Roughly every couple of minutes, someone is beeping their horn, or shouting out of a car window to Alonso Ahsan outside his shop on Stockport Road. He smiles and waves back to all of them. He’s owned the Levenshulme Bakery for just about five years, but he’s pretty much a local celebrity at this stage.
And it’s all down to the power of good shawarma. Anyone with even a passing desire to seek out the city’s truly great sandwiches will likely already know Alonso, AJ and Zheko and all those at the Levvy Bakery, a quite singular kebab spot among a glut of pretenders.
It is bustling all day long, from when the doors open at 10am to when it closes at 9pm. You simply don’t get that unless you’re doing something right.
And you can do all the sums and equations you like - location, footfall, turnover, margins - but what Alonso does is authentic to its core. While Manchester has been his home for 20 years, this food goes much deeper than pandering to the average Manc’s affection for a late night snack, chased home from the pub.
A Kurdish Iraqi, Alonso remembers as a child being fascinated by the bakeries in Mosul, where he grew up, Iraq’s second city, up in the north (perhaps another reason why he’s found his own affinity with Manchester).
He arrived in the UK when he was 16, alone. He had no family here, no support network, it was just him, something no teenager would choose or should find themselves having to do. He says that he lost both of his parents in the 90s.
I ask how, but I sense I’m pushing somewhere he doesn’t want to go, and he says he ‘can’t really remember’ much of that time now. We move on, but I get the feeling things have been far from easy for him. He attended an ESOL course at college to learn English, and now his fluency is pleasingly littered with Mancunian inflections.
He worked for a time as a machine operator in a factory in Burnage, but it was around 12 years ago that he made the move into the food business, working in restaurants and takeaways around Stockport. He had friends too in Rusholme, who ran food businesses, and he wanted in.
The Levenshulme Bakery was being run by friends of his, and was originally solely a bakery, making traditional breads. Slowly he came in to work with them, bringing in the shawarma. Some, shall we say, slightly less conscientious operators may buy their shawarma in frozen, but Alonso makes his every day fresh, marinating the lamb and chicken overnight. Of course, he won’t tell me the recipe. “We don’t try to give our recipes away,” he grins.
And while Mancunians may well enjoy a kebab rolled up in a naan as much as a crammed into a warm pita, the only choice for Alonso was the samoon, a traditional Kurdish Iraqi bread, similar to some of the other flatbreads found around the Levant, with variations in Syria, Lebanon and Kuwait.
The bread, soft and chewy, is perhaps the star of the show, or at least on an equal footing to what gets stuffed inside. Alonso’s samoons, made by Dahlia, a Kurdish baker of 20 years experience, are sprinkled with black and white sesame seeds, and are formed into the traditional diamond shape. They make between 300 and 400 every single day.
It’s what elevates Alonso’s shawarma head and shoulders above his competition, of which there is much. It’s also staggeringly good value. The chicken shawarma is an inflation-clobbering £3.50, the lamb £4.50 and a mix - which is highly recommended - just £4. Find a better value, more delicious sandwich in Manchester, stuffed as it is with crisp cabbage, yoghurt, mango, fresh green chilli sauce, and (to my mind the finest accompaniment) pickled gherkins, and I’ll gladly eat my hat. And coat. On the condition that Alonso has marinated them overnight first.
“It is important having the link to home in this food,” he says. “The ingredients, they are coming from home. From the Middle East but also from Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Iran. And people are interested in it. This type of food, I guess you mostly see on the Curry Mile, and not elsewhere. But this food is like home to me, and that’s very important. I would be eating it every day, or every other day.”
But he found it very hard at first. “The first two years, it was hard to survive,” he says. “Very hard. Paying for food, staff, bills, rent. I was really struggling for the first two years. But even now, though everything is going up, I keep our costs down. I do it for our community, here in Levenshulme. But there are also benefits for business. Keep prices low, and people keep coming back, it keeps us busy.”
Just this month, Alonso has made his first tentative foray into the world of franchising. He’s let another bakery use his name and open up in Stockport. For now, he’s keeping it at arms length, let them run it - on the condition that they do everything exactly the way he does, from the marinating of the shawarma, to making the samoon, to the fatayer, the folded pastries stuffed with cheese, spinach or lamb.
“I’m excited to see how it goes, and if it’s successful, I’ll start thinking about the franchise,” he goes on. “I might even go somewhere like Dragons’ Den! Get some rich people involved! Maybe we do a few branches.” Peter Jones would be eating out of his hand. Perhaps literally. Alonso has two sons, who are 12 and 7, and he hopes one day it will be a family business.
These are grand plans for a boy who arrived here aged 16 with nothing. But when the shawarma is this good, surely anything is possible.
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