The Mexican Pilgrim, Leeds

The street food revolution has reached critical mass.

What's that you're thinking? Here comes another Trinity Kitchen puff piece. Nope. The street food revolution has reached critical mass and cannot be stopped because there is now a Mexican street food van with a permanent pitch on Cross Green Industrial Estate. CROSS GREEN INDUSTRIAL ESTATE.

Those of you who have never ventured into the dark underbelly of Leeds may not have heard of this place, but I promise it really is in Leeds. It's actually quite close to the city centre, and is where you'll find all manner of old school industries, essential utilities and such-like. Proper industry, cast products and tarmac and sewage and stuff.

It's also where I've had an office base on and off for over a decade, and where the most exciting ever development food-wise was the arrival of the Wilson's pie van a couple of years back. It's the kind of place where mucky fat sandwich vans are the order of the day, and anything else, other than the pies, is pretty unlikely.

So the people who've suddenly appeared on the scene selling Mexican tortas, are either mad or very clever, or perhaps a bit of both. Whatever they are it's a bold move, not only are they selling Mexican food, but that Mexican food does not include burritos. No burritos! Can you imagine? I thought they were compulsory.

I'm not averse to a burrito once in a while, but I'm baffled by their ubiquity. Their boundless popularity seems out of step with the reality, which in many cases amounts to a great big damp stodgy wrap the size of your head stuffed mostly with Uncle Ben's savoury rice. And why do I have to pay extra for a smear of mashed avocado you bastards?

Anyhow, these boys are selling Mexican tortas, which are a sandwich on a bolillo (oval shaped) roll, filled with all of the same stuff as a burrito, except for all of that rice. This actually works pretty well, a more open textured bread does a better job of soaking up the juices than the flat stuff, and it's a much more manageable proposition without the surfeit of stodge.

Spicy beef with the works (refried beans, sour cream, cheese, lettuce, jalapenos, FREE guacamole) really went down a treat. The whole sort of melded into that tangy, spicy, messy mix you get with this sort of thing. Not subtle but very satisfying, although I think a crustier roll would be an improvement.

£3.50 for the beef torta. They also do a chicken version, and that's it except for the sensible addition of a standard breakfast butty menu served until 11. Mad or clever, I salute the Mexican Pilgrim. If you're ever in the vicinity of Cross Green pay them a visit.


7/10

Lay-by on Cross Green Approach
Cross Green Industrial Estate
Leeds
LS9

Twitter: @mexicanpilgrim

p.s. I will be paying a visit to Trinity Kitchen soon enough, after which I'll almost certainly be writing my own puff piece. The monthly rotation plans for the street food vans are a genuinely exciting new departure for a shopping centre, so well done to the corporate types for giving it a go. And the first round of vendors look ace.

Pinche Pinche, Chapel Allerton, Leeds

Pinche Pinche is probably your best bet for Mexican food in Leeds. I didn't love everything we ate but the good stuff was really very good, and it was all a significant cut above your average Tex-Mex chain fodder. If it was one of my local restaurants I could definitely see myself stopping in from time to time for a few tacos and a beer.

We started with an impressive mountain of guacamole and some pork nachos. Both of these went down a treat, the fresh, bright guacamole being particularly fine, a world away from the luminous processed green paste versions. I want to describe it as zingy, but I hate that word.

Of the good stuff the meaty things were the highlight. The aforementioned nachos were piled with shards of tasty pork (tasty - another rubbish word. Sorry.) and I could have eaten a dozen of the excellent lamb or pork tacos.

The lamb was slow braised to moist shreds with a gentle, fruity chilli heat, the pork the opposite; small pieces in a garlicky adobo marinade, quickly flash-fried until just done. The result was beautifully tender meat, not easy to do with lean cuts of pork.

I was less enamoured with the flautas from the specials board. I can't remember exactly but I'm sure they were supposed to involve pork scratchings, but just seemed like slightly greasy deep-fried guacamole filled tubes. Others liked them though so what do I know.

Getting the negatives out of the way all at once the fish tacos were also a bit dull. Tasteless fish on a bland and not at all spicy as advertised coleslaw.

Finishing off on a positive note a portion of fries were properly fried, and the refried beans were great. All comforting and savoury and mushy in a very satisfying way.

Service was friendly. Very friendly. Exceedingly happy verging on scary. I shan't complain though, that's just my British cynicism at play, which makes me automatically consider American style service to be false, deranged or both. The fact is everyone was lovely, and they brought us the food we ordered in a reasonable amount of time, and cleared up after us. What more do you want?

We paid £20 each for a good spread of food and a couple of drinks apiece. A good quality local restaurant that's well worth a visit. You probably need to book at weekends as it's small and clearly very popular.

7/10

116a Harrogate Road
Chapel Allerton
Leeds
LS7 4NY

http://pinchepinche.com/

Cochinita Pibil

Last week I finally got round to cooking some proper Mexican food, something I'd planning for ages. Cochinita pibil was a great place to start, because it's ridiculously easy to make and really rather delicious.

It's a dish of pork, slow roasted in a citrus and achiote marinade until the meat falls apart under the slightest pressure of a fork. The acidity of the marinade slices through the fatty meat like a dream, and the achiote lends gentle, earthy warmth.

In case you were wondering achiote is the Mexican word for annatto which gives the marinade its red colour. You can buy achiote paste, made from annatto seeds with garlic, cumin, allspice and oregano, online from the excellent Cool Chile Co. I also bought corn tortillas, chipotle chillies and Mexican hot chocolate from them, all of which are top quality stuff.

By rights this should be made with a whole suckling pig or at the least a bone in pork shoulder. I went for the quicker and cheaper trial version using a pack of pork shoulder steaks.

You can serve the finished product with rice, beans and salad, or use it, like we did, as a taco meat. I made chipotle salsa (just tomatoes, onion and chipotles), and with bowls of coriander, sour cream, guacamole and lime wedges the self assembly line was ready to go. If I did this again I'd probably ditch the sour cream and guac (unless it was home made) and opt for a crumbly, lactic cheese like Feta or maybe Wensleydale instead. You'll also need cold beer, I drank Meantime London pale ale with this which went down a treat.

There are loads of cochinita pibil recipes online, but it's so simple you don't really need to follow one properly. Here's what I did.

What you'll need

800g pork shoulder steaks
2 large oranges
1 lime
50g achiote paste
1/2 teaspoon salt

What to do

Set the oven to 150 degrees centigrade. Put the pork in a casserole with a tight fitting lid (if you haven't got a lid then covering it with foil will do). Juice the oranges and lime then pour the juice over the pork and add the achiote paste and salt. Give everything a good stir then put the lid on or cover with foil. Bake in the oven for three hours (check it after two and a half).

The pork is done when you can easily shred the meat with a fork. To serve shred the meat and pour over the juices from the pot. When you've done you should end up with a big bowlful of loveliness like the one above.

Taco Mazama, Glasgow

I usually eat splendidly when I visit Scotland's number one city (get over it Edinburgh). Take a look through my other posts labelled Glasgow and you'll see what I mean.

Last week I didn't. I'm not sure why I'm bothering to write about this really, another boring burrito is hardly exciting news. Probably because I like to whinge.

Here's that boring burrito, or rice sandwich as I'm renaming it. No-one really wants a rice sandwich do they? Especially when the rice is overcooked verging on mushy.

For balance I should point out that there was some beef and other stuff in there too, which was quite nice when you chanced on it. But why it cost an extra quid for the barbacoa shredded beef I'm not entirely sure. Update: I've just wikipedia-ed it and apparently proper barbacoa meat is cooked in a hole in the ground covered by maguey leaves (or if you spell it differently, it's a shit Jamie Oliver restaurant in London). That explains it then.

Not nasty or inedible or anything, just six quid's worth of boring boring boring.

4/10

261 Byres Road
Glasgow

http://www.tacomazama.co.uk

Lagos Spike, Manchester

Hidden down a dingy back alley off Chapel Street Manchester's worst kept secret has recently opened, the exuberant hovel of iniquity that is Lagos Spike.

Shivering from the autumn chill, I'm welcomed in from the street by Jeb Jepson, the elegantly coiffured front of house guy, one of three people running the show here, alongside business partners Tarquin Micklethwaite and Rose Rose-Gidley.

Jeb shows me to the bar, a solid, muscular presence in the room, brightly illuminated in intermittent circles by enormous filament bulbs hanging overhead. It's constructed, he tells me, entirely from pig iron reclaimed from spinning looms. It's a nod to the area's industrial past and in keeping with the ethos of the place that he proceeds to expound on.

Not before the drinks duly arrive though. I start with the excellent house white, a Pinot Grigio from the concise, no choice list where it's described in amusingly forthright manner as 'Fucking Wine'. It arrives in a distressed tumbler, a continuation of the post-industrial theme.

'There's a burgeoning movement here in the Western Quarter', Jeb tells me, 'the area has come on in  leaps and bounds since the renaming last year. Past associations with decline have been superseded by a truly vibrant urban renaissance. We really wanted to reflect that rebirth, but to keep things grounded in the history of the place we wanted a warts and all establishment, somewhere the local creatives can get down and dirty with the local locals, kick back and enjoy great food and booze without the formality. It's dining without the frippery, the reservations and starched table linen stripped out and pared down so we can focus on what's really important to our guests'.

It's clearly working, as the hour long queue outside in the drizzle attests, the democratisation of dining drawing in the crowds from across the city. Once inside, the place has a joyous buzz, twenty-somethings flitting about in the shadows, perching on Supermalt crates and making merry on recovered foam mattresses.

So what about the food, that's why I'm really here of course. 'We're bringing something new to the scene', Jeb proceeds, 'dishes the likes of which have never been seen in this town before. Eats that will blow your mind. The emphasis is on local produce, cooked with ingenuity. African food is so hot right now, and we really feel the polygamic marriage between the originality of Nigerian cuisine, the technique and classic dishes of Mexican street food and the produce of Lancashire has yet to be fully exploited, so that's what we're aiming to do'.

A selection of dishes from this Afro-Mex fusion tapas menu soon arrive, and boy are they good. The highlight for me is the bury plack pudding taco with hot shito, a dish whose fame has spread so rapidly it's already the stuff of legend in foodie circles. The artisan cornmeal tortillas act as the perfect vessel for the dense, porky goodness of the black pudding morsels within, the hot shito adding a brow-mopping hit of pure chilli heat. Totally dirty and utterly delicious.

Second prize for next best dish of the night went to the peanut butter burrito slider, a splendidly sloppy confection of rare breed (from Longhorn cattle farmed in nearby Monton apparently) rare beef chilli doused in extra spicy Ghanaian peanut sauce and held together in a slightly sweet brioche bun. Genius. Salivating genius.

Also commendable were the chipotle fufu fries, strips of deep-fried mashed yam doused in a smoky Mexican relish. By this time I was also gasping for more booze, and refreshment in general. Although the wine list is brief beer features more extensively. They have a huge range of imported craft beers all served with care in elegant stemware. I enjoyed an absolute belter of a triple-hopped imperial mild from Guam, sadly the name of the brewery escapes me.

Desserts are a more straightforward affair than the savoury dishes, a short list is split into very small plates, small plates, and less small plates to share. Being pretty much full up on dirty meaty filth I ordered the quarter of an Eccles cake from the very small plates section and was presented with a quarter of an Eccles cake on a wooden board. Simple, wonderful food with no need for prissy decoration.

Thereon the night progressed into a slightly drunken haze of meaty treats, strong booze and beats. After beers we moved onto the extensive cocktail list, the standout mix for me being the Aperol vimto spritz.

It's for that reason my photos are so terrible (apologies), that and the fact that there are no lights anywhere other than at the bar. 'It suits the vibe', Jeb explains, 'which if we're getting things right should be one part Dickensian workhouse to two parts West African stout den to one part illicit bookmakers in Gorton'.

Lagos Spike is undoubtedly one of the finest places to eat and drink in the north. The drinks are strong and applied liberally, the innovative fusion-filth food will tempt any budding gastronaut and the atmosphere rocks. As recently as five years ago this place just couldn't have existed in these parts, maybe in London's east end, but not in the north. See how far we've come.

9/10


off Chapel Street
The Western Quarter
Manchester
M3 5FF

No website, no reservations, no bullshit.

I was invited to review Lagos Spike.

Northern Food on tour: Festival food at Latitude

Last year I talked about how much festival food has improved since the dark days of the tinned burger. You'd think with the ongoing obsession with street food that this steady improvement would continue, what with all the dedicated folk selling interesting food from vans and stalls around the country. So how did I get on at Latitude?

Not bad, but could do better I reckon. Maybe I chose unwisely but I think (the much smaller) Standon Calling just edged it. From best to worst, here's what to look out for and what to avoid should you be braving the mud before the summer is out.

Disclaimer: significant consumption of alcohol may have rendered everything in this post misguided, incorrect or at least completely meaningless.

Lamb Kofta, from Kebabylon (£6.50-ish)

I know it doesn't look great, but when did a badly packed kebab ever look great? The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and this passed the test. A generously proportioned succulent kofta, interesting salad, bread that wasn't stale and a generous splodge of hummous. Which wasn't really hummous at all, more mashed up chickpeas. No matter, yoghurt sauce, hot sauce, job done.

Malay style lamb and potato curry on noodles, generic Thai and Chinese food stall (£7)

I doubt this was the best quality food I ate all weekend, but it bloody well hit the spot. Probably because there was about 2000 calories in it. A massive meaty carb load backed up with considerable hits of sugar, salt, spice and grease. All things nice effectively.

The lamb was genuinely very tender and quite delicious though, I'm sure of that. A little bit rendang-esque.

Large chilli beef burrito, Flaming Cactus (£7.50)

All aboard the burrito bus. You can't miss it, it's big and silver. I'm thinking a surfeit of carbohydrate may have had something to do with my fondness for this one too. Having said that it wasn't a tedious chore like eating these things often is, the salsa had a zip to it and it wasn't overloaded with rice at the expense of more interesting fillings. Rightly so too at £7.50 a pop.

Margherita pizza, wood-fired pizza place (£6)

This was just a bit too boring. Good texture and nice char to the crust but little flavour in either the mozzarella or the tomato sauce. Little flavour in the chilli oil I administered liberally to liven it up either. Or the basil leaves for that matter.

Footlong dog, Footlong Hot Dog stall (£4)

A bouncy, dense meaty sausage that didn't taste cheap was let down by very stale bread. Shame. Why the hell I put mayo on it I'm not really sure. Most likely a case of 'sauce is free therefore make the best use of it possible'.

Chicken and seafood paella, a Spanish place (£6.50)

The paella of shame. Actually don't call it a paella, it doesn't deserve it. At last year's festival I got real paella, made with meat on the bone and paella rice. This one didn't involve either of those things. Think overcooked savoury rice with dried up bits of chicken breast and added frozen mixed seafood bits. Crap. Sadly I can't remember the name of the stall selling it.

El Mexicana, Meadowhall

I've been meaning to visit Sheffield for ages. I always think it's the most enigmatic of the great Northern cities. Always going about its business slightly under the radar without feeling the need to shout about how wonderful it is to the world. Yes Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds I am looking at you.

There could be two reasons for this. Either Sheffield is a bit rubbish or it just doesn't care what others think. I have a sneaking suspicion it's the latter, and intend to go find out.

Unfortunately I'm not going to find Sheffield enlightenment at Meadowhall, so that will have to wait for another day. As a general hater of large shopping centres, you might imagine I don't much like Meadowhall. You'd be right, it's awful. Particularly awful when I was there last week. It was half-term and the place was rammed to the rafters, the entire population of South Yorkshire seemingly having decamped there to noisily eat shit food in a soulless echoing void.

Still, I needed something to eat and El Mexicana didn't have a queue and wasn't a fast food mega-chain so I thought I'd give it a try. As luck would have it it was pretty good.

 Burritos - not very photogenic

A pork pibil burrito was generously stuffed with tangy, tender slow cooked pork. The ratio of meat to rice and beans was just right and it didn't feel overly heavy like burritos sometimes do. The chipotle salsa could have done with a bit more kick though.

£4.49 for the burrito, so not cheap but about the norm for these sort of places. Guacamole was 50p extra, what a surprise! Certainly one of the better meals you're likely to eat in the Meadowhall fast food court. Hopefully I'll be back to do Sheffield properly soon.

7/10

El Mexicana
Meadowhall
Sheffield

http://www.meadowhall.co.uk/website/eat.aspx

London and South-East round-up: the good

Home at last. I'm just back from a rather silly week long jaunt around the country for both work and play. I've stayed at a Premier Inn, a Holiday Inn, two Travelodges and one friend's house, with no more than a couple of nights in one place. I'm not half glad to be home.

It's been an interesting week food-wise though, I've experienced much of what's good about eating on the cheap in Britain; the enthusiastic adoption of foreign cuisines and the rapidly developing street food scene being the primary examples.

On the other hand I've also experienced much of what's bad; the distinctly average offering in most pubs and the proliferation of crappy chains interested only in the bottom line being cases in point.

Other than Silk Road, which got a post all to itself, here are the things that were good, and if I can be bothered I might write about those that were bad too:


Franco Manca, Westfield Stratford City

There's much to dislike about the new Westfield mega-mall adjacent to the Olympic site at Stratford, if, like me, you're really not that enthused by shopping. Or by corporate-style marketing nonsense, which seemed to be in overdrive in an area of the centre named the 'Great Eastern Market', and described as a 'modern take on a traditional market'. If that's the case then a 'modern take' on a 'traditional market' means not actually like a market at all, more like an area of a shopping centre where the units are small and everything is hideously overpriced. Great.

Now I've got that rant out of my system I'll have to give credit where it's due. There is much to like about Westfield Stratford City from an eating perspective. All of the usual suspects are there, but a significant proportion of the extensive food offer is given over to small London based businesses. Businesses like Franco Manca who have opened their third outlet here.

Franco Manca are widely acknowledged to make some of the finest pizza in London. I've eaten at both of the other branches, in Brixton and Chiswick, and agree that they're excellent, although I didn't think Chiswick was quite up to the standard of the original in Brixton market.

When I spotted them in Westfield I was worried that they might have sold out, expanding the empire at the expense of the quality. I needn't have worried, the wood burning ovens were present and correct and the prices no higher than in Brixton.

Just tomato, mozzarella and basil, simple but absolutely delicious. They use a sourdough for the base which is then blasted in those fiercely hot ovens producing a crust that's beautifully bubbled and charred on the outside but remains soft, light and slightly chewy within. Good quality cheese and tomato in just the right proportions offset the dough nicely.

The ease with which a whole one of these can be gobbled up is amazing. Just compare and contrast with the heavy going stodgefests that so many pizzas become. An absolute bargain at £5.90, especially when you consider that the vastly inferior equivalent at Pizza Express costs £7.50.

9/10

Unit 2003
The Balcony
Westfield Stratford City
London
E20 1ES

http://www.francomanca.co.uk/




Buen Provecho, eat.st at King's Cross, London

I'm all for the street food revolution. Mobile catering has been improving at festivals and the like for a good few years now, and it finally seems that bringing the same idea (that you can serve good food from a van) to the city streets has caught on in a big way. London's new eat.st is at the forefront, with a rotating list of traders pitched up along a new pedestrian precinct round the back of King's Cross station.

Mexican stall Buen Provecho tickled my fancy last Friday, mainly because I'd heard great things about their tacos. Which as luck would have it were unavailable because the tortillas were late arriving. No matter as the lunch box meal is any two of the same taco fillings served on rice, with salsa, guacamole and tortilla chips.

A point of note to virtually every one of those burrito places that have popped up in recent years. It wouldn't kill you to include guacamole in the price. 50p extra or more for a smear of mashed avocado is a rip-off. Buen Provecho showed how it should be done by making good guacamole and including it in the price. Self service salsas and tortilla chips, and the fact the guy serving was friendly and looked like a pirate also made me smile.

Star of the show was Cochinita pibil, slow roasted pork marinated in orange juice and spices (I'm not quite sure what). The meat was reduced to lovely moist shreds that oozed juices with an intense tangy flavour. If I ever get round to going here again I'll just have this stuff. The salsas were also pretty good, one of raw finely diced veg and coriander, the other a hotter, smokier affair probably involving some sort of roasted chillies. A dollop of refried beans were also successful, lending creaminess to the rice.

The only duff note was the other meat dish, chicken and chorizo in a sauce that was a bit nondescript. It tasted ok but was dull in comparison with the outstanding pork.

A substantial meal box costs £6, service is friendly, you can help yourself to salsa and there's plenty of kerb to sit on.

8/10

King's Boulevard
London
N1C

http://eat.st/kings-cross/




Banh Mi Bay, Holborn, London

Imagine a sandwich that's rich and meaty but fresh and tangy. A sandwich that marries three types of pork with mayo and pickles. A sandwich that's spicy and fragrant. A sandwich that's crusty and crunchy but smooth and moist. This is the Banh Mi, Vietnam's notable contribution to the pantheon of great sandwiches.

I fell in love with the Banh Mi when I lived in Woolwich. Someone opened up a Vietnamese coffee shop just off the high street, so they were pretty much the only exciting foodstuff I could eat without hopping on a train (Woolwich is not London's finest foodie suburb, there are some potentially good Ghanaian places, but they always had strange blacked out windows and I never plucked up the courage to venture inside). I would muck around in the gym for half an hour or so, then reward myself with bread, and chilli, and three types of pork.

I digress, the special Banh Mi at Banh Mi Bay was pretty damn good. All the key elements were there: a light rice flour baguette, roast pork, pork roll, pork liver paté, slightly pickled carrot and mooli, mayo, cucumber, coriander, chilli. I'd have liked the paté to have been more liver-y, there are plenty of other strong flavours present to stand up to it, but apart from that I couldn't fault it.

£3.85 for the special Banh Mi, perfectly reasonable as it's an impressively proportioned sandwich. It contains three varieties of pork too, did I mention that already?

8/10

4-6 Theobalds Road
Holborn
WC1X 8PN

http://www.banhmibay.co.uk/

An Arndale Odyssey (or Mexican in Manchester)

Manchester's Arndale Centre, giant among Arndale Centres, now boasts two entirely distinct places to eat Mexican fast food. One of them has been around for a while, and the other is a brand new shiny American import, only the third to open on these shores. I thought I'd visit both for lunch on the same day, in spirit of serious culinary investigation.

Taco Bell, Arndale Food Court

The American import is Taco Bell, brought to you by those lovely people at Yum! Brands (their exclamation mark!), more commonly known in the UK as owners of KFC and Pizza Hut. With a track record like that you'd be expecting great things from Taco Bell, right?

I should mention that I've been to Taco Bell before, in America, over eleven years ago. I'm a sucker for these places. Chain fast food restaurants always lure me in out of curiosity. The few weeks I spent travelling around the US that summer, high on Mountain Dew, were a happy daze of Wendy's, Taco Bell and Long John Silver's. They always promised so much, but inevitably ended in crashing disappointment. I actually remember Taco Bell as being particularly bad, so of course when I learned they had arrived in Manchester I was there like a shot.

As you alight at the top of the escalator you can't miss Taco Bell. It's very purple. An army of youths in purple polo shirts and purple baseball caps toil away under a huge backlit purple sign. Just head for the purple. It's the usual fast food set up, order individual items or make them into a meal with chips and fizzy pop. As I was having two lunches I passed up on the meal and just ordered two tacos.

They're cooking every order fresh at Taco Bell, which I suppose is to be praised, but it does mean your 'fast food' may not be particularly 'fast'. It some became apparent that most of the purple clad worker bees weren't really toiling away at all, rather stood around in the back staring at unseen screens with bemused expressions. After what seemed like an eternity my order eventually appeared. The anticipation was killing me.

Taco number one. A Mexican chicken crunchy taco supreme (£1.29). The chicken was almost a pleasant surprise. Almost, but not quite. On the plus side, it was moist and tender. On the minus side the sauce seemed to be flavoured primarily with salt, msg and something else chemically. The lettuce, cheese, sour cream and tomatoes just sort of passed by in a refreshing nothingness. To sum up; inoffensive.

Taco number two. A beef soft taco supreme (£1.19). The same deal, just with beef and a soft taco. This was worse. The beef really is quite unpleasant. You can see it smeared out the end on the photo there. It's completely ground to a mush, so has absolutely no texture to lend it resemblance to meat, and tastes extremely low grade. Have they invented chilli con carne dog food yet? If they have this is probably what it tastes like. To sum up; bad.

A not entirely resounding success, but I'll probably go back at least once more. There are plenty of other things on the menu to investigate, and I'm a glutton for punishment (I once ate a McChicken Korma Nan and I can't get enough KFC hot wings). Thank you Yum! Brands, thank you so much. As an aside Yum! describe themselves as 'the defining global company that feeds the world'. Which is scary.

3/10

Kiosk 5 The Food Court
Arndale Centre
Manchester
M4 3QA

www.tacobelluk.co.uk


Pancho's Burritos, Arndale Market food court

And so to the other food court in the Arndale Centre, at the opposite end in the little market area. This is where you'll find the small, local businesses as opposed to the 'defining global company's that feed the world' up the other end.

I've been to Pancho's before, and was happy to see that they've now expanded into a second stall just round the corner from the first. They don't sell tacos individually, only as three for £4.60 (70p-£1 more than three at Taco Bell). Five tacos is too many for lunch, but it had to be done.

Or at least it would have been done if they'd had any of the little taco tortillas. They didn't, so I had to order a burrito instead (£4 plus 50p extra for nopales). The fillings are exactly the same as I'd have had on the tacos, so it's still a fair comparison.

This was stuffed with rice, stewed pork, refried beans, sour cream, hot sauce and nopales. I've never had nopales before, they're slices cut from the leaves of a type of cactus. I think they were slightly pickled, as they added a juicy, tangy, refreshing note to the burrito which contrasted wonderfully with the creamy beans and spicy pork. 

The pork was moist, tender and tasty with a slow burning, fruity heat. To sum up: spicy, satisfying, more-ish.

7/10

Arndale Market
Market Street
Manchester
M4 3AQ

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Panchos-Burritos-Manchester/107688639271714

The Verdict

With the exceptions of menu availability and extreme purpleness Pancho's wins hand down. Much better food and better service for a price that's only slightly higher. Taco Bell doesn't claim to be authentic (it's 'Mexican-style' and 'Mexican-inspired'), whereas Pancho's does. I know nothing about Mexican food, but if both are telling the truth authenticity wins hands down this time.

Go to Pancho's Burritos and don't go to Taco Bell.

Barburrito, The Trafford Centre

I don't really like shopping, it's not my cup of tea. My least favourite type of shopping is shopping in huge shopping centres. Despite this I find myself in the Trafford Centre from time to time, because it's near my house and sometimes I need stuff. Convenience is King.

Saturday lunchtime was such an occasion. I needed some stuff before heading off for the rest of the weekend. I don't think I've ever been in the Trafford Centre on a Saturday before (I usually pop in in the evening after work) and I don't think I'll be doing so again. The place was absolutely mobbed. Prizes for the busiest stores of the lot go to Hollister and Starbucks. Which says pretty much everything about why I don't like shopping.

Take Hollister first. This place seems to have stormed the high street with a very cunning marketing plan. This consists of doing away with the time honoured way of identifying your shop to the world, i.e. putting a sign up out front with the name of the shop on it, and building a sort of lean-to/shed out front instead, through which one must enter. The lean-to obviously acts as a magnet to the passing public, as there must have been about 40 of them queuing up outside it as I walked by. And what do you get when you are finally allowed to enter through this hallowed portal? Is it a bounteous, fragrant land of milk and honey? No, you get to buy an overpriced hoodie in the dark. Anyone know why it's dark in there? Me neither.

Hoodie in the bag, you can then go and queue for an equally lengthy amount of time at Starbucks. What joys await you there? Some shit coffee and the most tedious playlist in the world. They actually release compilations of the music played in their cafes, in case you want to recreate that Starbucks 'vibe' in the comfort of your own home. I can think of a better plan and it involves an idling car engine and a length of hosepipe.

Sorry, got a little sidetracked there. There was a point to this post. Honest. After queuing at Hollister and Starbucks for two hours I was feeling a bit peckish, so sporting my new hoodie and slurping on a frappachococino I headed for the main foodhall. I've been to Barburrito before and thought it was ok, definitely a notch up from the obvious fast food suspects, and more importantly it wasn't too busy, so I thought I'd give it another try.

I went for the slow cooked pork burrito with chipotle salsa. Rice, beans, salad, cheese and soured cream are all included as standard alongside your choice of meat and salsa. Guacamole is a rather steep 75p extra (I didn't bother).

It was nice enough, but could have been better. Can't fault the portion size, it was a big fat burrito, but contained a little too much filler and not enough killer. Rice was the most generous of the fillings, and who wants a rice sandwich. The pork was nice and moist, and the chipotle salsa was warming and smoky but not hot as advertised. The beans and cheese didn't seem to add much flavour-wise. £4.75 for the burrito and £1.50 for a bottomless soft drink.

A reasonable option, but I won't be rushing back. If you're in town I'd recommend giving Pancho's Burritos in the Arndale Market a try instead. Haven't been for a while but I seem to recall it being a better burrito and better value.


6/10

Barburrito
The Trafford Centre
Manchester
M17 8EH

http://www.barburrito.co.uk/