Oh Yes, I was there in the late 70s and the Plaza on Upper Brook St became the Friday night rite of passage after much ale. Actually there was only one curry on offer… chicken biryani. Maybe some popadums and raw onions and raita as well. If you really insisted, you could get egg, chips and beans.
There was one vat of yellow turmeric rice and shredded chicken and two vats of soup-like curry sauce. The high chilli vat, undiluted, was “suicide”. The other vat was “mild”. Mixing different proportions got you “hot” and “medium”. Some reckon there was “killer” and other extreme heat varieties but that’s just BS. You could get a half dish (normal) or a full dish… only one mate got through a “full suicide” (the bet was without drinking any water at all !) and we all chipped in to pay his bill.
In ‘79, the owner Charlie (a chap from Somali, he was really, really black, looked a bit like the black squaddie in the Predator film) branched out and took over the Palace restaurant in Rusholme for a few years. He was notorious for chasing down non-payers and runners (usually students) down the street waving a meat cleaver. In the 50s these were fairly smart restaurants… no longer. They have all been demolished for 20 years or more now.
One has to remember that the 70s were the dog days of Manchester. Market St was a huge wasteland building site where the Arndale Centre was going up. The city centre main streets like Whitworth St, Princess St and Moseley St, even Albert Sq, had just abandoned mills and their empty dusty admin offices. Even the Refuge Assurance Bldg was closed up. Long before these empty buildings were converted into plush apartments and hotels in the late 80s and 90s. Ken Dodd did a 6-week Christmas run, for free, to save the Palace Theatre from closure and dereliction.
The canals were putrid, the northern quarter up Oldham St was virtually derelict and empty. The night clubs were either awful disco venues like Pips and Placemates or dives like the Continental (opposite the Palace Theatre on Oxford St) and the New Conti in the back alleys off Princess St - these were just converted cellars with vile toilets and a tiny kitchen as they had to serve “food” (chips) to get a 0200 alcohol licence.
Thank Kerrist for Tony Wilson and his efforts with Factory, though he was riding on an inevitable upsurge, Manchester could not have got much worse. It was fckin awful, apart from a few oases like the Hallé, Royal Exchange Theatre and the Art Gallery and the variety of Manchester pubs serving real Boddies. And then came Buzzcocks, Magazine and a few others like Joy Division who were rather late-comers to the party. It’s a completely different city today, almost unrecognisable.
