Our favourite Indian restaurants in the North-West

Passionate Keralan-Indian-Brit fusion. A great place to eat can make the back end of nowhere worth visiting – and (largely) Keralan restaurant Amma’s Canteen, on the outskirts of Chorlton, feels like a destination.

Modern Indian restaurants come with their own USPs such as street food, home cooking and regionally-specific cuisine. Asha’s, near the library end of Peter Street, has decided to go high-end with proper posh Rogan Josh nosh.

Aunty Ji’s is fast becoming one of Levenshulme’s favourite cafes thanks to its friendly, all-comers vibe and a menu that marries Indian street food with modern brunch style eats.

Bombay Brew brings together beer and Indian street food. Bundobust may be the kings of this combo but unlike its rival, Bombay Brew doesn’t just stick to vegetarian food with its IPAs. Instead, you’ll find everything from lamb lollypops to octopus masala.

Bundobust is a huge beer hall serving craft ales in the heart of Manchester’s Piccadilly Gardens. It also happened to win Restaurant of the Year at the 2017 Manchester Food and Drink Festival awards, thanks to its stellar menu of Indian small plates.

GupShup serves food from across India in a setting of laid-back luxury; this is Hale, after all. The menu is relatively small for an Indian restaurant, but it focuses on serving up a taste of the whole country, from the Himalayan Foothills to the Great Trunk Road, and getting the flavours spot on. Quality not quantity. In amongst mentions of Rajasthan and Lucknow, you’ll find Delchester noted as the origin of an excellent tikka pie. It’s a great cross-cultural dish and guaranteed to raise a smile.

This slick 2020 addition to the Corn Exchange is determined to do something different to other contemporary Indian restaurants. And it largely succeeds, bringing flair and originality to the well-worn territory of street food and small plates.

Indian Tiffin Room Cheadle was one of the first local places to step away from the typical menu of the average flock wallpapered curry house and focus instead on Indian street food.

Lily’s Indian Vegetarian Cuisine is an unassuming restaurant in Ashton-under-Lyne that happens to serve some of the best South Indian food in the UK.

The Little Yeti is one of the newest dining spots on Barlow Moor Rd, but from the well-oiled team behind Didsbury veterans Gurkha Grill. It’s an establishment of the ‘limited menu but executed very well’ variety, which is more common in Asia than over here, where ‘all things to all people’ is perhaps too often attempted.

Mughli is the contemporary, social media embracing, second generation Curry Mile restaurant that paved the way for the likes of Indian Tiffin Room, Amma’s Canteen and Dishoom.

Prashad is a Gordon Ramsey-rated thrill for anyone craving Gujarati vegetarian food. Since starring on Ramsey’s Best Restaurant show, the team have made the most of the exposure. Expansion, relocation and even a Sunday Times top 40 rated cookbook followed.

Scene was one of the first of the new wave of Indian restaurants that left the flock wallpaper and the dodgy neon behind to offer street food and authentic cooking. It’s still got it. Inside, it’s cool and contemporary but still casual, outside there’s a large terrace. The cocktail menu has been thought about carefully and the menu is full of the sort of real Indian food we’ve come to expect from our curry houses.

Tharavadu, an unassuming Keralan restaurant, has charmed everyone from celebrities (Andrew Lincoln, Sanju Samson) to the inspectors of the Michelin, Hardens and Good Food Guides.

Zouk specialises in ‘apna’ – home-style cooking shot through with colour and heat from the spices and herbs. In recent years it has incorporated elements of global street food to its menu (prawn and pomegranate tacos, and butter chicken bao for example) but the main focus is still the authentic Indian and Pakistani cooking that made Zouk a success.