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.
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But now they are here, and Samir cooks the Syrian food he always has, and does instinctively. He worked for some years at a restaurant on Syria’s Mediterranean coast, at Tartus, and then would travel across the border to Lebanon, working in restaurants in Tripoli. But when the civil war in Syria escalated in 2012, he brought his family to Lebanon to be with him.
He still has a brother and a sister living in Homs, which was under siege for three years during the conflict, though his other brother and sister also escaped to Lebanon. Even now, though the fighting has long since subsided, there is still scant infrastructure. Sometimes the lights are on, sometimes not. When Samir’s father died a couple of years after he arrived in Manchester, he was unable to go back.
“There’s nothing there now,” he says sitting at a table by the bar in the restaurant, pictures of his ancient homeland on every wall. “No electric, no gas, no water. Nothing. No life. I don’t know how they do it. I help, I send money when I can, £100, £200. When they have electric, for an hour or two, they can call me. I feel sorry for what has happened there. And for what? For nothing.”
As refugees, they lived in poverty in Lebanon, Samir often unable to find work. He was briefly imprisoned for having no identification papers, and as refugees from Syria continued to flood in, an unimaginable 1.5 million of them, things began to look increasingly desperate. That was until a lifeline came from a United Nations initiative, and the family was lucky enough to find themselves on a plane to the UK.
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The family landed at Manchester Airport in 2016, to a welcoming committee of people they did not know, a group from the St Monica's Roman Catholic Church in Flixton, who had sponsored them as part of a resettlement scheme orchestrated by Catholic organisation Caritas. They had found them a house, furnished it, and created an instant support network. More recently, the group has done the same for families fleeing the conflict in Ukraine.
“When we arrived, they were with us every day. Even now, they are with me,” he says. “Anything I need, they help with.” He proudly shows me a video of the opening party the church helped him throw last Christmas. Local parishioner Sean Ryan, who was awarded the MBE for his work sponsoring refugees in 2018, is suited and singing Fairytale of New York in the restaurant, before embarking on a dazzling solo on his penny whistle. “He is a very, very good man,” Samir says. He remains eternally grateful to them.
This is his second restaurant. His first was in Stretford, but when the lease came to an end, he found this new place, on the busy strip of bars and restaurants just down from Urmston station. It’s bigger, and as the current inflationary circumstances cruelly dictate, things are tight.
But still, he bluntly refuses to pass on this to his customers, many of whom have become ardent regulars, and who have followed him from his first restaurant to this one. He sees the problem, and while business was brisk when he opened here at Christmas, he’s watched things slow in recent months. He’s had to let all his staff go and watch as costs rocket out of reach. Cooking oil has doubled, charcoal and flour nearly the same. These are basics.
“Everything has become expensive, electric, gas,” he says. “But people’s salaries, they remain the same. And that’s happening to everyone. If I increase my prices, people cannot afford to come anymore.” And so starters remain doggedly reasonable at four or five pounds, main courses no more than £12, much less than many others like him. And while the price is important, the food transcends all that. Were this one of those ‘pay what you feel’ initiatives, you’d be emptying your pockets.
The comforting classics of the Middle East are all here, of course. The lively fattoush salads with thin shards of fried bread, fresh homemade stuffed vine leaves, hummus made daily and served with warm pillows of pita, and falafel, which here - and this says it all - are shaped like hearts.
He makes the kibbeh, the deep fried bulgur wheat and ground lamb dumplings, to his late mother’s recipe, and remembers making them with her when he was a little boy. “I would watch how she cooked from when I was a baby,” he says. “I make the kibbeh the same way.”
But there are adventures to be had on this menu too. Sheikh el Mahshi are mini whole courgettes, stuffed with lamb, floating like torpedoes in a sauce made from pomegranate and tahini. It’s sharp and soothing at the same time, and I resent sharing it. Perhaps order your own. Actually, definitely do, and guard it. It’s one of the most delicious plates of food I’ve eaten this year.
He buys in the small green squash for the Abu Basta stew from the Pakistani supermarkets in Rusholme. The homemade lamb sausages come in a thick slick of tomato sauce, the sausage heavy with cinnamon, and the kebabs are pitch perfect, and this is in a town that has more than its fair share of pitch perfect kebabs going on already. The spicy koftas are just that, but run through with chopped walnuts or, in the less spicy version, flecks of sweet, green pistachio.
The day I visit, he’s frustrated because he’s having the extraction fixed and he can’t cook over charcoal like he usually does, but when he can there are lamb chops rubbed deeply with spice and cooked over fire, and shoqaf, cubed pieces of melting lamb speared on a skewer.
Some people arrive, another family, and Samir’s face lights up. They’re fellow Syrians, who they met through Fadya’s English language course at Stretford College. Within moments of being through the door, the children are off playing together, and the grown ups are helping them in the kitchen too, washing and cleaning.
“They have become friends,” Samir says. From arriving here knowing ‘no one’, literally, other than what was a group of kind strangers from a church group, having this link to home must mean everything. After what they’ve been through to get here, they deserve this, as well as many new regular customers as they can handle.
Samir wants more than anything to repay what was given to him when he and his family needed it the most. With this cooking, and his family now part of this community, he's doing so much more than that.
Samir's, 80 Flixton Rd, Urmston, Manchester M41 5AD
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