WE threw our dummy out of the pram back in May 2015 when Ask Developments announced Sainsbury's and Italian guff-merchants, Pizza Bloody Express, as tenants at the heart of Manchester's new £500m First Street Development.
The restaurant's instant popularity made it harder to get into than a damp pair of skinny jeans on Boxing Day
This was supposed to be Manchester's 'new cultural quarter', where artists and thinkers and dreamers would gather in HOME, Manchester's new £25m arts complex, to soak up intelligent, contemporary and internationally significant work and perhaps hang around for a glass or two of Chianti and a handful of Nocellara olives in the spattering of wine bars and bistros.
Nope. Pizza Express. Great.
But then we imagine developers Ask couldn't give a monkeys, they've since offloaded much of First Street to Patrizia Immobilien anyhow.
So imagine our surprise, when walking through First Street to witness the damage inflicted on HOME by a pissed off axe-wielding artist, to see that Indian Tiffin Room, Cheadle's back street Indian gem, has applied for a licence in the most prime First Street unit.
The Tiffin Room is the brainchild of two southern Indian lads and University graduates, Srini Sundaram and Suresh Raje Urs, who've earnt rave reviews for their bona fide Indian street tuck (centred around the Tiffin - a type of Indian lunchtime tupperware) since launching seven miles south of Manchester city centre in mid-2013.
READ GORDO'S REVIEW OF INDIAN TIFFIN ROOM
The problem was, as Confidential food writer Deanna Thomas put it a few months after the launch, the restaurant's instant popularity made it 'harder to get into than a damp pair of skinny jeans on Boxing Day'. The place was simply too small.
So they've taken a punt on a much bigger and considerably more expensive unit in the city centre. Good luck to 'em. Alongside Street on 1st at Innside Hotel and HOME's decent restaurant that 'new cultural quarter' might well be back on track.
Just watch some Sloppy Giuseppe spoil it...
Indian Tiffin Room
ITR site (left) on First Street
