Maida Grill House, 38 Liverpool Street, Salford M5 4LT (0161 312 9772, maidagrillhousesalford.co.uk). Starters £2-£8; all other dishes £5-£8.50; unlicensed.
Even in this age of rapid digital spread, the UK still has its discrete regional foods. I’d call them delicacies but they rarely are. Middlesbrough’s Parmo, that thumping pizza box-sized deep-fried schnitzel, topped with bechamel and cheese, is many delightful things. Delicate is not one of them. It is the perfect end to a rigorous Friday night out; a welcome blast of carbs, fat and protein. Leaf scratchings, made from the internal fat of the pig, are huge in a few square miles of the Black Country, and all but unsellable anywhere else. Neath Market has its gravy-slicked faggots, a tribute to nose-to-tail-eating long before nose-to-tail was a thing, and Wigan has its particular pies.
Then there’s the noble rice and three. If you know what this is, it’s because you are from, or lived for a while, in Greater Manchester, probably on a budget. There, it is very much a thing, marking patterns of migration to the city from Pakistan and the need of workers for reliable food options. Much as the Balti houses of Birmingham’s Sparkbrook began as canteens for single men from the Indian subcontinent, needing a reliable taste of home even if they were far from its comforts, Manchester’s rice-and-three curry houses have always been about utility rather than dining out. You need feeding. Here, have a plate of steaming rice stacked high with your choice of three curries, still for much less than a tenner.
What’s most impressive about them is their staying power. Manchester is invigoratingly addicted to change. There is a constant stream of new apartment blocks and sharp-edged office developments, some loved, some hated. Blocky redbrick streets move on from their industrial past to a service-industry future of small-plate bistros with honking natural wine lists, alongside joints offering stacked smash burgers or blistered sourdough pizzas. And yet throughout all this, curry houses serving rice and three, an innovation claimed to have been invented by the This & That café in the Northern Quarter about 40 years ago, has endured. Granted, they are no longer clustered in that part of town, once home to the Pakistani rag trade, although a few are still there. They have followed the work, out to places like Cheetham Hill and Salford.
If this all makes me sound knowledgable, it’s because I’m copying my mate’s homework. Thom Hetherington has worked in and around Manchester’s hospitality sector for years. If you’re a journalist wanting to know what’s going on there, you ask Thom. Lots of us do. Among other things, he writes a monthly column for the always engaging Manchester’s Finest website. A recent one was on the culture of rice and three. I asked him to be my guide and he pointed me to Maida Grill House, which makes the point about their continuing popularity because it opened only two years ago. Rice-and-three places don’t employ PRs. They don’t do marketing. They just open. The square building stands alone at one end of a barren-looking ribbon of Liverpool Street in Salford. For all the apparent isolation, it’s a clever location. Across the road is a big Holiday Inn forever full of weary travellers looking for something to eat which isn’t a badly made caesar salad. To one side is a huddle of newbuild apartment blocks, home to myriad Just Eat accounts only an itchy finger tap away. On the other is a huge industrial estate, which provides some of their traditional Asian customer base.
The grill is named after Maida Kosar, who is to be found both at the glass-fronted counter and in the kitchen, alongside her husband, Hussein. The dining room is a square, functional white space with a fridge full of soft drinks including the famed Mango Rubicon. There’s a table with jugs of water, glasses and squeezy bottles of mango chutney, sweet chilli sauce and the like, serving the small number of eat-in seats. The takeaway leaflet, listing the daily changing dishes, is also the main menu. It needs to be said that Maida is both good and cheap, and great because it is cheap. At the end of a lunch for two that will later see me declining dinner, I settle a bill for £32.50, tip refused because, “It’s not that sort of place.” As Thom says, “You could spend that for two in Pret.”
A portion of Monday’s tarka dal is £5. Keema potato on Wednesdays is £6.50. Friday’s lamb biryani is £8.50. Some of these dishes may also turn up on the white board by the counter which, at noon, Maida is completing because the dal is only just ready. Order at the counter and they will deliver. We have four smoky lamb chops for £6.50, the meat cut thin so it pulls away easily from the bone, the crisped fat blackened where the chilli-ripe marinade has seared. Chicken tikka are chunky pieces of breast, chargrilled, stained turmeric yellow and bursting with spice. Today there’s a lamb karahi, cooked on the bone, so that spooning through the thick, onion-sweet gravy, glistening with the best flavoured fats, occasionally you find a hard cylinder from which you can suck jewels of marrow. We mop with torn pieces of hot, bubbled and ghee-slicked bread and occasionally with chunks of the flaky veg samosas, £1 apiece, full of soft, spiced potato. A metal tub of freshly chopped ginger and green chilli is placed on the table for added kicks.
And so to our heaped rice and three, chosen from that white board. To the west is the keema curry with peas, the lamb mince as sweet as the karahi. To the north is a big spoonful of chicken masala in a thick tomato-based sauce. Finally, to the east there’s the deep yellow tarka dal. It is a plate of profound care and nourishment. As with the Somali restaurant Hooyos a few weeks back, it feels very much like the domestic pushed out into a public space. For this they charge £8.50, which is roughly the going rate for rice and three these days. Obviously cheap isn’t everything, but in these days of ever-spiralling costs, sometimes it really is something. After all that, perhaps you want dessert. There’s a pile of Snickers and Mars bars in a corner of the cabinet. I adore fridge-cold, sweet-counter chocolate but honestly, the rice and three had done for me. It will do for you, too.
News bites
Cardiff chefs Tommy Heaney of the eponymous Heaneys and Dave Killick, formerly head chef of The Heathcock (positively reviewed in this column in 2022), are joining forces to launch a new venture. The restaurant, which is yet to be given a name, will be located across the road from Heaneys and will have a menu of game, charcuterie and handmade pasta. ‘I’d love to tell you this was a well thought out dream of ours,’ Heaney told restaurantonline.co.uk. ‘But in reality, we were having a drink, one thing led to another and here we are.’ They plan to open towards the end of September.
The Michelin-starred Whatley Manor has added an à la carte option to go alongside its £175-a-head tasting menu. It will, however, still have a set price of £120 for three courses. A number of restaurants have recently added a choice, to go alongside the rigid tasting menu structure, including the Pompadour in Edinburgh and Furna in Brighton (whatleymanor.com).
Less the end of a restaurant, more the passing of the flame in Hackney where restaurateurs James Ramsden and Sam Herlihy have announced that, after nine years, they are closing Pidgin. The restaurant, which for a while held a Michelin star, became known for its weekly changing tasting menus. As a result, they served over 1,000 different dishes. The space will relaunch next month as a wine bar called Sesta under the current Pidgin head chef Drew Snaith, in partnership with the current general manager Hannah Kowalski. Follow @sesta.dining on Instagram for more.
Jay Rayner’s cookbook, Nights Out at Home: Recipes and Stories from 25 Years as a Restaurant Critic (Penguin, £22) is available from guardianbookshop.com at £19.80
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on X @jayrayner1
