Nisha Katona's popular Indian street food restaurant is heading to University Green on Oxford Road
SINCE giving up her twenty-year career as a barrister, the affable and formidable Nisha Katona hasn’t stood still.
Katona opened her first Mowgli restaurant in Liverpool in 2014, closely followed by a branch in Manchester’s Corn Exchange less than a year later.
READ: Mowgli, reviewed (2015)
In between writing and publishing cookery books, appearing on her Youtube vlogs and television, and doing food demos at various food festivals, Nisha has found time to expand her contemporary Indian street food brand even further, following a £3.5m investment by private equity firm Foresight Group.
As well as opening a second Liverpool branch and another in Birmingham, Mowgli are due to be springing up in Leeds (Autumn 2018) and Oxford (Spring 2018). Now, Katona has revealed that work is underway on a second Manchester site, just off Oxford Road.
She told Confidential: “Manchester was where I spent my student years. I can’t tell you how massive it is for me to be able to give back to my teen coolscape. We aim to open Oxford Road Mowgli in the autumn. Nothing is sure until it happens. I'm anxious yes, but excited much more.”
Mowgli is to join Icelandic coffee house TAKK, Five Guys and Loungers at Bruntwood’s new campus development, University Green, on Oxford Road (next to Blackwell's) - due to complete this summer.
More brands are yet to be announced for the Green, which will span 40,000 sq ft of retail and leisure space across twelve units, each with double-height glazed frontages.
Bruntwood have also completed phase one on their plans to turn a dark and desolate space beneath the Mancunian Way into Manchester’s answer to the BoxPark in Shoreditch.
Hatch - a semi-permanent (five to ten year) pop-up shopping and dining complex constructed of repurposed shipping containers - launched in December with a 'Scandinavian concept nano brewery and keg bar', Öl, another branch of Takk, and street food traders including: Blue Caribou poutine, Eat & Sweet Jamaican and El Marchador Tacos, with Oh My Glaze joining the line up next week.
Phase two should be ready by late-spring to early-summer this year, with even more traders including a mini-restaurant by chicken supremos Firebird Hope.
