Scousers don’t have the monopoly on the use of the slang term ‘lah’, it appears. “It’s used all over Asia,” Zosima Fulwell, co-owner of Yes Lah, tells me during lunch at her cafe in Didsbury. “It’s a colloquial term, like a slang term.
“Like, have you got any eggs? Yes, lah. Do you do coffee? Yes, lah. It’s kind of like, ‘yeah, man’. You can use it like that. But yes, a lot of people have come in and said ‘are you a scouse shop?’.”
To confirm, Yes Lah is not a Scouse shop. Its origins perhaps couldn’t be further away, in fact, geographically. Zosima - Zos - is half British, half Filipino and grew up in Saudi Arabia, while her partner in cuisine Yen is from Malaysia.
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The pair met when they were planted next to each other, quite by accident, at the new school food court Hatch on Oxford Road, the collection of shipping containers under the rumbling Mancunian Way. It’s expanded rather significantly now, but at the time it started, they were two of only four food stalls on the site.
Both of them were just starting out - Zos as Mama Z, serving hearty Filipino dishes, and Yen doing her addictive take on Korean-style fried chicken on her stall Woks Cluckin. They were both just dipping their toes into the street food scene, and so naturally became great friends, very quickly, during the hot summer of 2018. “In those three months when we met, it’s crazy how many memories we made together,” says Yen.
Neither had cooked beyond a domestic kitchen before, so this shared baptism of fire and hot frying oil made them cling together. And they’re still together now, with Yes Lah being their first proper café.
It has colourful waxed tablecloths, and despite embracing social media, hosting evening supper clubs and noodle making workshops, and serving dishes you may not have encountered before on the menu, it still manages to feel like an old fashioned caff, but with a few exotic twists.
There’s a chilled cabinet for a counter that’s stuffed with Yen’s glorious, vivid-coloured donuts and homemade chicken sausage rolls wrapped in golden pastry. There are eggs and other groceries to buy, but also all kinds of noodles, coconut vinegar, dried anchovies, Asian snacks and bottles of Zos’s banana ketchup.
There are, as you’d expect from a caff, oozing cheese toasties, but these ones are made with Yen’s own recipe kimchi, which can change with the seasons. When Zos got a glut of apples from her boyfriend’s parents at the end of the season, they went in too.
So it’s both familiar and homely, but kind of exciting too. I had a nasi lemak, as recommended by Zos - perfectly steamed rice served on pandan leaves, a curry made with chicken thigh and accompanied by a spicy sambal chutney, tiny dried anchovies, peanuts, boiled eggs and cucumber. I’d eat it all day long.
Zosima was brought up in Saudi Arabia, where her parents worked, but came to the UK for college, studying contemporary art history. Not cooking then? She laughs: “Completely irrelevant! I thought I’d love to do curating, but it’s very hard to get a job. There’s no funding in the sector.” So she worked in bars, like Tiger Tiger and Twenty Twenty Two in the Northern Quarter, and while working at Soup Kitchen managed to make the shift from behind the bar to behind the stove, and never looked back.
She took some time out to return to the Phillipines to see family and do some exploring, and returned determined and invigorated. A grant from the Prince’s Trust then helped her set up at Hatch.
While restaurant experiences in the Philippines aren’t always good, she says, home cooking is where it’s at. And this type of home cooking - like adobo, the long-stewed national dish with soy, vinegar, and, in a colonial Spanish twist, bay leaves - is a staple feature at their place.
At the small kitchen In the back, Yen, originally from Penang, is doing some baking, trying out a new recipe for sweet buns, with pandan, palm sugar and desiccated coconut. The sweet end of things, the baking of the brightly coloured layer cakes and donuts, is her wheelhouse.
Foremost in her mind when she’s in sweet mode are the recipes her grandmother handwrote, which she still uses. Her grandma is very much her ‘north star’ for cooking. A particular favourite is a retro pineapple upside down cake, complete with glace cherries on top. So while you might come here for a crisp toastie or a punchy rice dish with a fried egg laid on top, you must stay for the cakes too.
“Baking is quite calming for me,” she says. She spent a chunk of her childhood in Ireland, where her father moved the family for his work. Of course, when they moved, her grandma packed their suitcases full of Malaysian ingredients - dried anchovies and shrimp paste - that she knew they wouldn’t be able to source.
They returned to Malaysia, but Yen came back to the UK for University, in Sunderland, where she studied marketing. She is not good at marketing.
“If I was to make a cake, my marketing of it would be ‘come and buy my cake’,” she laughs. So it’s Zos who handles all the social media. Perhaps for the best, not least because Yen’s cooking is significantly better than her marketing.
Both Zos and Yen want this to be more than a cafe, something more akin to an extension of their home as well as their cultures. At their evening supper clubs, they encourage guests to try eating with their hands too, as Yen’s grandma would. Most throw themselves right in, and love it.
“We say that if you’re not comfortable with it, please feel free to use cutlery, but people get totally stuck in with it!” she says, delighted. “We give people gloves if they want, but no one uses them!”
These two working together and blending their cuisines and cultures together feels right. They feel that way too. “It just feels like it was meant to be,” says Yen.
Yes Lah, 102 Barlow Moor Rd, Manchester M20 2PN
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