GOING for an Indian in Manchester once meant you were torn between the formica tables and grubby water jugs of the Northern Quarter’s basic cafes or the brash smugness of Rusholme’s Curry Mile – Las Vegas soaked in ghee and sprinkled with coriander. For ‘finer’ dining, over half a century, you invariably took in the Rajdoot in Albert Square, whose ornately Moghul basement (happily back in business after a fire) was matched by equally rich, sauced meats.
Little of all this reflected what a billion plus Indians subsisted on, let alone the other races jostling for space and spice across the teeming sub-continent. Did we care? Not enough for a long while. Yes, there was a time before street food, regionality and back to authentic basics.
It’s nearly a decade since EastzEast, proclaiming its Punjabi roots, scooped restaurant of the year in the Manchester Food and Drink Awards. The nearest champions of regional identity since have been small-scale South Indian stalwarts Sanmini’s in Ramsbottom and Lily’s in Ashton-under-Lyne, while more recently in Cheadle the Tiffin Room and Aaamchi Mumbai have steered away from the curry house stereotype. As has the sleekly different Zouk Grill down on Oxford Road.
The good news now is that in the city centre, currently a cauldron of culinary activity, seriously contemporary Indian restaurants are arriving. Take Asha’s, whose launch featured the octogenarian Bollywood singing superstar it is named after. It is a glamorous affair with cocktails to the fore but there is serious attention to detail in the kitchen and a nod to regionality.
First on the scene, though, was Scene (sic) with street food as its calling card. TOM loves its lovely Left Bank terrace overlooking the river and the huge mural featuring Agra station but is still uncertain how ‘street’ it really is. We have no such doubts about Bundobust and Mowgli.
We caught up with the former in the Food Village at Indy Man Beer Con, where their stall gave a foretaste of what’s in store when this Leeds-based Indian veggie/craft beer bar opens in Manchester too next spring, venue to be announced with the Piccadilly end of the Northern Quarter the likely destination.
Bundobust started as a collaboration between Bradford’s Sparrow Bier Cafe and award-winning Prashad in Drighlington, whose glorious Gujerati food is trimmed down into grazing portions in tubs. The Leeds city centre base is equally basic, especially the side room that feels like a Goan beach hut. At IndyMan they were serving paneer kebabs for a fiver, bhel puri at £4 and okra fries at £3..50.
Prices are similar for the small dishes at Mowgli, newly arrived in the Corn Exchange after a hugely successful first year in Liverpool. Particularly interesting were the Hindu speciality, tea steeped chickpeas (£4.95), which had been simmered in a rich Darjeeling and spiced tomato and spinach sauce; green ginger and rhubarb dahl (£4.50) and the classic cheese dish; and Mowgli paneer (£5.50), delicately simmered with peas and fresh spinach. A good introduction is the ‘taster thali’, offering a variety of dishes plus rice. And don’t miss the yoghurt chat bombs – crisp bread puffs filled with chickpeas, spiced yoghurt, tamarind, coriander and mint that explode in your mouth.
Much of the menu is vegan-friendly but meat and fish feature. Aunty Geeta’s prawn curry (£6.50) was generous with the prawns and subtly laced with nigella seeded and chilli. I stuffed it into perfectly puffed puris and washed it down with Curious IPA (£4), hoppy sideline of leading English winery Chapel Down.
Mowgli is the brainchild of barrister turned YouTube cookery guru Nisha Katona (above), who draws on the Calcutta roots of her family. Its lunchtime food offer follows Hindu tradition by being onion and garlic free with plenty of vegan options. Oh, and in a cute take on Indian office food, you can carry out a tiffin box, with the menu contents changing daily. In India it’s a billion pound industry. When office workers leave home for work, they cannot take with them their home cooked hot lunches.Their lunches follow them in stacked tiffin tins, “by train, mule, taxi and turban”. Mowgli will serve the Office Workers Tiffin at £12 for three curries and a black cardamom rice and the vegetarian School Dinner Tiffin at £10.
Speaking of tiffins, it’s great to see Tiffin Room saving us the trek out to Cheadle by lining up an outlet in the city centre’s coolest new frontier, the £500m First Street Development. Srini Sundaram and Suresh Raje Urs’ take on South Indian street food (check out their website image above) has garnered huge acclaim in a short time – it will be interesting to see how it transposes.
The same goes for Mughli, maverick shining light in Rusholme with the new generation spreading their wings beyond the family charcoal pit to open the Railway Cafe pop-up (now permanent) in Alderley Edge, combining cutting edge gin with chef David Gale’s small plate interpretation of Indian food. He’s back on board for their latest venture in the Northern Quarter, taking over Superstore in Tib Street. The menu there is still as is, but we look forward to its eventual relaunch as, in Gale’s words, “a global brasserie with a focus on fresh food”. That suggests something beyond Indian. Better a melting pot, though, than flock wallpaper and a ‘pint of lager with me vindaloo, mate’.
Mowgli Unit 16, 37 Corn Exchange, Manchester M4 3TR. http://www.bundobust.com