Salt & Pepper became a legend in its own lunchtime. Literally. Anyone who works in town will remember the queues that would snake around the foodhall in the Arndale food market each and every day, whether it was a dreary Monday or a busy Saturday afternoon.
Such was its wild and unbridled success that eventually, it had to move. Sibling owners Chloe and Cash Tao, the youngest generation of their family to start a food business in Manchester, a dynasty stretching back 80 years, were not deterred.
Rather than have to pay up for a £91,000 extraction system in the market to cope with the demand for their takeaway boxes (the council said that they had become a ‘safety risk’ because they were ‘so successful’), they moved over the road late last year into their first bricks and mortar restaurant.
Read more of Ben Arnold's food writing covering Greater Manchester...
'I found some of Manchester's most exciting food in a backstreet café with a wonky roof'
The Thai cafe in the shadow of Strangeways where only one thing matters
- This Brazilian cafe in the Arndale Food Market will fill up your soul
Now set up in their new unit on Market Street, in the sight line of where it all started, the queues are still an issue. Last Saturday, it was nudging at the front doormat, and snaking the whole length of the new unit up to the tills and the kitchen at the back, where the magic happens.
It’s the kind of deflating queue that you see and think ‘gah, is it worth it?’. Let me tell you now, it is.
At its busiest, the seating situation is an issue. A victim of its own popularity once again, there’s just not enough of it. So while you’re queueing, it’s a Marty Feldman situation, one eye on your place in the queue, and another on who’s just sat down, who’s midway through their lunch and who’s picking at their last bits and likely to be standing up to leave.
There’s three of us - two in the queue, one hovering, eagle-eyed, to swoop in on a table. Another diner can see I’m hovering around one group. As they stand to leave, she dives in, pretends she’s not seen me, and asks innocently if they’re leaving - YOU KNOW FINE WELL THEY ARE - and sits down, pointedly avoiding eye contact with me. I lose all faith in humanity.
I rejoin the queue, resigned that I’ll probably be eating my lunch off the top of a bin outside. Behind the tills, the kitchen is a blur and clamour of clanking woks and fizzing fryers.
On the order goes the ‘surf and turf’ - a honey soy grilled steak and three fried prawns, ordered with half rice, half salt & pepper chips (£10) - a sticky canton chicken (£8.50, with the same), some salt & pepper calamari (£6) and some salt & pepper hash browns, because they look like the greatest side order of all time (£5). And some sticky soy glaze wings (£6.50).
The wait is painful. But in the meantime, a booth becomes available, and faith in humanity is duly restored. In fact, the wait is about 10 minutes, but it feels like days. Weeks. Perhaps a month.
My number’s called, possibly my name too and the buzzer thing I’ve been given goes off. It’s a ‘belt and braces’ ordering system, and all the better for it. Pots of sauce - sweet sticky soy, szechuan mayo, I forget them all now - are pumped out and the ugly spectacle begins.
And it is ugly. Breath is not taken, the table is a blur of swiping hands. Mine gets slapped as it reaches for a calamari ring, and that’s quite fair enough.
The honey soy steak is wildly generous for the price. It’s not fillet, and I wouldn’t want it to be. This is steak with character. With body. It’s chewy, but it gives. It’s perfect. The prawns are gone in a heartbeat.
Beneath, the crinkle cut salt & pepper chips are buried - buried - under a savoury mix of fried garlic, chilli, spring onions. At that moment, with that combination of flavours, they were the best fried potatoes in Manchester, and likely the world.
The calamari, once I was secure in the knowledge I wouldn’t be stabbed with a chopstick, gnawed to a point like a prison shank by one of my own children, I found also to be perfection, particularly after being dunked first through the sticky soy, and then dragged through the szechuan mayo.
The sticky chicken, glazed in canton sauce and showered with toasted sesame seeds, was a let down. I’m joking. It was also perfection. The soy ginger wings? Perfection.
And those salt & pepper hash browns? Legend has it that Sinatra was buried with a packet of cherry LifeSavers in his tuxedo pockets. Let the record show that I would like to be buried with these hash browns in mine.
The experience in general was summed up succinctly by the teen son. “My only criticism is that I couldn’t finish it all,” he said. I would concur. I loved it.
Salt & Pepper, 60-62 High St, Manchester M4 1EA
READ NEXT:
Stunning beer garden hidden among reservoirs, ruins and woodland just outside of Greater Manchester
Exact timings for Lancaster bomber flight over Greater Manchester this May
"Most colourful exhibition of the year" coming to Salford direct from Paris in UK art exclusive
Inside the 'mini Dutch pancake house' hidden on a quaint Greater Manchester Square
