The Pie At Night: In Search of the North at Play

by Stuart Maconie

  I take a seat and almost instantly my bread and butter arrives, a mixture of brown and white; daringly cosmopolitan but unsettling. A chip butty with brown bread feels wrong to me at some deep-seated, pre-logical level. Nostalgic music blasts out at impressive volume. First it’s ‘songs from the shows’, Joseph and The Sound of Music, then Elaine Page warbling something dire, then chirpy Tommy Steel and a clutch of early sixties teen idols. Next we have a bit of wartime stuff, like The Andrews Sisters and Glenn Miller before moving onto Sinatra and Tony Bennett, and in passing the worst version of ‘My Funny Valentine’ I have ever heard. Behind me sits a cheery, rotund family of three. ‘Eat your sausage,’ says mum to a girl of about four, while Dean Martin slurs woozily ‘when the sun hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s amore’.

  They like their signage at Grandma Pollards, and they like it bamboozling. An entire wall is taken up with pictures of Tony and staff with a variety of customers, and with shots of various diners accompanied by fabulously literal captions. There’s a picture of a man and woman tucking in to their dinner, he with peas, she without. The caption reads: ‘What, no peas lady?’ There’s a picture of some empty plates (caption: ‘empty plates’), an elderly man holding up a sign saying ‘I am 91 and a Dunkirk Man’ (‘We Are So Proud Of Him’) and my particular favourite, a cheery fellow caught opening a sachet of tomato ketchup (‘Time For Tomato Ketchup’). Another adjoining board is headed ‘Celebrity Collage’ and features Tony with Ken Dodd (caption: ‘His Idol’) and, less predictably, Prunella Scales and Timothy West tucking into pie and peas with some gusto. Emma brings me a vanilla slice as big as four desserts in Knightsbridge, and quite heavenly.

  Reluctantly leaving Emma and the warmth of Grandma Pollards for the wild night coming in over the Pennines, I stop for a whisky at the White Horse, a pub on the moors that is as boisterous and warm inside as it looks chill and deserted from the exterior. ‘Which one would you like?’ asks the barmaid. ‘Thank god,’ she says when I ask for Laphroaig, ‘it’s the only one I can pronounce’ – which seems somewhat weird on many levels. As I leave I notice a van in the car park bearing the legend ‘Equine Dentist’. How does one arrive at that line of work? Who in that crowded bar was the equine dentist, looking for some simple human warmth after a raw day on the hills (possibly) staring gift horses quite literally in the mouth with not even the consolation of asking them where they were going for their holidays.

  The simple, enduring glories of fish and chips aside, working Britain has always been playing catch up in the foodie stakes. The church basically dreamt up the sin of gluttony during the Middle Ages to make the poor feel better about having nothing to eat. Centuries passed, and the notion of eating out in establishments dedicated to just that took hold in Britain, with the indulgent mood of the post-Cromwell Restoration a tipping point. But it was still largely the wealthy who could afford the time and money required to spend an evening living it up over several courses.

  The early Edwardian era was a boom time for dining out, when the modern restaurant as we know it began to emerge. Even so, most people’s experience of a dining establishment was the new-fangled and very welcome works canteen. The enlightened Titus Salt of Saltaire was a pioneer here, as was Thomas Adams, lace makers of Nottingham, where ‘girls leave their counters and refresh themselves with a bun and a glass of milk from four to half past six’. Alongside these were ‘ordinaries’; working men’s taverns and chop houses where you could get an ‘ordinary’; a basic sustaining meal at a cheap fixed price. (Incidentally, here’s a tourist tip; in Berlin, anyone can eat in a works canteen. They’re completely open to the public so you can enjoy the great views and exalted company at, for instance, the Berlin Philharmonic or the Ministry of Defence plus rump steak ‘with herb butter, beans and croquette potatoes’ for about 7 euros.)

  Looking back, the pub-cum-restaurant I was taken to by the Stokes for that impossibly glamorous and adult excursion was perhaps one a chain of establishments that revolutionised the British night out in the seventies, thanks to two brothers from Italy. Frank and Aldo Berni came from a tiny village high in the Apennines where they went to school on skis. In 1929, like many of their countrymen, the family moved to the valleys of south Wales and opened a café. During the war, the brothers were interned as enemy aliens but this didn’t turn them off their adopted country. After the war, they visited America and were impressed by the slick restaurant chains with their reasonable prices and good service, but not by the bland and flavourless food. They decided to try something similar but tastier here.

  They opened their first restaurant in Bristol’s oldest pub The Rummer in 1952. Through that decade and the next their eating houses became enormously popular firstly in the West Country and then throughout the UK. Berni Inns had a simple, set menu requiring only a grill and a deep fat fryer in the kitchen and no trained chefs. The manager was key. He or she worked from a detailed operational manual known as ‘The Bible’ which covered everything from presentation, place settings, cooking procedures and complaints, which the diner was encouraged to make rather than go away seething and spreading bad ‘word of mouth’.

  They were clever chaps. They used place mats instead of tablecloths, a gesture towards informality that also saved on laundry. Portions were strictly controlled by weight; an idea which critics claimed had been borrowed from the prison system but kept costs standard and diners happy. Berni’s grills cooked at far higher temperatures than was usual so the meat was sealed instantly and far juicier than we were used to; five minutes rare, seven minutes medium, ten minutes well done. A competent grill chef could turn out 300 steaks a night.

  Their ads were ubiquitous; in one a smiling, sympathetic husband is consoling a wife standing glum-faced over a smouldering chip pan. ‘We’d be better off at a Berni’ runs the tagline. In 1970, they sold up to Grand Metropolitan, who wisely kept the Berni Inn name and gave Britain its definitive seventies meal out: prawn cocktail, steak and chips and Black Forest gateau. After the sale, Frank retired to Jersey (£14.5 million better off) by which time the chain had 147 restaurants in Britain and several in, of all places, Japan.

  But fashions change. The lure of the exotic and the dread rise of nouvelle cuisine alongside hollow eighties snobbery did for the homespun Berni. In 1990, Berni Inns were sold off to the brewers Whitbread, who immediately dumped the name and re-launched them as Beefeaters. As the food writer David Smith put it, ‘Berni Inns had become a bit like a teenager’s parents. They had taught the British how to eat out at restaurants but were an uncomfortable reminder of who we used to be not who we are now.’ This slightly squirming sense of affection and nostalgia was nailed perfectly in a number in Victoria Wood’s musical That Day We Sang entitled ‘Berni Inn’ with lyrics like, ‘Would you like to grapple/with gammon and pineapple’ and ‘It’s wrong to brag/It’s just cake in drag/But it’s gâteau at the Berni Inn’.

  Just around the time that Berni Inn was dwindling in status, receding into memory to become a seventies’ cipher like Space Hoppers and skyjackings, another nosh behemoth was inexorably rising. It was moving across the Atlantic like those unstoppable predecessors Ford, Coca-Cola and Walt Disney. Resistance would be futile. I remember well the first McDonald’s opening in Wigan. It was around 1984, a particularly grim period in the town’s history and an appropriately Orwellian one, at least if you’re one of those types who wears a Guy Fawkes mask and thinks fast food is at the very least imperialist and at the worst probably something to do with the Illuminati. I’m neither but I didn’t go in McDonald’s often.

  At the time Wigan still had a Wimpy, and to this day I have a deep vestigial loyalty to Britain’s original burger chain, whose first branch grew out of a Lyons Corner House on London’s Coventry Street. Wimpys, with their chunky, idiosyncratic hand-assembled burgers and rough chopped salads are now as rare as hen’s teeth, and never to be passed by anyone with taste buds and a feel for tradition. From a peak of 500, there are now just 89, maybe less by the
time you read this. If you have one near you, patronise it. Preserve it. It is in its own way a cherishable national culinary oddity like Spud U Like. A chain of potato outlets for people who find fish and chips too flamboyant, and once owned by the British School Of Motoring. Yes, really.

  Anyway, ‘Maccie D’s’ never became the treat or hang out for me that it did for some teenagers. Perhaps it was that first experience in Wigan, when scanning the illuminated menu boards and trying to decode and disentangle the Big Macs from the Quarter Pounders, musing on whether McDonald’s actually thought a grown person would ever ask for a ‘Fillet-O-Fish’, the man in the queue in front of me asked for a ‘beefburger … and I don’t want any of that fucking shit on it’ thus brusquely dismissing the finest pickles and condiments of Ray Kroc’s devising.

  In the same way, I seem to have been missed out on the generational food cult that is Nando’s. To call Nando’s a phenomenon is to damn it with faint praise. Like text messaging and selfies, it is one of those new notions that seem boring and unappealing – in this case a new restaurant selling the dullest of all meats – until young people with their massive cultural muscle and consumer soft power made them into ‘a thing’. No, make that ‘the thing’. Nando’s is the most popular food outlet among British teenagers. It’s particularly big with young black Britons, and about 50 of its 333 restaurants in the UK are halal, which makes a hit with Muslim diners. My Sikh friend Gary, who can’t eat halal, takes his children there for their favourite dish, chicken livers. Any restaurant that can make liver palatable, let alone irresistible, to kids wields a terrifying power.

  Quite how it got here is a bit of a mystery, like much about the Nando’s cult. Sometime in the mid-nineties, there grew a backlash against the perceived tackiness of McDonald’s. Nando’s was in the forefront of what retail jargon calls ‘the fast casual chicken space’. It’s not haute cuisine, and you have to queue up to order, but at seven quid-ish for a chicken leg and some sides (an average meal spend is nine quid plus) it’s not Greggs either. Its demographic is huge, its appeal genuinely classless. You are equally likely to spot a gang of hip-hop youths in there as a middle-class family, a young couple on date night or grannie and granddad having a bite after shopping. This makes it catnip to politicians. David Cameron has stopped off several times in various Nando’s for selfies with customers when on the campaign trail. Prince Harry has been seen tucking in at the Fulham branch. Ambulance, police, fire services, Army, Navy, RAF and NHS workers all get a 20 per cent discount, a neat PR move. During the summer disturbances of 2011, a Facebook group called The Nando’s Defence League sprang up, demanding that rioters and looters leave Nando’s alone. If Nando’s were to launch a political party, their spicy Reich would last a thousand years.

  But the most enigmatic element of all Nando lore is the ‘Black Card’, or the Nando’s High Five Card. This fabled object is the Bilderberg Group of fried chicken retail, shrouded in secrecy and power, a sliver of metal that makes a platinum Amex look like my Gala Bingo membership. Ownership guarantees the holder free chicken for themselves and four friends for life. Like the minutes of the Bilderberg Group, Nando’s are hugely coy on the matter of the card. But rumour has it that David Beckham and Lewis Hamilton have one. Rapper Tinchy Stryder says he has one. Ed Sheeran has been pictured with one. What gives here? Perhaps we will only know when the saucers come to hover over every one of the 333 branches – something odd about that number, isn’t there? – and the walls start to revolve, revealing the blinking lights of the subterranean control rooms, as Nando’s move into the final glorious phase of their project.

  Nando’s proclaims itself ‘the home of the legendary Portuguese flame-grilled peri-peri chicken’. Peri-peri is Swahili for ‘pepper-pepper’, which in fact comes from Mozambique and the company’s majority shareholders are from South Africa. So it definitely qualifies as foreign food – of which of course myths and prejudices were once rife. My friend’s tiny and permanently suspicious grannie eschewed curry on the grounds that it would ‘thin your blood’ and ‘make you sexy’, admirable functions both, I would have thought, unless you wanted to be a sexless dolt with clotted blood. Similarly Chinese food was OK but there was something in it that would make you want another one two hours later. There is actually; monosodium glutamate, ‘MSG taste powder’ as it’s known in the trade, and the sort of thing middle-class people regarded as only slightly better than putting powdered weapons-grade plutonium in your sweet-and-sour sauce.

  But look a little deeper and you’ll find we have always been more adventurous in our tastes than our self-image suggests. It’s customary at this point to refer to the chicken recipe from the Middle Ages that called for 40 cloves of garlic (it’s called, brilliantly, ‘Chicken With 40 Cloves of Garlic’), or to the fact that Saik Deen Mahomad opened the Hindostanee Dinner and Hooka Smoking Club in London in 1810 which offered ‘Indian dishes, in the highest perfection’. He even offered to have dishes delivered to his customers’ houses. Crazy! That’ll never catch on.

  We have never been as dull as we think. A Tudor recipe for a picnic salad instructs ‘take parse, sawge, garlic, chibllas, oynons, leek, borage, myntes, porrectes, fenel and ton tressis, rew, rosemarye, purslayne, lave, and waisshe hem clene. Poke hem, pluck hem small with thyn hond and myng hem with rawe oile. Lay on vinegar and salt and serve it forth.’ It certainly sounds more adventurous than some Hellman’s on a hard-boiled egg.

  Hybrids abound in our eating landscape. There’s ‘the Chinese chippy’, offering fish and chips as well as Chinese dishes; ‘the full Muslim’, a whopping traditional English breakfast without the pork. Chicken tikka masala, said to be our national dish these days, is rumoured to have been invented one rainy night in Glasgow in 1971 when a curry house customer moaned that his chicken curry was too dry and the chef improvised with a tin of Heinz Tomato Soup. In 2010, a survey by Cauldron foods found that six out of ten meals prepared in British households were derived from foreign culinary traditions. Of our five English Chinatowns, four are in the industrial north or Midlands: Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool and Nottingham. The first two of those cities also boast Curry Quarters or Miles and I know both well, too well some might say. In Brum, it’s also known as the Balti triangle (from the Urdu Balty for Bucket, referring to the metal bowl the food is served in). It’s a crowded corner of the city where Sparkbrook, Balsall Heath and Moseley meet in the crowded, buzzing streets of Stoney Lane, Ladypool Road and Stratford Road. Every other building is a curry house or Indian sweet centre.

  When I first wandered this street in the late 1980s it was not uncommon to see Roy Hattersley, then MP for Sparkbrook, tearing his chapatti in one of them. None were remotely smart but all were unique; menus under glass on the table tops, cutlery ‘liberated’ from ancient British rail buffet cars, and in one famed establishment chained to the table. Whole extended Asian families would sit in them for an entire Sunday afternoon, laughing and chatting noisily, the women and children dazzling in scarlet, lemon and turquoise, deftly scooping the dahls and sambars one-handed with scraps torn from the enormous karack, or ‘family’ naan breads the size of dustbin lids.

  Somehow all stayed in business, prospered even, each with its own hardcore fan base who came for the specialties of the house; fresh naans folded over those little tea towel covered domes and stuck on the side of the tandoor ovens, seasonal bel puri and papri chat. On a roadside stall or two, you could find a snack so rare and prized that even today I know Asian friends from Prestwich and Didsbury who will drive to the Midlands to get the prized ones from the Ladypool Road. This is panipuri or golgoppa which means roughly ‘all in one mouthful’, the best way to eat this delicious street food of Kashmir and Nepal, crisp spheres of bread filled with scented liquid, tamarind and chick peas. Once you would have had to go to the roof of the world for such delights, to the backstreets of Lucknow, Chittagong or Kathmandu. Now you can get it on the 8A bus route to Aston via Five Ways.

  In Manchester, the curry mi
le runs along Wilmslow Road, the main drag of Rusholme. There is nothing quite like it on a summer night, when Pakistani hip-hop and Lollywood soundtracks blare from the shops offering mobile phone unlocking, and the air is heady and sizzling with cumin and coriander. My two favourite curry houses here are busy enough, thank you, without me making my life harder by naming them. I’m sure you understand. One is the only place on the curry mile where you can get dhosa pancakes and good bel puri and something of an insider’s secret. I remember the little swell of pride I got once when jumping in a cab at Piccadilly station and asking to be taken to it, the Asian cab driver turned around and gave me an admiring look and said, ‘You know your food I see, my friend.’

  Somewhat disloyally, Somerset Maugham once said ‘to eat well in England, you must have breakfast three times a day’. The warmth and zeal with which we’ve embraced the food of the subcontinent, as well as the Orient, the Mediterranean and the Middle East, is sometimes reckoned to be proportional to the blandness, wretchedness even, of traditional British cooking. I have some sympathy with this view, raised as I was on a grim diet of haslet, tongue, brawn, corned beef and other vague, translucent, grisly pressed meats of every hue, flaccid pies and vegetables boiled to within an inch of their lives (I drew the line at tripe, which looked exactly like what it was, the rubbery lining of a dead ruminant’s stomach).