Curry with miles of staying power
Ben Arnold talks to the owner of Sanam, the first Indian restaurant to set up in Rusholme and its longest survivor
BEFORE the Curry Mile was the Curry Mile, there was Sanam, out there on its own, the only curry house in Rusholme. It was the trailblazer. It’s quite possible that without it, we would not have the Curry Mile at all.
Abdul Akhrar, its owner, remembers his father building the restaurant we now sit in - he would have been barely a teenager at the time fitting it out opulently with chandeliers and a mezzanine floor. People would come in just out of curiosity to look at it.
Back in the 60s, there were ironmongers, fishmongers, stationers, pubs by the dozen, banks - six or seven of them - hardware shops, hairdressers; everything a community could need.
“It was a proper neighbourhood, and a proper community,” he says. “Working class people are always the best people, more friendly. The loveliest people.”
It was only in the late 80s that it began the transformation into what it is today. It changed ‘beyond all recognition,’ he says, with more and more restaurants moving in, creating something more like what we know of the mile today. Some of the changes have been to the good. Some, not so much.
Back when they started, it was Sanam and Kentucky Fried Chicken across the road, and that was pretty much it. One of the first in the UK,
Abdul’s dad told him that the actual Colonel Sanders came to open it.
It’s a rather different landscape now. Since the turn of the millennium, food from the Middle East, Kurdish, Iraqi and Iranian food has become just as prevalent as the Indian, Bangladeshi and Pakistani restaurants on the strip, not to mention the many shisha bars.
He is content enough with how things have moved on. ‘Life is a journey,’ he says. But for him, the 80s and 90s were ‘the best times.’
“When people see a successful business, other people follow,” he says. “Everybody knew everybody. It was a small community, very friendly. There was no rivalry, we’d help each other out, lend each other whatever they would need.
If someone ran out of something, you knew someone a few doors down would help you out. He says all this sincerely, though when discussing history, things can become rose-tinted.
While the immediate community was friendly and supportive, prejudice was ever present. They would do the day’s business in the two hours after the pubs kicked out, but the clientele were not always pleasant to deal with. Some would be rude, racist, at times threatening. When they weren’t demanding the hottest curries possible out of drunken bravado, they would be trying to leave without paying.
“No one was going out for lunch at an Indian restaurant, at that time it was all after the pub,” he says. “You’d do your whole day’s business in that time. It would be korma
because people wanted their curry mild, or vindaloo for a bet, if they were showing off. Sometimes people would be rude. Sometimes very rude. You just had to take it. Eventually, you become immune to it. Back then though, the police were very understanding. It was difficult, but we felt like the police were listening to us.”
There were other times when he feared for his safety. During the Moss Side riots in 1981, he remembers being hit in the forehead with the same brick that had just smashed his windows. “I was standing at the sweet counter, and it hit my forehead,” he says.”
Abdul’s father, Abdul Ghafoor, arrived in Manchester from Pakistan in the early 60s, working in the cotton mills as a machine operator, the city polluted and swathed at the time in grim smog. There were only two jobs an immigrant worker could hope to get at the time; either in the mills or in Manchester’s frozen food factories. His father chose the former, but as a resourceful young man, it was not for long.
He and two friends - many young Pakistanis were either bachelors or had left their families at home while they got set up in Great Britain - opened their first curry house on Hyde Road in 1963, next to the bus depot, called the Multan, named after the great city in Pakistan, known as the City of Saints.
“He was not a chef, but you would come here, on your own as a young man and you would have to cook your own food,” he says. “So you’d learn to become a master in the kitchen, doing all your own cooking.”
The growing Asian community drew them from Hyde to Rusholme and Moss Side, and their second place, Sanam, named after the famous 1950s Bollywood movie, was founded in 1968, a few doors down from where the restaurant is now. It moved into the current unit in the mid-70s, and has been here ever since. Abdul, now 64, arrived in Manchester aged 11, finding the neighbourhood to be warm and welcoming. When he wasn’t helping in the restaurant, as kids they’d mind people’s cars on match day, back when City played at Maine Road, just around the corner from their house. “They were good old days,” he says.
Recent changes are good, some not so. He laments the bike lanes that the city council completed a few years back. He wonders why they couldn’t have been laid on the parallel A6 instead.
It’s affected parking, which he feels has badly impacted businesses on the mile, and all he sees is the ‘many accidents’ as people stray into the lanes. As I leave, I see a cyclist nearly stack it into a pedestrian. Neither seem particularly shocked by the near calamity, which perhaps says much.
It’s issues like this, he says, that mean he doesn’t feel ‘heard or supported’ by the city council, although the area is held up as a beacon of multiculturalism.
“The cycle lane has created a huge disadvantage to businesses. Before, people could park here and it was safe. The lane could have been on Upper Brook Street, there are no businesses there, there was space available. But they decided to do it here, and they killed off the road. Wilmslow Road was the main artery from the city centre.
“[The cycle lane] has been a disaster. Not good at all. All that space has been wasted”.
Nonetheless, Sanam has endured while others have not. Well, not only endured but thrived and expanded. None of the restaurants that were founded around it in the 70s on the Curry Mile remain, the closest being the likes of Shere Khan which first opened in the late 80s.
But the secret of their success, of lasting nearly 60 years, isn’t really much of a secret. “Hard work,” he says. “We’re used to hard work. We just stuck to it. We always said, ‘when we make £1000, we’ll go back home.’ But it didn’t happen that way. We had our ups and downs, but we stuck to it. Many have folded along the way, but this is all we know. We are all on a journey. We are just travellers.”