We’ve been here before. In 2020, Jorgelina Cardoso, the wife of United winger Angel Di Maria, spoke at some considerable length of her distaste for Manchester. “It was horrible! All of it was horrible,” she said, branding the food ‘disgusting’, the women ‘weird’ and the city in general ‘a sh*thole’. It was boring then, and, guess what, it’s boring now.
In an unwelcome, unsolicited and unoriginal bout of deja vu, Sara Arfaoui, wife of City’s captain Ilkay Gundogan, has had another pop at the city she perhaps disdainfully calls home. Asked for her favourite restaurant on Instagram (and whoever did so must be wondering just what they have started), she replied: “Sorry I'm sad to be honest but nothing. I tried so bad to find a good restaurant but... horrible food everywhere.”
She went on: “Can't find a real Italian or good sushi or just fresh food .. everything frozen. Restaurants here are just focus on making money with drinks and shot like night clubs not quality food. Maybe in London but in Manchester nothing. I'm sorry.” Perhaps there’s some comfort to be had in London only getting a ‘maybe’.
Now then. We can talk for days perhaps about why this is all objectively wrong. There is good Italian food, there is good sushi. The frozen bit? Have to say, that part is particularly baffling, unless she’s barging her way into the kitchen at every restaurant she’s dining in, elbows sharp and suspiciously rummaging through the fridges for an iced pork chop. And presumably she’s not talking about shopping at Iceland.
She says she’s tried ‘so bad’ to find somewhere good to eat, yet it sounds like she has only managed to end up in restaurants that are more like nightclubs, and which are prioritising ‘shots’ over what's coming out of the kitchen. It does make you question just how dogged her quest to find a decent scran has actually been.
And yes, there are great places to eat in the city that aren’t ‘like nightclubs’. There are Michelin-starred restaurants, soon-to-be-Michelin starred restaurants, sterling neighbourhood places and ultra-reliable city centre favourites.
Just last week, the best the Manchester food scene has to offer assembled for the Manchester Food and Drink Festival Awards, now in its 25th year. It showed the unwavering resilience of the restaurant business post-pandemic, and celebrated our city's excellence. Newcomers like the faultless Another Hand on Deansgate Mews and the astonishingly talented chef Eddie Shepherd, a magician of sorts with a waiting list months long for his home restaurant the Walled Gardens, went home with awards on the night.
So did Stockport's increasingly influential Where The Light Gets in. All of these places, world class in their creativity, would be the pride of any city in the world, from London to New York to Copenhagen to Tokyo.
But you barely have to scratch the surface in Manchester to find magnificent food. Food with heritage, food which nourishes the soul as well as the body. From Rusholme to Cheetham Hill, this is a city of bewildering, thrilling variety, quite apart from the fine dining that might grab headlines for its awards and excesses, but is still beyond the reach of so many.
Our proud history of immigration has given us the privilege of the Afghani, Iranian, Iraqi, Pakistani, Kurdish and Indian food which lines the Curry Mile to the Jewish delis and bakeries of North Manchester.
But all of these places are currently at risk, and lazy, spoiled, tone deaf comments like this are damaging and unhelpful given the impossible decisions many in the hospitality industry are being forced to make right now, and the sleepless nights that will be accompanying them.
Restaurants are, quite literally, struggling to keep the lights on. One restaurant owner I spoke to this week, presumably making some of that ‘horrible food’, told me that his annual electricity bill is going up by over £35,000. He's had to close down a place he poured everything into because of the impossible financial pressures. To pop that into some context, Ms Arfaoui’s income aside, the couple have at least £140,000 coming in every single week courtesy of Manchester City.
Quite apart from being materially wrong about Manchester, when framed like that, all this leaves a particularly sour taste.
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