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The Diary of a Watercress Fanatic at the Alresford Watercress Festival.

The twenty-year-old watercress festival celebrating a 200-year-old British tradition, by Jacob Negus-Hill

It’s already unusually hot for a mid-May morning when I arrive in the peaceful Hampshire market town of Alresford. There’s a greengrocer selling fresh watercress on ice for a pound, while opposite, in a cafe called Loaf, the first thing I spot is a sign for a watercress smoothie, followed by watercress sausage rolls, watercress-and-cheese turnovers, watercress scones, and all the usual deli sandwiches but with watercress in place of the standard rocket. I buy a smoothie and head back out onto West Street, where I buy a bunch of the fresh watercress: it is unbelievably peppery, and by the time I’ve eaten the whole thing, my mouth is numb. At its best, and at its coldest, the green of watercress is a deep and dark emerald, with thick and hollow stems from which small, rounded leaves extend in clusters. When you chew it, the chemical process is similar to when you eat wasabi: your saliva macerates an enzyme present in the plant’s solid form into liquid, and the resulting compound is both refreshing and explosive. The feeling is not unlike the mala of Sichuan peppercorns, or the effect of cocaine on the gums; it’s stimulating and I feel alive.

At 10am – as per tradition – the Watercress King and Queen spring from their tower and ride through the streets by horse-and-cart procession. Their chariot makes its way from one side of the town to the other, followed by legions of musicians and several sects of Morris dancers. It stops intermittently while the king and queen (who are in fact two children from a local school) sling handfuls of watercress into the crowd. There are bells and whistles, the steady rattling of tambourines, and the thwacks of the Morris men hitting sticks together. A stray shoe flies into the crowd and is promptly thrown back; the audience cheers; children laugh. You could imagine Martin Parr ducking and diving between the wild arcs of stray bunches, trying his best to capture the Watercress Monarchy in its regal glory. But while the festival feels folky, acutely pagan and part of a long and unbroken English tradition, it’s actually all marketing – a twenty-year-old experiment to bring the once much-loved plant back into public consciousness.

Since 2004, people have flocked to Alresford for its Watercress Festival, held on the third Sunday of May each year. Alresford is a small town of around 5,000 people; now, on an average day, you can hear the water flowing down the paddies in its farms from the roadside, but 150 years ago it was one of the most important hubs in the country for the watercress trade. Many of the UK’s chalk streams are located in Hampshire, and watercress is dependent on the fresh, flowing water filtered through them, which not only cultivates its crisp bite but also its unique nutritional content (watercress – containing B1, B2, B3, B4 and B6 – has the maximum rating of 1,000 on the Aggregate Nutritional Density Index, which was developed by nutritionist Joel Fuhrman). In 1865, the demand for Hampshire watercress was so strong that a new line was added to the UK’s steam railway system, connecting Hampshire’s agricultural chalk streams and watercress paddies to London. This became known as the Watercress Line, and Alresford, the only town of any size in the area, was at the centre of it all.

In the 1800s, a breakfast of watercress eaten raw from the hand like an apple wouldn’t have been unusual. It was so popular in Victorian England that London’s morning markets would’ve rung with the shouts of woooooor-tercress, sung by impoverished, mostly female sellers who carried the plants – all shipped into the capital from Hampshire or Dorset – in full-to-the-brim hampers under their arms. Henry Mayhew’s landmark 1840s work, London Labour and the London Poor, contains a vignette called Watercress Girl; this shows how the sellers’ first customers were working-class labourers who, at 5am, needed something cheap and energising for the day. Victorians would often stick watercress in sandwiches, although the poorest – who couldn’t afford bread – would eat it plain. Even into the first half of the twentieth century and throughout the two world wars, watercress was shipped up and down the country to supplement rations.

However, by the 1970s – when the steam railway had declined – the watercress boom was over. In addition, a nationwide watercress-related health scare in 1979 (watercress is uniquely receptive to agricultural run-off, meaning wild watercress can harbour liver fluke – a parasite linked to livestock) hospitalised nineteen people and damaged the plant’s appeal. New industry standards stated that watercress must be farmed on a gravel-lined bed fed either by natural spring water (a geographical luxury), or a borehole (which is more water-intensive). Farms were left with a choice: move entirely to spring water or boreholes, or stop farming altogether. Because of the costs associated with changing their water supply, most opted to stop growing the leaf, thus vastly reducing the number of active watercress farms in the country. At the height of the watercress boom, there were 1,000 acres of farm; now it is closer to 100. The UK has lost its connection to watercress; if you look in British fridges today you’ll likely find a bag of rocket instead, a similarly peppery but more cost-efficient leaf that was introduced to Britain in the 1980s by Hampshire watercress farmer Steve Rothwell.

But walking the streets of Alresford on this celebratory May day, you would be forgiven for thinking that watercress is still thriving. I scout stalls selling everything from cough syrup and soap (‘They used watercress as a health tonic in Ancient Greece!’, the syrup-seller says) to burgers and pâté, all made with watercress. This celebration of the plant as both a culinary and cultural product is significant in a country where it is no longer widely eaten. Outside of Hampshire or Dorset, watercress is now mainly found in supermarkets, often blended with other salad leaves. Aficionados make the case that the flavour of bagged watercress is lacklustre, no comparison to the pungent bunched watercress they remember – the type that greengrocers used to sell, and the bunch I started my morning with. ‘The best is from Hampshire,’ one reviewer writes on the Sainsbury’s website, but ‘foreign watercress lacks flavour.’ Yet Tom Amery, managing director of the Watercress Association (a sort of watercress growers’ union) explains that, while watercress from Spain and France is available, it’s actually UK growers who have established the farms abroad, using the same plants we have in the UK. If there’s a difference in flavour, it’s most likely due to shipping times: watercress is fragile, best when eaten fresh.  

The Watercress Association is currently fighting a battle to preserve the plant’s reputation amid ecological concerns focused around intensive, non-traditional-method watercress farms. Concerns about watercress’s intense borehole water usage and potential damage to chalk rivers – including pesticides, and silt and sediment run-off – were magnified following the industry changes in the 1980s. In response, entirely new industry standards have been formed, and farmer John Hurd pioneered an organic approach to growing the plant. Since 2019, watercress has fallen under the Traditional Specialty Guaranteed scheme, ensuring shared practices that weed out unscrupulous growers (farmers have been caught trying to sell land cress – a far less nutritionally rich and flavourless plant – as watercress, riding off the crop’s reputation). One evening, after several pints in a Travelodge on the outskirts of Arlesford, I get talking to a volunteer for the festival. Leaning against the bar, he becomes more and more impassioned about the state of watercress farming. ‘The festival’, he bellows, ‘represents a last attempt to put watercress on the map. It is political resistance and defiance in the face of changing British agriculture.’

The festival’s genesis can be traced back to the early 2000s, when the watercress industry felt there was a lack of understanding about the importance and benefits of this exceptional plant. One tactic was to modernise watercress’s reputation, which resulted in some dubious attempts at rebranding. In 2003, The Watercress Alliance enlisted the help of a PR firm to run the award-winning campaign Not Just A Bit On The Side. The idea was simple: get glamour model Jo Guest, garnish her with watercress, and hope the message would be clear enough. The following year, the first Watercress Festival took place in Alresford, and by the second, they had funding from the Watercress Alliance.

Today, the shape of the watercress industry has changed – people are making money, but that money is mainly in the hands of big groups who own multiple farms. Hurd tells me that when he first started farming watercress in Dorset in 1953, there were only four types of salad leaf available. ‘Now it’s more like twenty-four,’ he says. Hurd has one of the UK’s biggest watercress market shares and is the first certified organic grower in the UK. He tells me that one of the reasons watercress has declined is that the salad-leaf market is now ‘full of competition’. Despite making his money from supermarkets (he is the sole organic supplier for Waitrose), Hurd also laments the decline of the UK’s greengrocer economy; watercress used to be sold locally in hand-picked bunches, with the entire stems and stalks still attached, but these days it is (mostly) machine-harvested and shipped to supermarkets, which monopolises the output. ‘One of the only places that can really afford to establish its own direct watercress supply chain is Pret [a Manger],’ Amery explains. Pret has its own sources and supply chains because consumers are realising the health benefits. ‘Thanks to watercress’s nutritional density, it factors in the health-food markets, which Pret taps into,’ says Amery. ‘Even brands like Lush are buying watercress for blends in hair care.’

Despite the increased use of native produce in Modern British cuisine, it might be too much to argue that watercress is having a culinary revival. Still, at St. JOHN in Farringdon, you can eat a green salad composed almost entirely of watercress covered in dijon vinaigrette. The watercress is delivered daily from Thornicrofts at New Covent Garden Market, who are in turn supplied by Hurd. Steve Darou, St. JOHN’s Canadian-born head chef, is just as enthusiastic about watercress as me. ‘The only rule we have for our green salads is that [they’re] at least half watercress,’ he tells me. He also garnishes any roast bird with watercress, echoing Jacques Pépin, who argued that nothing goes better with roast chicken. (Both Darou and Pepin are right: there isn’t much that can soften a spring or summer roast bird with as much complexity and ease as a peppery side of watercress.) ‘When I was a chef back in America and Canada, watercress wasn’t a thing,’ says Darou, ‘but here, it’s such a special crop that we try to make the most of.’ 

Back in Alresford, it doesn’t seem to matter whether the festival is tradition or marketing, because people are in a frenzy. Sure, there are more exciting food events in other countries. Spain still has bull-runs and tomato festivals, there are rowdy wine harvests across the continent, and rice is celebrated with offerings, processions, and community-constructed artworks throughout South Asia. But there’s something special in Alresford, too: a unique local product harvested this very morning, and one that tastes better when eaten fresh out of the ground. Here we all are, bathing in the knowledge that this is the best of the best, premium watercress, and we’re throwing it around with abandon. Today I won’t get speared by the horns of a bull, but a stray watercress missile does soar in my direction, only for the gentleman next to me to intercept it with cat-like reflexes. I shake his hand in a jolly, formal, English way and then, when he hands the bunch to me, I keep hold of it – much like a soldier might the bullet that almost took his life. And then I stuff it into my mouth.

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The 2024 Alresford Watercress Festival takes place this week on Sunday 19th May. For more information, click here.

Credits

Jacob Negus-Hill is a chef and writer based in London. He has previously been the editor for Proper Mag, a Manchester-born menswear magazine, and has been published in The Face, the British Journal of Photography and Kerrang! amongst others. 

All photos by Jacob Negus-Hill unless otherwise stated.

To learn more about the history of watercress, please read this article by Bee Wilson in the Financial Times.

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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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From Aleppo to Manchester, by Joel Hart

Syrian restaurants in Manchester and their Jewish clientele

Aladdin is an institution, and institutions are famously, maybe necessarily, stubborn entities. In the last 30 years, many things have changed on Wilmslow Road — which stretches from the centre of the city, through Rusholme and its ‘Curry Mile’, to the south Manchester neighbourhood of Withington — but Aladdin is not one of them. Perhaps the prices could have been raised further (they have recently been slightly raised for the first time since 2005) but the fact that the restaurant’s interior has not changed since 1988 is something many regulars are grateful for. The tables are covered in ruby red, Islamic geometric-patterned tablecloths, the walls laminated with a cracked sandstone effect and decorated with black-and-white photos of early-20th-century Aleppo. All of it adds to the restaurant’s harlequin charm. 

“People like it how it is,” current owner Ahmed al-Adin tells me. This applies to the food, too, with the most popular dishes including grilled lamb chops, kibbeh makli (deep-fried crushed bulgur wheat stuffed with spiced lamb and pine nuts) and mujaddara (a satisfying mix of cinnamon-laced rice, lentils and an ample topping of crispy fried onions). “It is the same consistency, no one feels the difference. I don’t trust any other chef. I have to do it all on my own.” 

Arriving from Aleppo in 1989, al-Adin began working as a chef after learning how to cook traditional, Syrian dishes from his mother and took over the business in 2005. Not wanting anyone to miss Aladdin’s historical centrality in the story of Levantine/Middle Eastern restaurants in the city, al-Adin is eager to usher me over to the section of the restaurant walls displaying the first reviews of his restaurant in the Manchester Evening News from more than 30 years ago. One article from 1990 praised the restaurants with the heading reading “Aladdin’s Crave”.

Aladdin was once the only restaurant serving Arabic food in Manchester, and in the 30 years since it opened, it has given birth to the multiple iterations of Levantine restaurants in the city that have sprawled out from the south Manchester suburbs and into the rest of the city: from Pasha, also on Wilmslow Road, Jasmine, in nearby Chorlton, to Yara – which boasts multiple locations in the northern and southern suburbs – and Syriana in Hale Barns (the south Manchester suburb where I grew up) . These restaurants have lineage: Syriana’s owner Khaled al-Sabah is originally from Damascus and learnt his trade at Yara, which is owned by his brother who himself used to work at Aladdin.

Yet while the Arab population of Manchester has increased over the last few decades, the proliferation of these restaurants is in part a result of their most loyal clientele. As al-Sabah puts it, “This kind of food – Syrian food – has to be in a Jewish area in Manchester. We don’t rely on Syrian people, we rely on Jewish people.”

With 30,000 Jews living in the Greater Manchester area alone, the city has the second largest Jewish population in the UK. While some Jews arrived in Manchester in the 1750s, and another wave followed after the Napoleonic Wars in the early 19th century, the majority of today’s population descend from Ashkenazi Jews who fled European pogroms in the late 19th century. Most Ashkenazi Jews initially lived in Cheetham Hill/Crumpsall, around a 15-minute drive north from the city centre, but over the years moved to the further north suburbs of Prestwich and Whitefield, where the overwhelming majority of Jews who originally arrived in Manchester still reside today. In the 1970s, some began moving to Hale, in the market town of Altrincham, as well as to Hale Barns and Bowden where two synagogues have been established.

A smaller contingent of Sephardic Jews – which includes Jews from Syria – began emigrating to Manchester in the 1850s and continued to settle here due to their links in the textiles trade. In the 1950s there was a larger migration, with the response by many Arab states to the creation of the State of Israel leading to repressive conditions for Jews in Iraq, Syria and Egypt. The Syrian Jews of Manchester mostly came from Aleppo, while most of the Jews from Egyptian cities had origins in Aleppo, too. The Sephardic community was centred around the southern neighbourhood of Didsbury – directly south of Withington – until the 1990s, when the majority of families moved out to Cheadle, near Stockport, or also to the Altrincham area.

It was the Sephardic Jews of Didsbury who first frequented Aladdin when it opened as a restaurant in 1988. Jo Scorah (née Churba), whose mother’s parents and father’s father were from Aleppo, was one of them. Scorah lived in Didsbury until she was 14, and despite moving further out to the suburb of Cheadle, continued to eat at Aladdin for decades. She told me how on Saturday nights, the restaurant was mostly filled with Jewish people, often celebrating birthdays. 

Scorah recalls, “My whole family was entrenched in Arabic and the Sephardic world, and while we did eat the same food at home, we had the money to go out. But also we were second generation, so we didn’t cook it in the same way. It is hard to make round fried kibbeh!”

According to al-Adin, even today most of Aladdin’s clientele are Jews. “They want to remember the food of their family. Most of them know me, it’s like coming home; they feel at home.” I enquired as to whether the relocation of a lot of the Jewish population further south may have meant less Jewish customers, but he insisted, “It’s more because most of the original customers are now very old, but now their children come.” For al-Sabah, it is important to be able to offer hospitality empowered by memories of a lost homeland. “Many are from the Middle East,” he tells me. “I have a customer called David who says the makdous [stuffed aubergine] reminds him of home.” 

Taking pride in these restaurateur-customer relations may have something to do with Aleppo’s legacy as a multi-communal city, which was home to Armenians, Christians, Circassians and Kurds, in addition to Jews and Muslims. As a focal point of trade and a particularly diverse hub of Ottoman Syria, the city gained a reputation for its food and is still known today among Syrians as the country’s culinary capital. The city is no longer as diverse as it was, with almost all of the Jewish population gone by the 1970s and the Christian population – still 250,000 in 2010, 12% of the city’s population – reduced by 60% during the Syrian Civil War over the last decade. But the variegated traditions producing its culinary reputation still live on in the food. For example, itch, a local cooked bulgur salad using the same ingredients as tabbouleh, is often referred to as ‘Armenian tabbouleh’. 

Yet the Aleppan identity of Aladdin may be lost on those without familial heritage in the city. Historically, it was not uncommon for Arab populations opening restaurants in the UK to label their cuisine ‘Mediterranean’. Later, ‘Lebanese’ and ‘Moroccan’ became acceptable, and many non-Lebanese Syrian restaurants would conform to the style of Lebanese menus. Aladdin still goes by ‘Arabic & Middle Eastern’, with Yara opting for ‘Lebanese and Syrian’ Only Syriana, the restaurant that opened most recently, displays the origins of the food in the name.

Aladdin, however, is still the most Syrian in its menu offerings. For the mezze, in addition to hummus, moutabal, babaganoush, labneh and makdous, it offers Syrian versions of hummus hab (whole boiled chickpeas with lemon) and fateh (chickpeas and pita chips in a yoghurt and tahini sauce), makmour (a rich tomato and aubergine stew), as well as the particularly Aleppan dishes of mutowameh (slowly stewed courgette cores), kibbeh safarjalieh (bulgur stuffed with lamb in a tomato sauce with quince) and kibbeh summakieh (bulgur stuffed with lamb in a tomato and sumac sauce). The majority of customers don’t know that al-Adin also used to work in a sweetshop in Aleppo, which is why the dessert menu is more extensive than Aladdin’s descendants. He is particularly proud of his halawet el-Jibn, which costs a reasonable £5. The balance of the dish is achieved through a lush texture, the subtly sour lactic hint in the cheese, the aromatic luxuriousness of the pistachio and the not-too-sweet sugar syrup tying it all together. It gives the version at London’s Levant Book Cafe a run for its money. 

Whilst Yara and Syriana have departed from their ancestors’ offerings, dropping the mutowameh and focusing more on charcoal-grilled meats than Aleppan stew dishes, much of the formula remains the same, with some of the classic vegetarian dishes like the stuffed artichokes and the spinach stew developed at Aladdin. But more importantly, the connection between Muslim Syrian restaurateurs and a strong contingent of  Jewish clientele has been maintained. 

As the south Manchester suburbs have become a home to newly affluent populations, new groups of clientele have emerged. Al-Sabah tells me that although Manchester’s Syrian population generally don’t eat at his restaurant, given they don’t live locally,  aren’t affluent enough to eat out regularly and prefer to eat Syrian food in a domestic setting, he now has a sizable number of Indian customers. Unlike the Jewish population – who often follow the rules of keeping kashrut at home – he caters many of their parties, and they always request that he add extra levels of spice and chili heat. 

Many Ashkenazi Jews also frequent these restaurants. This is in part due to inter-marriage and greater mixing between Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews of all denominations (particularly more secular Jews), but may also extend from the experience of eating Palestinian food in Jaffa or Mizrahi street food in Tel Aviv; experiences from which Ashkenazi Jews have developed a taste for and want to replicate in the UK. The other major shift of note in how Ashkenazi Jews eat at home is the adoption of Middle Eastern culinary elements. As I got older, in addition to chopped liver and egg-and-onion, hummus became the third variation of our Ritz cracker canapes, and then, in more recent years, I would find Ottolenghi salads alongside classic Friday-night roast chicken. My mother now eats weekly with a group of friends at Syriana, while a baharat gifted to her by al-Sabah has become a staple of the kitchen. On a recent visit to Aladdin, we ordered the Aleppan dish kibbeh sumakiyeh. The lamb was tender and falling apart in the headily tart and umami sumac-laced tomato sauce. My grandmother remarked on tasting it, “It’s what you call heimische; cooked forever, home-cooked.” We both chuckled. 

Aladdin’s Sephardic Jewish customers may have waned slightly over the years due to intra-city migration but many still think of it as the best, and now Ashkenazi Jews who eat at Aladdin too think the same. Ironically, it is unlikely that Aleppo’s Jews would have eaten at restaurants very often due to kashrut laws, so few may have imagined that secularisation and their migration to Manchester would lead to the development of an emotional reciprocity between British-Syrian Jews and Muslims, cradled by the mnemonic power of food to evoke a sense of place.

Even if Aladdin’s non-Jewish customers dwindle, this connection seems here to stay. As al-Sabah tells me, “When I first opened Syriana, a Jewish customer said to me, ‘We will support you whatever happens. We will never let you close. We will keep coming here and keep you going.’”

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A guide to Jewish food in Manchester - from cholent to amba coronation chicken

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Credits

Joel Hart is an urban anthropologist and food & drinks writer. You can find him on Instagram or at The Schmaltz, where he has recently embarked on a writing project on Ashkenazi-Jewish foodways.

Vittles British-Jewish Food Week is edited by Molly Pepper Steemson, with additional editing from Jonathan Nunn and Adam Coghlan, and subediting by Sophie Whitehead and Liz Tray.

All illustrations are by Georgia Turner, a freelance illustrator and neuroscience PhD student from London.

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Good afternoon!

Today’s newsletter is the first in Vittles’s Normal Country project, dedicated to the everyday hyperregional food culture of the UK. This project also encompasses Red Wall Feasts — which challenges media narratives surrounding the north of England through the diversity of its food — as well as today’s new column by Isaac Rangaswami of Instagram account caffs_not_cafes, which will celebrate regional caff culture outside of London.

If you would like to pitch to Normal Country, please email vittleslondon@gmail.com

Live, Laugh, Laverbread, by Isaac Rangaswami

It’s easy to get nostalgic about the high streets of yesteryear. Back when we wore more brown and everywhere had a fusty, threadbare Britishness to it, our town centres were paved with grocers, butchers’ shops and branches of Woolworths. I can only really squint at those days, but I still feel their pull. I see traces of them everywhere: on Bakerloo Line trains, motorway service stations and phone boxes with the old BT logo on. 

My love for British ordinariness has made me interested in places I perhaps have no right to have nostalgia for, like pie and mash shops and carpeted pubs. The same goes for Kardomah cafés, a chain of coffee shops which died out years before I was born. The brand opened its first cafés in the early 1900s and thrived into the 1960s, before fading away and all but vanishing. At its post-war height, dozens of Kardomahs were dotted across the country, serving coffee, tea and cakes. Cities like London and Liverpool had a handful each; even Paris had a few, including one on the Rue de Rivoli near the Louvre. Manchester is still haunted by the ghosts of Kardomah past. 

Only one Kardomah café survives today, in Swansea, for unclear reasons. By remaining in business, the place has preserved one of the most beautiful 1950s interiors in the country. Its dining room is spacious and airy, yet filled with a thousand marvellous modernist details. When I asked Catrin James, who works at Swansea’s National Waterfront Museum and documents the city’s modernist heritage on Instagram, why she loves the Kardomah, she reeled off the following: the copper reliefs, the abstract mural, the tiled back wall, the patterned Formica tables, the ​​lengthy window with the mature plants. It may be the UK’s prettiest caff. 

So when I went to Swansea recently, I made sure I ate at the Kardomah three times. I fell in love with its food. I fell in love with its comfy leatherette chairs, which are the terracotta colour of strong tea. I fell in love with its beautiful coat stands, which have ball-like ends for hooks, which Catrin adores too and I learned from her are in the Atomic Age style. By visiting Swansea’s Kardomah and its other historical places, I tried to get to know the city in my own way, through the purpose-built spaces its inhabitants have kept alive.  

Day 1

Swansea was heavily bombed during WWII and almost entirely rebuilt afterwards, which has shaped the city’s character enormously. When I arrive, it reminds me of places like Bracknell and Stevenage: new towns defined by their modernist buildings and pioneering urban greyness. But Swansea feels different, in that its post-war architecture is set against picturesque, sandy beaches and a series of dramatic, house-speckled hills, where sky and water and concrete meet. 

One of its most distinctive buildings is Swansea Civic Centre, a hulking brutalist complex that houses various council services. The centre is a kind of Barbican-by-Sea, where you can register deaths, get legally married and browse old papers using a microfiche reader. Swansea’s indoor market has a similar vibe, in that it’s also colossal, was once radically modern and still gets a lot of use. But it’s the Kardomah that embodies this ageing functionality best. 

The café had a previous life in another building which opened in 1905 that the Luftwaffe later turned to rubble. The new Kardomah, which is now 65 years old, was designed around the modernist principles of simplicity, ​​functionality and space. The place remains the city’s beating heart, an enormous, light-filled room with 36 tables and 134 seats which has been run by the Luporini family since the 1970s. Unlike some heritage caffs, which like Trigger’s broom have been remodelled so many times as to lose all of their original components, everything in the Kardomah is as it was when it opened in 1957. But it’s more than a living museum; the place is a genuine community centre, where everyone goes. 

As you enter, you pass a reception desk where a member of staff will kindly tell you which part of the restaurant to sit in. The service here is impeccable, unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in a caff; when you’re finished, the uniformed waitresses present you with a hand-written bill signed with their name. There’s a Welshness to it, but the bustle of the place and the service-led approach gives it the feel of an American diner. 

The first thing I eat is an omelette and chips, as Catrin had told me it was a “very Swansea” thing to order. I go for the ham version, which comes in juicy, delicatessen-quality chunks. After I eat, I speak to Louise Luporini, who runs the restaurant with her husband Marcus. She confirms that the reason my omelette is so delicious is because the ham is cut from a joint. “We get asked sometimes to make a Welsh rarebit, which isn’t on the menu,” Louise tells me. “But we’ll make it anyway.” I’m also thrilled to learn that the Kardomah serves a Welsh breakfast, another off-menu item, which features cockles and laverbread (an edible seaweed), which I’d been hoping to try and I note for later. That night I eat whitebait, a spaghetti bolognese and a tiramisu at Topo Gigio, the city’s oldest Italian restaurant.

Day 2

When I return for lunch the next day, I order the gammon and pineapple, mainly because I’d enjoyed my ham so much the day before. I’ve also seen the dish on the menu of every other Swansea caff, including Fairdeal, a spot deep in an industrial estate where I’d eaten a bacon roll that morning. While the places I’ve visited in Swansea so far are decades old, Wales is also home to multiple century-old caffs, which are among Britain’s oldest. In small valleys towns you can find caffs like Pino’s in Mountain Ash and The Prince’s in Pontypridd. They are remarkable time capsules which can be traced back to Wales’ first wave of Italian migration and the origin of caffs in the UK. After eating in two packed Swansea caffs, I feel like they get more use here. 

My second day in the city reminds me that my fondness for such places goes well beyond food. These inexpensive restaurants are fascinating as communal spaces, in that they don’t necessarily require you to interact much with other people. In a caff, it’s easy to eat on your own, since they’re so cheap, which feels less self-indulgent. If you go with a mate or in a small group, you might say hello to the owners, but you’re not there to speak to strangers; you’re there to eat. If caffs do anything to unify people, it’s mainly by bringing them together under one roof. This sense of community feels particularly strong in Swansea. 

My gammon lunch and a visit to the Indoor Market, which is packed with family-run butchers, convince me that the city is all about old-fashioned meat. After a long, rainy walk along the coast to Mumbles, a neighbouring seaside village, I drink some solo pints by the water. Inevitably, I find myself in the mood for something substantial, so when I go to Monni’s Fish Bar for dinner, I forego the fish and order faggots, peas, chips and gravy — something else I’d seen at Fairdeal and all over Swansea. The faggots are soft and gamey, somewhere between stuffing, organ meat and a corned beef hash. They have a wonderful sour taste that goes well with gravy. I return to my Travelodge, tired from all the walking, but feeling like I’ve put all those calories to good use. 

Day 3

On my last morning in Swansea I return to the Kardomah and order the Welsh breakfast. The laverbread is a shock, like a puddle of crude oil among the other fried breakfast components I know so well. I assumed it would be like soda bread or a tattie scone; if Ulster frys and Scottish breakfasts had their own bread-like things, surely Welsh fry-ups would too? But laverbread isn’t bread at all. It’s mushy, sludgy and coal-black. It tastes like the sea smells, as if samphire married boiled spinach, but more rich and iron-y, not far from liver and kidney. My breakfast cockles are great too: hot, porky and far better than a portion served cold in a polystyrene cup. I spend my remaining hours wandering around the Botanical Gardens in Singleton Park and the residential hills of Mount Pleasant, after paying a visit to Dylan Thomas’s house.

I leave Swansea thinking that the Kardomah is about a whole lot more than its interior. Maybe restaurants like this do attract the odd enthusiast like me, who have an interest in a place’s atmosphere and history. But they remain successful with repeat customers because they’re friendly and reliable and serve food that makes you feel good. When I spoke to Louise she told me, “We’re very lucky that we have so many loyal customers.” The place is packed with families, grandmotherly types and lunch-breaking office workers, who all seem extremely at home. While we chatted, Louise said hello and goodbye to more than a dozen people, including Swansea’s very own pantomime dame. “I know what day of the week it is by who’s walking in,” she told me. Yes, the Kardomah lifts your mood because it serves meals that are wholesome, nostalgic and distinctively Welsh. But the place goes beyond that, by making you feel at home too.

Perhaps this homeliness is at the heart of every good caff, although each one brings it about in its own way. After spending more than three years documenting London’s caffs I know I’ve barely scratched the surface of the city, but I’m also conscious that I’m not getting the full picture. I’m just as interested in other parts of the UK; I just don’t live in them. Each caff I visit convinces me that the things that excite me about London – history, functional buildings, wholesome and affordable food – also manifest themselves in so many compelling, region-specific ways up and down the country. 

While Swansea was the first on my list to visit outside London, I know every town and city has places like the Kardomah, whether it’s in Penzance, Kirkwall or anywhere in between. Ordinary, purpose-built spaces are constantly changing, as new stuff destroys the old; every pub, caff, car park, chip shop, market, station, high street, library and bus shelter is interesting for that reason, because they hold traces of what came before. We could get dewy-eyed about the unlikely fragments of our communal past that slip through and remain available to use, since some of them won’t last forever. But that would be boring. It’s more fun to make good use of them while they’re still around, because that’s what they were built for. 

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Credits

Isaac Rangaswami is a writer based in London. He runs the Instagram account @caffs_not_cafes.

All photos by Isaac Rangaswami.

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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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Where Has All the Tchulent Gone? by Atar Hadari

The changing tastes of orthodox Jewish Manchester

When I first moved to Manchester so my wife could go to music college, we rented a tiny little flat up on Bury Old Road in Whitefield, just round the corner from a deli called Let’s Fress. In the twenty years since I moved from London, Let’s Fress has been one of the few kosher food landmarks that has remained open in this part of north Manchester. Back then, Let’s Fress (fress being Yiddish for ‘over-eat’) was ‘kosher but unsupervised’ due to some bust-up with the kosher authorities, but still provided bagels, cream cheese, fried fish, schnitzel along with a flagship Sabbath meal deal of a roast chicken, chicken soup, chopped liver or egg and onion, roast potatoes and tzimmes for a single tenner. By comparison, Marks & Spencer was then offering a similar deal including a bottle of wine for the same tenner to the much larger non-kosher market. Soon they dropped the bottle of wine, then the side dishes, then the tenner.                  

The deli’s owner Marc Cooper told me that they had been managing to sustain that Sabbath meal offer at a tenner a head (rather than a tenner for the whole thing) up until the pandemic in 2020. But when lockdown came and the Cooper actually had a chance to do the figures, he realised that there was no profit in it. You can buy your chicken breast, your chicken soup, even your tchulent (or cholent) and make whatever Sabbath meal you like, but it will never come to less than a tenner. But the change Cooper was negotiating is deeper than price. Not only has the cost of meat and supervision made such meal deals not viable, the community has contracted and changed its tastes. Jewish food here once meant tchulent and Sabbath chicken meal deals. But it is another special – the chicken tagine for two at £16 – that is an indicator of where Manchester’s new kosher diner is coming from.

Shortly after I moved, I had to adjust to a rather dourer and more conformist Orthodox community up north than I was used to in London. They liked their kosher food but they didn’t like frills; Chinese food was as experimental as they got. One of the most popular community spots, just up the road from Let’s Fress, was a kosher Chinese restaurant called Pagoda. Pagoda enjoyed the relatively lower rents up near Besses o’ th’ Barn which allowed it to spread itself across two shop-fronts – a takeaway entrance and an adjacent spacious dining room with a good twenty tables and a huge aquarium full of golden and orange tropical fish, lit picturesquely by the sun through the wall-length windows and Venetian blinds. Many an accountant could be found there with their colleague or client at lunchtime, where the restaurant’s emptiness gave them room to talk in relative privacy.    

A couple of years ago the landlord made Pagoda an offer they not only could refuse but, in fact, did balk at, and owner Daniel Clayhills decided that he might as well be where most of his punters were and move down into Prestwich (the heart of the Mancunian Jewish community), where he now occupies a much smaller but undeniably busier dining room. He sells a lot of sushi takeaway at what is now Pagoda Chinese Cuisine Grill and Sushi Bar.

The way we eat often evolves not because of one restaurant or takeaway coming or going out of business, but about bigger changes. Some might say that this shift is primarily down to economics. Take tchulent, for example, the Ashkenazi stew of beans and brisket that used to be as popular as sushi in this part of Manchester. Its appeal is partly that of cheap and cheerful food, but it’s more than just comfort food. Anybody can make a pizza, like the new kosher Tasti Pizza in Salford, but a good crust takes talent, a good sauce takes taste. Similarly, anyone can throw a bit of brisket in a pot with some butter beans, onion, potatoes and barley but if it’s done properly what you taste is time, care taken and a sense of peace. It’s designed to be a dish you can leave in the oven all night if you don’t cook on the Sabbath. It’s a meal that tells you that you are home and don’t have to go anywhere. 

Yet when my children go to stay at their schoolfriends’ houses for Sabbath they get fed sushi, not tchulent. And it’s the Modern Orthodox parents buying the kosher sushi. Sushi now occupies the same role Chinese food did twenty years ago, in that it seems a tiny bit more daring and exciting than chicken in cashew nuts and mushroom, in the same way chicken in cashew nuts and mushroom once seemed more daring and exciting than a kosher chicken fillet. Pagoda does not, of course, offer tchulent.      

Around the corner from Pagoda on King’s Road you will find Mozzarella, a wood-fired pizza joint that also offers sabich pizza, shakshuka (Moroccan) and Israeli (or as it is known on Hebrew menus, ‘Arabic-style’) salad. No Eastern European food, no tchulent. But it’s the favourite hangout of the girls from all the Jewish schools and the favourite meeting place of their mums. Just beyond them on Bury New Road you will find the boys at Ta’am, a Mediterranean grill whose chips in orange paprika my son is devoted to and will travel all the way into Prestwich to eat with his fingers. You can get a kosher shawarma in (Iraqi) laffa there for £8.99 (which you’ll struggle to match in London) and it illustrates the prevailing trend away from the honest bean, broth and brisket of old.

There are a few holdouts left. Down Bury Old Road on your way into the centre of Manchester you will pass Leicester Road, the true heart of the ultra-Orthodox community where Brackmans Bakery still sits offering bagels, pasta and breakfast to a bustling clientele after many decades of business. A few doors down, you’ll find Dovid’s Deli, a small and steamy hangout of yeshiva boys and assorted waifs and strays, which is one of the few places left that serves affordable tchulent from a huge pot, schnitzel, fried fish and assorted deli items and Sabbath fare. (It had an unofficial kosher supervision by a religious judge who had broken with the Manchester kosher authorities but vouched for them with a piece of paper with his name on it in their window) It is always packed. The place is such a cultural landmark that it featured heavily in a documentary made about the ultra-Orthodox community in Manchester. 

Dovid’s is only open on Thursdays (until late) and Fridays (closing at 2pm); but the weekday lunches are not enough to keep them going and only one of the little dining tables is still there. When I ask the guy on the till says he can’t remember when they were open longer. They still sell a small cup of tchulent for £3 but seem unused to providing what they think will feed six and consider whether two silver trays will be enough. Imagine you are a mother of eight in Salford and you want to feed your family. Why on earth would you go out and pay £3 a head to buy ready-made tchulent? You could make tchulent at home and you even might take a stab at making the orange chips yourself. Sushi, however, will always be beyond you, so it can command a higher price. 

I now usually buy tchulent to take away at Shefa Mehadrin, a butcher’s shop turned supermarket on Bury New Road just across the street from Mozzarella. The pot at Dovid’s is bigger but I must say I prefer what comes out of the small pot at Shefa. I now have that family of six and if I fill a container with tchulent and they weigh it and only then add the kishke or vegetable sausage on top, I do not pay for the sausage and get it free. Because my daughters insist that, ‘We can’t make tchulent as well as Shefa Mehadrin,’ I have no choice but to buy that tray of tchulent for £18. If it were a bigger family I suspect, like most of the Orthodox Jewish community of Manchester now, I would not bother. Sushi, of course, is a different matter.

There is an alternative narrative to explain all this which has nothing to do with the price but with the social mores of the people. Twenty years ago, Let’s Fress was catering in Whitefield to a middle-class, more secular Jewish clientele who may not have kept strictly kosher but were nostalgic for their grandparents’ Russian and Eastern European Jewish tastes from the late 1800s to 1900s when 30,000 Jews arrived in Manchester. (Entirely different from the community of Reform Jewish wool merchants who founded the Bradford community in the 1820s and wouldn’t have touched tchulent with a barge pole.) That clientele was nostalgic for the food they grew up eating. A schoolfriend of mine, the grandson of a former President of the United Synagogue, had not visited a synagogue in many years but would make pilgrimages to Bloom’s in Golders Green, a great old kosher deli, to eat the food he associated with his grandfather’s home.      

That generation is gone. Their children have either married out and no longer keep kosher, eating tchulent for nostalgia, or they became more religious and presumably demanded that Marc Cooper patch up his quarrel with the Manchester kosher authorities and get professional supervision. That generation do keep kosher but they are no longer nostalgic. They want to eat what Modern Orthodox American Jews eat and what Israelis eat. Who cares what they ate in the shtetl? They want their kosher sushi and they want it now.

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Keeping Kosher? - A battle over food, tradition, and autonomy in Stamford Hill

A guide to Jewish food in Manchester - from cholent to amba coronation chicken

Credits

Atar Hadari's most recent collection of poems is 'Gethsemane', a sequence of monologues about Jesus by his Jewish contemporaries published by Shearsman.

Editor’s note: if you want to find out where the cholent has gone in Manchester, please check out The Cholent Connoisseur on Instagram.

Vittles British-Jewish Food Week is edited by Molly Pepper Steemson, with additional editing from Jonathan Nunn and Adam Coghlan, and subediting by Sophie Whitehead and Liz Tray.

All illustrations are by Georgia Turner, a freelance illustrator and neuroscience PhD student from London.