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Freaky Friday

For our American readers: Vittles editor Rebecca May Johnson is currently in New York talking about her book Small Fires. You can find her tonight at Molasses Books in Brooklyn from 8pm. Conversely, for our British readers: the American food magazine Cake Zine are in London! They will be holding two events next week—at Oranj on Dec 6 and a conversation at Maximilian William gallery on Dec 7, where you can meet the editors and buy copies.

A Guide to the Dhabas of Birmingham by Gurpreet Jivan

Whenever I go home, my dad asks me what I want to eat. He’s not inquiring as much as implying that he has a hankering for the kinds of crispy golden treats that come wrapped in translucent brown paper bags, in the hope that I do too. He’s usually not wrong: it’s exactly what I’m craving when I’ve been away. When you’ve grown up Punjabi in the UK, dhaba food becomes the cornerstone of your desi experience: their quiet presence laid out on silver trays skirting the edges of reception hall tables; the sustenance they offer at the end of a shopping trip with your mum on Soho Road when you’re dizzy from hunger and sequins; the moment the door latches after you say bye to your guests and you can finally swipe a cold, overlooked samosa, enjoying it in one sweeping movement.

If you ask any Punjabi what their favourite dhaba is, they’ll tell you a story. They’ll tell you about the place they used to get samosas from before its abrupt closure; the place where they once ate pakoras, whose unremarkable quality saw it axed from the slate; and their new haunt, the one that now belongs to them. I recently asked my auntie how she would define a dhaba and she texted back: “It’s a place where you eat :)”. While its literal translation is “roadside food stall”, her logline captures the essence of what it means to the communities that dine there. In the absence of soft furnishings, ambient lighting and adjective-adorned menus, the only thing left is the food. This might be why dhaba food is marked by such intense scrutiny from aunties and uncles; food is never simply good. Instead, it is considered along numerous variables, like the thickness of the roti, the tartness of the imli, the ratio of potato to peas. 

Dhabas exist outside of Western rules of dining, operating in countless forms: a brightly-lit sweet centre with long glass counters, reflecting an infinity mirror of brightly coloured stacks of mithai, all tinted the same butter-yellow; a pizza place challenging the very definition of pizza itself, where chunks of tandoori paneer have been strewn across as topping; on the end of a WhatsApp message for freshly prepared keralas, paneer bhurji and chawal placed at the foot of your door; tucked away inside newsagents, behind a line of Punjabi magazines and prints; in places not comfortable enough to spend hours in, but just long enough to catch the ghee while it’s swimming on top of the dhal.

Punjabi dhabas in Punjab and Punjabi dhabas in Birmingham have also evolved in response to a different set of community needs. In Punjab, they popped up after Partition in 1947 – appearing along highways as lay-bys for hungry truckers. With low overheads and slim margins, food that could be eaten quickly and without utensils came to shape Punjabi dhaba food. Here in the UK, in Greater London (Hounslow, Slough, Southall, Ilford) and the Midlands (Birmingham, Leicester, Coventry), they emerged in the 1970s, starting as sweet centres before expanding into savoury items, offering samosas, spring rolls and pakoras. They marked the end of a generation of grandmothers, mothers and aunties that would form production lines in their back gardens, bulk-frying over open campfires. Not all Punjabis were happy about this change, though; although it opened up some time for the women of the family, men like my grandad still wanted food hot enough to blister the roof of their mouths, often resulting in food already fried once being refried again at home.

Today’s landscape of dhabas is non-linear, adapting to first, second and third-generation British Punjabis and those in Punjab themselves. This means that when you consider what an investigation into dhabas should cover, the possibilities are dizzying. Personally, I think of a cardboard box piled high with samosas, softened with grease, food that is both vegetarian and brilliant, the pride placed on food that is simply good value for money and sacrilegious combinations of chocolate and barfi. As it happens, in 2023, you are just as likely to find a tandoori chicken pizza in Punjab as you are an aloo tikki noodle burger in Birmingham.

A note on Birmingham’s dhabas

Over the last 70 years, high streets in Birmingham have swelled with Caribbean, Jamaican, Kashmiri, Bangladeshi, Punjabi and Pakistani restaurants, an expression of the many ways in which these communities, who boldly left their homes to make another, have tethered their lives here. Punjabi dhabas are merely one of these expressions. They tend to be concentrated in North West Birmingham, where the borders of Handsworth, Smethwick, Oldbury and West Bromwich blur. But also, the city centre is bloated with Indian and North Indian restaurants chasing a narrow kind of authenticity, continuing to romanticise an idea of ‘exotic India’, a century-old colonial project which has continued to limit the multiplicities of South Asian identities.

The majority of the dhabas in this guide consider themselves to be ‘Punjabi’. But, as I came to realise when compiling this, Punjabi is a category that is flawed in its ability to capture all of the complexities that shape migrational patterns. This could have easily been a guide to Sikh restaurants because Sikhs make up a large percentage of people who have migrated to Birmingham from Punjab. But they don’t make up all of them; that would exclude Christians, Ravidassias, Hindus and those who have dropped any notion of religion altogether. Punjabi, based on ethnicity, would have included a great deal of restaurants from now-Pakistan that have opened here in Birmingham. There are huge overlaps and influences in the cuisine, but including them would conflate the ways in which Partition and migration changed the kinds of foods that are revered in differing diasporas. These restaurants are not all regionally from Punjab, they’re second- or even third-generation owned, becoming distinctly British-Punjabi. Still, this guide has settled on Punjabi dhabas, revealing its presumptions, but it also offers an invitation to meet and examine our ideas about British-Punjabi identity.

Smethwick & Oldbury

Aaron’s Kitchen, Smethwick

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This article is a part of Vittles British Jewish Food Week. To read the rest of the essays and guides in the project, please subscribe below:

1. What is British Jewish Food, really?, by Dan Hancox

2. The Shop, by Laura Goodman

3. Keeping Kosher?, by Martin Francisco Saps

4. The Rise of MiddleEastMediLevantia, by Josh Dell

5. Friday Night Dinners, compiled by Molly Pepper Steemson

6. Where Has All the Tschulent Gone?, by Atar Hadari

7. From Aleppo to Manchester, by Joel Hart

8. The London Rugelach Index, by Adrienne Katz-Kennedy

9. A Guide to Jewish Food in Manchester

10. A Guide to Jewish Food in London

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A guide to Jewish food in Manchester

From the country’s best cholent and kugel to amba coronation chicken

Manchester’s best Jewish food has always been found at Friday night dinners, Shabbat lunches and catered events – prepared by home cooks, both Ashkenazi and Sephardi. For many Jewish Mancunians, their food is either understood through what you eat in your own home and the homes of others, or through well-kept communal secrets. Most have heard of the Hyman family, who operated butchers and delis in the past, but now focus on producing very good smoked salmon at The Manchester Smokehouse. And most know Estelle Shiers, a cake producer who doesn’t exist on the internet, and yet whose sponge and multi-coloured icing combo has appeared at all major birthdays. My own tastebuds didn’t learn what Jewish food is by visiting the city’s kosher restaurants, but by eating Rochel Yaffe’s challah, Sara Senior’s tahdig, Rene Hodari’s kibbeh and my grandmother’s chicken soup.

As the city with the second highest population of Jews in the UK (30,000, after London with 145,000), which grew by 12 per cent between 2011 and 2021, the Jewish food scene has been expanding and shifting in intriguing ways. Manchester’s Jews are split between a growing but small ultra-orthodox community, who mainly reside in the North Manchester neighbourhoods of Prestwich and Broughton Park, areas that have seen growth in the number of kosher restaurants, and the rest, living in North Manchester locales like Whitefield, as well as Cheadle, Hale Barns, Hale and Bowden in the south (the Sephardic community of Didsbury has almost entirely relocated to these suburbs). They vary in religiosity, from secular and pork-eating to traditional high-holiday shul-goers who keep kashrut, and at the other end of the spectrum, those who are more devout and eat only in kosher restaurants, if they go out at all. The majority of the rest will eat out at non-kosher establishments, avoiding non-kosher meat, or at least pork and seafood, and are probably more used to eating at Italian and Syrian restaurants than anywhere serving kosher food.

Manchester’s Jewish food is defined by the integration of Ashkenazi, Sephardic, international and quintessentially British food options. This is obvious at most grocery shops, butchers and delis, where you’ll find fridges displaying pickled herring, chrain, babaganoush, hummus, sweet and sour duck sauce, lime pickle, English mustard and tahini side by side. The process may have begun in 1985, when The New Jewish Cuisine by Manchester-born and -based cook Evelyn Rose was published and found itself in Jewish homes across the city, forming the basis of the peculiarly eclectic options offered by caterers: canapes included mini burgers, lamb koftas and spring rolls. This was the first time many of Manchester’s Ashkenazi Jews were taught how to cook versions of dishes like shakshuka, where the meat strudel was reinvented with Sephardic spices, and where chopped herring with cherry brandy could be found next to ‘Persian’ lamb shoulder stuffed with spiced risotto rice, spreading an unruly idea of how expansive Jewish food could be. If Manchester’s Jewish food has a vernacular identity, it is the way this formula transpires – distinctly – among each of its creators.

While some of Manchester’s Jewish restaurants have gone brazenly mishmash, others have focused on more specific elements of Jewish culinary heritage. This guide focuses on the institutions making consistently good quality products over the years, as well as some newer places that are contributing to the evolution of Manchester’s Jewish food story.  Joel Hart

Dovid’s Deli
31 Leicester Rd, Salford M7 4AS

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A completely personal restaurant guide to Los Angeles, Part 1.

In February 2023, Vittles columnists Jonathan Nunn, Ruby Tandoh and Feroz Gajia spent 14 days in Los Angeles and ate at over 100 restaurants, ice cream parlours and taco stalls, and just generally had a very good time. What follows is sort of a guide but also a very biased and subjective account of that trip, told through multiple perspectives. Part 2 will be out next week.

A pilgrimage to the San Gabriel Valley, by Jonathan Nunn

Going to the San Gabriel Valley was, for me, like a singer visiting Graceland. It’s where the discipline I work in was essentially created, of seeking to re-include neglected suburbs into the mythology of the city by documenting their food culture. Like all suburbs, it is extraordinary, ugly, beautiful, surreal, and deeply mundane: the remarkably cheap and well-placed Hilton where we stayed was almost solely filled with middle class visitors from China seeing family or checking out schools (next to the 24/7 gift shop, you can find a college consultancy firm as well as organise trips to the Ronald Reagan Ranch Centre).

One thing which visitors get wrong about the San Gabriel Valley is calling it the largest Chinatown in America. The word ‘Chinatown’ seems wholly inadequate when describing the SGV because it has none of Chinatown’s artifice. Rather, it is a whole, autonomous Chinese town that just happens to be in Southern California. The Flushing Chinatown in New York is comprehensible, although it may give you an superficial sense of dislocation when you first visit, with its Simplified Character signs giving you the impression that you might be in a mid-level Chinese city. But the SGV, with its Spanish revival malls in Lynchian American suburbia, with Chinese businesses and an Alpine backdrop, has by far a deeper sense of dislocation, one which is difficult to shrug off.

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Ten Things London’s Restaurants Can Learn from Los Angeles (and Five Things Los Angeles Can Learn from Us)

The idea that food in America is innately better than in Britain is, of course, extremely small-time behaviour, stemming from a misguided British talent for self-flagellation and a food culture in thrall to American discourse. Much of this discourse was formed in Los Angeles. It has profoundly shaped American food culture and, by extension, how the world thinks about food and assigns importance to cuisines. Because so much culture is funnelled through America, without Los Angeles, there would certainly not be as much of a global interest in Mexican and Korean food as there currently is; without Los Angeles, we might not have so much of an obsession with regional cuisines; without Los Angeles, we may not have learnt the lesson that great food can be found in the most unexpected urban environments. 

Over the last fortnight in Los Angeles, I’ve eaten as much tacos as there are Mexican states, Korean BBQ that takes two runs of dry cleaning to wash out, absurd sundaes and soondaes, things we don’t have in London. Rather than provoke jealousy for what we’re missing, they have revived how I feel about London’s food, as if I had gone to a rehabilitative Swiss clinic. At the risk of being the guy who has spent two weeks somewhere and has come back with Big Opinions, I think there are things about Los Angeles which we would do well to steal, others that we can take heed from, and things about London we don’t treasure enough,. And vice-versa, of course. 

My main takeaway, though, was this: the grass is not greener on the other side. The primary topic of conversation among Angelenos who seemingly have it all was the lack of good Indian food in a county of 9.8 million people. If we’re allowed to be performatively mocked for having pistachio and pea guacamole, then we also have the right to point out that LA’s hottest restaurant right now is a sports bar that serves chicken tikka pizza and tandoori spaghetti. And perhaps the biggest thing we can learn is admitting to ourselves that this might just be a great idea. 

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Today’s newsletter is the third part of the Vittles Review of the Year and recounts a week spent eating in Thessaloniki and Athens in November. You can read part 1 of this guide here and part 2 here. There is a list of all dishes and restaurants at the end of the newsletter.

Vittles Review of the Year, part 3

Thessaloniki and Halkidiki

Thessaloniki is a nervy city, positioned strategically in the long quiff of northern Greece, with the Balkan countries to the north, Istanbul directly east by land or sea, the fertile land of Halkidiki to the south, and built around a port that once provided safe harbour to Sephardic Jews. Journalists love to describe it in terms like ‘crossroads’, ‘melting pot’ ‘confluence of empires’ – particularly when talking about its food culture. But Thessaloniki is ambivalent about these influences and paranoid about its geography. If you want to find this out for yourself, you can visit the childhood home of Ataturk, armed with as much security as an embassy, whose opening up to Turkish tourism led to the 2018 attack by a group of fascists on the city’s progressive then-mayor, Yiannis Boutaris. You can visit the Museum of the Macedonian Struggle, dedicated to the turn-of-the-century battle over the nationality of Macedonia between Greeks, Bulgarians and Serbs, and which still reverberates in the perpetual ill-will surrounding the naming of ‘North Macedonia’. You can visit the Jewish Museum, where you can see an exhibition about Sephardic food while also reading about the expulsion and genocide that turned Thessaloniki, in less than a century, from one of the only majority-Jewish cities in Europe to a place where there is almost no Jewish presence at all. 

Or, you can eat. 

One thing you might clock about the food in Thessaloniki, even when noticing that it is very good, is that it is insular. You can binge your way through gyros, souvlaki and soutzoukakia, and they will be the very best examples you will have had in your life, but after a while you might wonder: where are the other restaurants? Not the American chains (McDonald’s never managed to break a city already built around the fast consumption of meat) nor the cheap Chinese and Indian takeaways that form a dense lattice across most European suburbs, but the food of its neighbours. Where are the Turkish restaurants? The Sephardic restaurants? The Balkan restaurants? Where is the food of the people whose labour has kept, and still keeps Thessaloniki running?

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