Samir Hamwyeh’s son Wasim, a boy with a winning smile, obviously loves helping out his dad in the family restaurant. Only just at high school, and with none of the bashfulness that sometimes overwhelms at that age, he shows you to your table, and if his dad lets him, he might take your order too. I challenge you not to melt while he does this.
Samir and his wife Fadya cook together in the open kitchen in their modest restaurant in Urmston, and the other kids Wisam, Susu, and little twins Nada and Yhia, usually play in a room upstairs, while their parents work but they would rather be downstairs where the action’s happening.
This is a family place in every sense. Samir, 53, who has worked as a chef since his early 20s, brought his family here from Syria in 2016, after life in his home city of Homs - a distant name we would have heard here in grave news reports along with the likes of Aleppo and Raqqa - had become an impossibility. Life could have been very different for them, or had they stayed, snuffed out in an instant.
