're a paradigm for the cosmos!

They arrive piping hot on a plastic doyly-cum-tray sort of thingy and you can't touch them for a few minute because they will burn your fingers. Best to have something to fill in the time while they cool. I usually have a "salad" while I'm waiting. Served on a little plate it is a melange of fresh tomato, a little lettuce and two kinds of raw onion, one plain, the other marinated. The whole thing gets a big spoonful of mint raitha poured over it followed by an equally big spoonful of hot chili sauce. It is quite simply orgasmic. The crunchy texture of the vegetables blended with the cool-hot contradiction of the yoghurt and chili just has to be tasted to be believed. Get that down your neck bonny lad!

By the time you have finished the salad the chapattis will have cooled enough for you to tackle the lamb. You can use your left hand if you want, but the local
s will look down their noses at you
if you do. The tradition of "Clean hand, dirty hand" dictates that you only use your right. There is a trick to resting your right wrist on the chapatti to hold it in pos
ition while you tear of a bite sized piece with your fingers. The locals make it look easy and it has the added advantage for them in that they can continue to do business on the mobile phone with their left hand! Once you have your piece of chapatti you can do like the regulars and drop it over a piece of meat in the bowl. The trick then is to pick up the chapatti and the meat, all in one deft motion, and pop it into your mouth. Whenever I have tried this I have always ended up with curry all over my shirt. Instead, I use a spoon in my left hand (sort of acceptable in a "Ha! - look at that clumsy twat" kind of a way). I fold the chapatti into a kind of scoop in my right hand and then spoon meat and sauce into it from my left before shoving the ensemble into my eager gob.

The first bite is heaven. The chapatti and lamb simply explode into the most massive savoury hit inside my mouth. Sure its curry-warm, but it isn't hot in the "give us one them bum burners Abdul" kind of way that you might be used to. This is far more subtle. More than anything, you taste the lamb. This is LAMB! Capital letters. It just blows me away and I eat it in rapt silence. No conversation with this dish. "Leave me alone. I want to enjoy every morsel!"

The chapatti rapidly disappears and I use all of the remaining small pieces to wipe around the bowl in order to finish every last drop of the sauce. I push the bowl away with a sigh of contentment. Finish with a glass of water and a visit to the washbasin to wash the remaining flower and curry from my hands.

OK, I admit it, I am an addict. I simply HAVE to have at least one of these curry hits a month or I begin to go cold turkey. The st
uff is wonderful. The chicken is just a
s good but always a little hotter than the lamb. I would rate it at about a Madras level of hotness as compared to the lamb which is more of a medium curry by regular Indian takeaway stand
ards. If you are ever in Manchester you simply must give these unique curry shops a go. The only other town that I know which has anything similar is Bradford, but even there, they seem to have left their roots and gone more up-market.

The price? To plagiarise the Barclays bank advertisements, you can't put a price on the moon or the stars. But this particular piece of Nirvana will cost you about four quid. That's right, four quid, - and they smile when they take your money. You don't even mind the pissy Manc weather on the way home.

Summary: