No shortcuts - everything is peeled, chopped, diced and grated from scratch for that home cooked curry taste
EastZeast, the independently-owned, contemporary Indian restaurant group has just celebrated its 12th birthday. From opening their first restaurant on Princess Street in 2005, the group now incorporates six restaurants including the huge 300-cover restaurant in Riverside on the Manchester/Salford border.
Despite producing thousands of meals every week, they still retain the basic principles of cooking and serving traditional desi Kashmiri curries like the ones you’ll find in Indian homes, or simple and delicious street food snacks like the ones you’ll find at stalls lining the streets of Bombay.
When we sat down to have a chat with eastZeast’s owner Kabir Rayman (here), he told us that they also have their own production kitchen and butchery in Crumpsall where they prepare their own meat to their own high standards, rather than putting their trust in a middle man. There they also make thousands of samosas, spice blends and marinades for the dishes served in the restaurant.
Confidential couldn’t resist a visit, so a few of us trooped down one afternoon to get a glimpse of where some of the magic happens. We parked round the back of a shuttered blink-and-you’ll-miss-it kitchen and storage unit to be met by one of the eastZeast team. Inside are neatly lined boxes of fresh vegetables and herbs along with rows stocked with enormous bags of whole spices and pulses.
We were introduced to eastZeast’s butchery team who showed us the spick and span walk in fridge in which hang whole, grass-fed Halal lambs which had been sourced from farms in Lancashire and Cheshire, along with boxes of neatly ordered chicken wings, chopped and minced lamb ready to be delivered to the restaurants.
Butchers were methodically working away, dicing chicken breasts (from chickens sourced in Cumbria) into cubes; boning joints of lamb and dividing them into different boxes for different curries. When we asked what each was, we expected the answer to be ‘shanks, neck fillets, chops and for mincing’ but instead, the butcher named the curries they were destined to be part of, “this is nehari, this one’s for keema and this is sookha bunah” and so on.
Next, we were shown the prep kitchens to witness the team of chefs preparing curry blends from scratch. One was working his way through chopping up a box of fresh green chillies – we were praying he didn’t need to rub his eyes, but he looked too much of an expert to fall for that one. Someone else was peeling and slicing a giant pile of onions and chopping fresh tomatoes.
In the centre of the kitchen were four enormous gas burning stoves on top which sat the biggest bath-sized pans we’d ever seen. We watched, trying to take notes as chefs added cubed lamb, almost industrial amounts of freshly minced garlic, ginger and chillies, more oil and a blend of ground spices. Once cooked for a couple of hours until the sauce has fully released its aromatic flavours and the lamb has become tender, the curries are placed in a blast chiller before being vac packed into bags to be couriered over to the eastZeast restaurant kitchens to be finished off before service. Each curry is different; they do not make one generic curry base in which to add ingredients and various batches of particular curries are made from scratch every single day.
Of course, the chefs wouldn’t let us leave without making sure we’d had something to eat first (lucky us) so in front of our eyes and under ten minutes they prepared an utterly delicious home-style chicken curry stir-fried with garlic, green chilli, garlic, onions, fresh tomato and coriander.
Before we left, they let us in on another little secret and led us through to the back of the unit (which actually turned out to the front.) Soon, this room will be a brand new delicatessen open to the general public. The chefs explained that the eastZeast deli will sell freshly baked breads, homemade salads handy for lunches or barbecues, as well as snacks of all types and lots of cakes. The new delicatessen should be ready to open over the summer and isn’t too far away from the Manchester Arena end of town. Confidential will be back soon to give a full report.
Find out more about eastZeast on their website.
