You know lunch is going to go well when you’ve already started to eat it in the street, chasing it down like a kebab at 3am. The plan was to eat sitting in the park in the sun, but it has simply not worked out like that so far.
This van on Oxford Road, with its back to All Saints Park by Manchester Metropolitan University, was once Couch Potato, judging by signs still up. You can still get a breakfast barm, and a burger for that matter, but the spuds have been replaced by bamboo steamers and flat-grilled noodles.
Having passed it plenty, and seen queues of foreign students and those clearly in the know about such things waiting for pancakes and boxes of steaming delight - and already said ‘I really have to go there’ - I went there.
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If you’ve tried the jianbing pancakes from Gerry’s on Piccadilly Gardens (the equally unlikely spot just outside Primark), you’re in the ballpark. Here, though, the pancakes are less like a chewy crepe and more crispy, like a fluffy disc of puff pastry.
They’re heated on a hotplate, with an egg cracked on. It’s then painted with chilli oil and covered in strips of spicy beef, folded up and stuffed into a foil envelope as the customer (me) salivates on the pavement.
This is what I was chasing down the street moments after paying up. It makes for some pretty compulsive eating. But then again, what’s not to like combining spicy, marinated beef, a crispy, puff pastry pancake and scrambled egg. It was delicious and a bargain at £6.50.
Also ordered was a box of kao mian, a northern Chinese dish, where raw sheets of noodle are heated on the hotplate with egg until they submit and go floppy, after which they’re covered in chilli oil, coriander, onions and, in this case, curls of spicy cumin-rubbed pork which is finished off in the fryer until it goes crisp (you can also choose anything from braised duck to spicy chicken to kelp to potato).
The noodles, now soft, are then chopped up on the griddle and packed into a takeaway carton. It’s £7 and it’s completely irresistible, garnished with more fresh coriander and peanuts.
There are noodles boxes too, starting at £6, marinated tea eggs for 80p, and steamed buns for £2.20 each. The latter are huge, four times the size of a regular steamed dumpling-type bun (the size of barm, basically) and they’re airy and satisfyingly chewy, fluffy buns stuffed with pork and chives or chicken and mushrooms.
Order two of these - by my calculations, £4.40 - and this is easily a decent size lunch, not to mention being completely delicious, and on a sunny day like this, eaten on the grassy steps at the new Symphony Park development on the site of the old BBC building, it was a blazingly good start to the week, lunch-wise.
Well, the stuff I didn’t shovel down before I got there was, at least. I still don’t know what it’s called. I don’t much care either, to be honest. Just go there.
