Red Wall Feasts - Bradford

Paratha, mixed starter, keema masala: a taste of home on Leeds Road, by Joe Cresswell

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Red Wall Feasts is a new rotating monthly column about food culture in the north of England, looking at how the discrepancy between the media narrative and the reality of northern cities and towns plays out in its restaurants, caffs, chippies and other food establishments.

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Paratha, mixed starter, keema masala: a taste of home on Leeds Road, by Joe Cresswell

There is an early scene in the recent Maggie Gyllenhaal adaptation of Elena Ferrante's The Lost Daughter where Olivia Colman's flat-vowelled protagonist, Leda, enduring a horrendous day at an Italian beach, is confronted by an overbearing American mum-to-be determined to find out where that funny accent comes from. 

Leda's answer? “Leeds. Well, Shipley really”. 

The correct response would have been to just carry on watching, unperturbed by the fact that Gyllenhaal (Leda is Neapolitan in Ferrante’s book) seems to have realigned the internal borders of West Yorkshire. But it was too late, the chip on my shoulder had been exposed. Could that be a very niche observation, I wondered, dropped in by a knowing northern screenwriter? Perhaps a genuine error in the backstory, suggested by one of the southern Brits in the cast? Either way it's a maddening, if familiar, response. 

Shipley is not a geographical grey area; it is very firmly in Bradford, two miles north of our Venetian-gothic City Hall, twelve miles to the classical equivalent in Leeds. But in this throwaway line lies a timely reminder that there are still occasions where people from the fifth-largest metropolitan borough in England choose to say they live next door, more likely out of embarrassment than misunderstanding, or worse, fear of the prejudice the admission might provoke when tabloids are content to lazily depict Bradford as a bi-cultural, failing wasteland. 

Yet, somewhat ironically, if you want to truly understand Bradford in 2022 you have to spend time on Leeds Road. And when you visit, it makes sense to eat.