Michael Dias, who smiles constantly, was probably around eight years old when he first entered the hospitality business. He was the face of his parents’ restaurant in Corlim in the north of Goa, close to the famous Basilica of Bom Jesus, home to the remains of St. Francis Xavier.
Right on the tourist trail, Michael would be tasked with enticing passing tourists to come and eat, but along with his brother and his two sisters, they all grew up on the restaurant floor. “My dad would always put me right in the front of the restaurant, to bring in the people,” he says. “It’s where I picked everything up!”
He even made the sign for his parents’ place, he says, and decades later, he and his son made the sign for the takeaway the family now runs from their ex-council house in Blackley. It is ornately carved from a piece of wood, and it stands proudly in their neat front garden. It is called Liv’s Takeaway, a shortened version of his son and daughter’s names - Livren and Livrinda - and the food is just marvellous.
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The neighbours have been tremendously supportive at having an unexpected takeaway pop up next door. “Even before we started the takeaway, and we would have the windows open, they’d smell it and come and say ‘What’s cooking today, Michael?’, and we would share it with them,” he says. “But when we opened a takeaway, yes, it was a little bit of a shock for them.”
Michael and his wife Cefona, who cook together in their tiny domestic kitchen on a four-ring hob, met at high school. They were childhood sweethearts. “It was love at first sight,” he says, and Cefona blushes. They married in 2001.
Cefona is originally from Shiroda, in the south of Goa. Her father ran a bar, which her mother still runs today, as well as a bakery, so hospitality and food is very much in her blood too. She was a primary school teacher in Goa, and recently retook her GCSEs in maths and English in the UK so that she could work as a teaching assistant. She also does voluntary teaching work too. For now, though, the focus is on the kitchen.
As a Portuguese colony for four centuries until it was liberated in 1961, Goan food is somehow similar and also wildly different to that seen across the majority of India. Cefona and Michael are Roman Catholic, so pork is allowed, as is beef, in stark contrast to what is eaten - or not eaten - by Muslims and Hindus.
Sorpatel, something of a Goan national dish particularly during festivals, and a speciality at Liv’s, is served with pork and given an extra, deep layer of seasoning by using pork liver in the masala. It’s a stunning dish, with both echoes of the east and the west.
Cefona makes the spicy, chorizo-style sausage used in the groan-inducing Goan sausage pulao from scratch, mixing the pork with spices, marinating it for three or four days and skinning the sausages before cooking and serving with rice. All that said, Halal food is very much catered for on request.
After high school, Michael took up his diploma in hotel management and catering. He worked for a handful of small, five-star hotel resorts in Goa, and bigger concerns like the Holiday Inn, before joining the cruise ships, a path well trodden by many Goans in the hospitality business.
He travelled the world with both P&O and Royal Caribbean, from Sydney and Auckland to Hawaii, Mexico, and the Caribbean, but would sometimes find himself in steward's roles, and not front-of-house where he wanted to be. It was hard graft - 12 sometimes 13-hour days, with not much of a break other than short meal times.
He also worked in a luxury resort in Saudi Arabia for a time, which he describes as being ‘like jail’. Though he says they weren’t treated badly at all, he would see the confines of the resort compound, the staff quarters and nothing else. He did two stints of two years.
“Four years was enough,” he says, the exhaustion almost detectable in his voice. “The guests had everything; a bowling alley, ice skating rink. We’d finish a shift in the compound, go back to our quarters, and then back again the next day.”
The couple first came to the UK in 2013, seeking a more stable life for their children, and also a cooler climate, with Michael taking jobs in a number of restaurants, like Peter Street favourite Asha’s and then Vermillion, before his most recent job, as assistant restaurant manager at Hotel Indigo near Victoria.
On November 4, 2021, a precise date that Michael pulls easily from his memory, they started the business, first gauging interest by posting menus through neighbour’s doors. Many of the recipes on the menu come from Cefona’s mother. She jokes: “When I was not married, I was not as keen on cooking. Now I ring up my mum and she says ‘when you were with me, you never learned to cook, now you call me up and you ask me for recipes?!’ But yes, now I love cooking.”
This is wonderfully evident. Cefona and Michael cook generously and with passion. When I visited them in Blackley last week, they prepared a Goan biryani with chicken, likely their most-ordered dish. It’s probably the prettiest bowl of rice I’ve ever seen, the rice stained pink on top, and scattered with cashew nuts, caramelised onions and served with a yoghurt raita which is rich with coconut. Buried like treasure in the rice are soft pieces of chicken on the bone.
The mung bhaji is a homely and soothing curry of mung dahl for which I immediately ask the recipe. When Cefona says it begins with garam masala, I know all is lost. They grind their own special garam masala themselves to their own recipe, and the chances of my replicating even that part correctly seem somehow unlikely.
We also have a beef cutlet bun, a popular street food in Goa - a thin piece of steak, breaded and fried, and then served in a warm roll, the salad tossed in vinegar brewed from coconut tree sap, and a plate of fiery fried prawns, which have been sliced down the the back, butterflied and filled with a hot chilli masala.
Liv's also prides itself on its Goan vindaloo, a dish rather removed from the scorching rocket fuel served in many an Indian restaurant of a Friday night to competitive gentlemen who are often rather too refreshed to notice the nuances of the spicing. Liv's vindaloo is not the same ball game. It's barely the same sport. “The best vindaloo you will ever have will be a Goan vindaloo,” says Michael.
All the curry bases they use are made from scratch, and their cupboards are laden with jars upon jars of spices, the smell of which hit you the moment you walk through the kitchen door. They also grow their herbs in the garden, as well as their own chillies in the green house, broad beans, carrots, tomatoes and turmeric. They use the hard-to-get leaves along with the pungent root.
Michael is very proud of their five star hygiene rating, displayed in the window of their front room, and something we’d probably all like to think we’d attain, but likely wouldn’t if an inspector were to turn up on our doorstep without warning. “It is the highest level,” he says beaming, as he always seems to be.
Just before Christmas, they received an unexpected order from London, for their Bebinca, a popular layer cake known as ‘the Queen of desserts’, eaten during the festive season and made with coconut milk and caramel. Despite explaining they were in Manchester, the customer still wanted the cake, so it was sent down in the post, next day delivery. “We made Christmas hampers full of desserts, and we sold quite a lot of those,” says Cefona.
Liv’s Takeaway is a family business in the realest sense of the word. There is no home cooking which gets closer to home, with both Livrinda, who is just sitting her A-Levels (she’s hoping to study business at Met Uni), and Livren helping out when the orders ping in from the delivery apps, assisting with the prep and the packaging, before the food is promptly whisked away.
The phrase ‘hidden gem’ is bandied around an awful lot, but you’d struggle to find anything more deserving of the title than Liv’s. While a restaurant of their own is not on the cards just yet, they hope that the takeaway holds the key to the family’s future, and the stability they hoped for when moving to this country. “With God’s grace, it will,” Michael says. Well that, and the best vindaloo this side of Goa.
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