Going to Al Faisal feels like a pilgrimage. It shouldn't be undertaken lightly. It deserves special attention and much appreciation. It is really something out of the ordinary. Something to behold.
A decade ago I used to meet friends there and grab an almost impossibly cheap and staggeringly tasty curry before heading off to find back street pubs selling beer from forgotten breweries, daring each other to venture into the next ever more tumbled-down tavern that we came across as we charted the post-industrial hinterland between Market Street, Ancoats and Angel Meadow. It was a voyage upon a beery sea of discovery and we were bouyed by the possibility of adventure and a sense of real danger. Yet keeping us steady was the balast of Al Faisal's redoubtable cuisine.
I made my way there the other day for the first time in a while. It was a great spring day, sunny and mild. A trailer for a summer to remember? I cut across from where the barrows used to be on Church Street, alongside the Conran apartments which previously housed the BT building where I once worked a different lifetime ago and found myself on Back Turner Street, intruding upon a fashion shoot against the backdrop of a short flight of stairs leading down from a door in the alleyway, amongst the bins. I watched as the photographer crouched and stood, thurst forward and recoiled as if she herself was the subject being zoomed in and out. On Kelvin Street I admired the newly refurbished former weavers' cottages, the oldest residential properties in the Northern Quarter, dating back to 1780. They are bookended by the most incredible yet subtle obelisks of modernism, tucked away in the anonymity of these back streets, just as many grand and architecturally ambitious buildings were in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
I turned the corner and found myself before the counter in Al Faisals once again. Half and half - chick peas and chicken with rice. A tough choice - the dahl always looks good, as does the lamb, the breads. ah! I ordered, I was told rather firmly to sit at the vacant table closest to the counter so the guy didn't have to cross the world's tiniest restaurant and I opened the paper. Within seconds my food had been served up from the canteen behind the counter and was in front of me on the table. I poured some water and alternated between reading about a rather glorious defeat of some footballing rivals, smiling, gazing through the window at the characterful frontages of Goodall's Gallery and the Thomas Street Post Office, and rampantly racing through the delicious food. I tried, several times, to eat it slowly, to savour each mouthful, but it is possibly, the most more-ish food in the world.
I paid my £5 for chic pea curry, chicken curry, rice and a diet coke, grabbed my paper and let the backstreets of the Northern Quarter absorb me once again. read more