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 Akhtar, 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.
Smiling, he points across the room to where he recalls seeing the workmen lifting the huge steel beams into place just on their shoulders, teetering on ladders. Health and safety was less of an issue back then. “Can you imagine that?” he laughs. “Going up a ladder with this huge girder on your shoulders!”
Indulge in more of Ben Arnold's food writing covering Greater Manchester...
One of Stockport's best takeaways is run by an ex-footballer and tucked away by Cash Converters
The takeaway inside an ex-council house in Blackley serves the 'best curry you'll ever have'
A guide to enjoying life in one of Manchester's favourite suburbs
At dusk one evening last week, we sat and ate - seekh kebabs, chicken tikka, a rich chana curry - as he reflected on what this strip of the relentlessly busy Wilmslow Road used to be, and what it has become. 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. And they’re still all crammed in next to each other, cheek-by-jowl.
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.
READ MORE: 'Glorious' restaurant with Michelin star team to open in the city
READ MORE: Award-winning Salford brewery Pomona Island is to open its first pub
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 through. “I was standing at the sweet counter, and it hit my forehead,” he says.
“We closed the restaurant, boarded it up. It was an unbelievable time. You never thought it could happen here. After that, the shutter business came. Now everyone has shutters. I felt very unsafe. Racism was common, but nothing like that. We were watching it unfold on the news, and it was unbelievable.”
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. That’s how it would start.”
Just a few years later, the growing Asian community in south Manchester 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, sandwiched between a children’s clothes shop and a health food store, 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. “Innocent days. Life seemed more simple.”
READ MORE: New Middle Eastern-inspired Sunday roast is heading to Manchester
READ MORE: The Manchester restaurants named in the 2023 AA Guide
The family - Abdul is one of four brothers and two sisters - lived first in Moss Side. He went to Ducie High School, and lived in Cannock Street. “It was a lovely neighbourhood at that time,” he says. But his street, along with a handful of others, was earmarked for demolition, and was levelled in 1974, so the family moved to Chorlton, to Wilbraham Road.
But the family business remained in Rusholme, Abdul and his brothers and sisters helping in the restaurant. While he sat A levels, he was always around the restaurant, and so it eventually fell to him to run, and he’s still here some 40 years later, seeing the changes happen slowly, incrementally in front of him, as new places come and go.
Some 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. Literally 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. From here, you cross, and people don’t realise, and there are many, many accidents. And the upheaval for two years while they were building.
“It’s not been good at all for businesses. All that money wasted. It could have been used in better ways. The parking is a big issue. They could have given more parking to us. It’s very annoying, and it’s very difficult.
“All these roads are broken, and we can’t do anything about it. We’ve always been asking them for more parking. We don’t feel like we have a voice [with the city council], as a community. We did have the Rusholme Traders Association, that was very much in dialogue with the city council, but as people have moved out and others have moved in, that has disappeared, so we don’t have a voice now.
“We have an individual voice, but not a collective voice. And that’s where the problem lies. The city council doesn’t know who to contact anymore. Things have changed. Not all for the worse. But all not for the good.”
Nonetheless, Sanam has endured while others have not. Well, not only endured but thrived and expanded. There are Sanams in Longsight and Cheetham Hill too, as well as Oldham and Bradford. They’ve seen off their share of recessions, and of course, a recent pandemic.
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. Abdul’s not sure who will take over from him. His own children - he has seven, five daughters and two sons - are all taking on their own careers. He hopes that this might change, or that the children of one of his brothers could take it on and keep it in the family.
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. People come and people go, and the journey continues.”
Get the latest What's On news - from food and drink to music and nightlife - straight to your inbox with our daily newsletter.
Read more of today's top stories here
READ NEXT:
'I found Manchester's best sandwich down a very dodgy looking backstreet'
Why the Jewish Museum's award-winning Cheetham Hill café is 'good for the soul'
Family, faith and 'the best' doughnuts: Life in Manchester's oldest kosher bakery
The takeaway inside an ex-council house in Blackley serves the 'best curry you'll ever have'
One of Stockport's best takeaways is run by an ex-footballer and tucked away by Cash Converters
