Bundobust, 61 Piccadilly, Manchester M1 2AQ (0161 359 6757). Meal for two, including beer: £45 (if you try hard)
It takes something special to stop me wanting to bang my head on the table repeatedly, while stabbing the business end of a fork into the soft part of my hand, every time I hear the term “restaurant concept”. Bundobust in Manchester is that something special. There’s no doubt the “c” word can be applied here. It is not a straightforward restaurant. It is clearly underpinned by a defining idea, which is: Indian street food and craft beers. But, by God, it works. It gives concepts a good name.
Right now, the large, echoey basement space off the city’s Piccadilly feels like a big fat link in a chain, only one that hasn’t quite been built yet. It is one of a kind, but if there isn’t a Bundobust like this in every university town across the north of England within three years I’ll be very surprised.
That said Bundobust – according to online dictionaries it means “arrangement” in Hindi – does have a sibling. It started as a classic street food operation, operating out of a van, run by Mark Husak of the Sparrow Bier Café and Mayur Patel, part of the family behind the highly regarded Indian restaurant Prashad, both in Bradford. A couple of years ago they opened a small bricks and mortar outlet in Leeds. But this one, which opened in December, is on an entirely different scale.
It is reached through as unpromising a doorway as you could hope to find in Manchester, which is a saying something for a city rich in such spots. It’s next to a branch of Subway, underneath chronic scaffolding. It’s the sort of place where you would expect to find a huddle of depressed pigeons or slumped drunks, shouting at the traffic. Through that door and down the stairs and it opens out into a huge, bright space of aged ceramic tiling. There are booths and benches in tangerine-coloured leatherette, against sky-blue tables. Some of those tables are communal. The walls are hung with blow-ups of vintage Desi film posters.
At the far end is the bar, overlooked by a board high up the wall listing 14 craft beers, with names like Clairvoyance and Bombay Dazzler, Dale’s Pale and Red IPA. Four are permanent. The other 10 change regularly. Some come from star local breweries like Cloudwater, recently judged to be among the top 10 in the world at the RateBeer awards; others come from the other side of the world. You order both drinks and food at the bar. Snacks are handed to you with your drinks in pots of pure polystyrene; the rest of your order is delivered to your table.
As we study the menu, we nibble on a pot of salty-sour, deep-fried rice puffs, in geometric shapes and vivid colours. We have spiced nuts and another pot of deep-fried and battered okra, seasoned with cracked black pepper and the citrusy kick of mango powder. If I had asked other diners to describe the food, I imagine they would first have mentioned the fact that it is Indian. If I had pushed them they may have pointed out it was street food – everything comes in branded cardboard containers – and vibrant and cheap, and it is all those things.
I suspect the fact that it’s entirely meat free, indeed largely vegan, wouldn’t have figured in the conversation at all. This is brilliant vegetarian cooking which makes its argument on its own terms. It’s centred on a culinary culture which is not making up for absence of any kind. There is nothing to miss.
Obviously, being based solely on vegetables and pulses keeps the prices down. Nothing costs more than £6, with many items at much less than that. At lunch, you can get two dishes for £7. A selection for two comes in at £25. For £66 you can have every dish on the menu, which they say feeds six, but I suspect would do for a lot more. I was sorely tempted, but hated the thought of all the waste. Even so, we gave the menu a proper seeing to.
There are cylinders of crisp, lacy dosas, the colour of ageing ivory, wrapped around a filling of a spiced potato and onion fry with, on the side, a deep, soothing lentil soup to dip them into, and a little pot of fresh coconut chutney. The bhel puri is an addictive mixture of puffed rice and deep-fried samosa pastry, spun through with the sticky kick of a tomato and tamarind chutney; bundo chaat is another mess, this time of chickpeas and potatoes, more fried samosa pastry, turmeric noodles and more tamarind chutney. Both are served cold, and are the perfect accompaniment to a beer like the Cloudwater, with its caramel tones and layers of its own soothing spice.
Their golden tarka dal, served over pillows of basmati rice, is punchy with onions and garlic, and fistfuls of roasted cumin. For those who feel a night out like this is not complete without something shoved inside a brioche bun, there’s the bhaji butty. It’s a classic thick and crisp onion bhaji layered with their own spiced ketchup and a coriander and green chilli chutney, which makes you blink and sigh.
The kebab end of the market is served by skewers of crisp-skinned paneer and smokey mushrooms, first marinated in yogurt and garam masala and then grilled, before being pelted with more chutney. The nearest thing to a classic curry is the pav bhaji, a stew of cauliflower, peas and potatoes, rich with fenugreek, more chilli and more of that garam masala. (The one at Prashad takes 22 different spices; I suspect this is little different.) Even their salad, made with bitter leaves, red cabbage and cucumber, knocks it out of the park on account of a ripe dressing full of mustard seed and lemon.
Roll your eyes at the luscious beards of the barmen, but there’s no doubt that these are real craft beer geeks. I mean that fondly. They know exactly what they’re serving and can work backwards from your taste to their list. And it’s a very good match indeed for the food, which is uncompromising and self-confident and, above all else, clever. On a wet Monday evening Bundobust in Manchester still manages to draw in a crowd of 60 or so. Apparently at weekends the student hordes descend, despite the lack of marketing. It’s built itself on word of mouth and I’m not at all surprised. Because I, too, want to shout about it.
Jay’s news bites
• Sharmilee, which the Gosai family opened on Leicester’s Golden Mile in 1973, is an equally good value meat-free Indian. Their crisp hollow wheat puri, filled with the likes of chick peas and puffed rice, with tamarind based sauces, are £3.95, and the masala dosa less than £5. There’s also an intriguing selection of dishes from the Indo-Chinese repertoire (sharmilee.co.uk).
• A report on attitudes to food hygiene ratings by NFU Mutual has found over 40% of diners wouldn’t enter a restaurant if they knew it had a rating of three out of five or below. That’s relevant, as from 2019 all hospitality businesses in England will be required to display their ratings, as already happens in Wales and Northern Ireland. Currently 82% of English businesses have a score of four or above.
• Latest filthy obsession: the marshmallow puffs at London’s Ole & Steen, the first UK outpost of one of Denmark’s leading bakers. A crisp almond base, a whorl of marshmallow, perhaps with a core of salted caramel, in a thin chocolate shell. Yours for £2.50 (oleandsteen.co.uk).
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
