When Rita Linsdell says she comes from ‘a cooking family’, she really means it. Her daughters Olivia and Leya, sons Isaac and Matthew, and her husband Darren, all live in the same house in Mottram and work for the family business.
You may have seen it. It’s called Rita’s Reign on Piccadilly Gardens, and it’s the one that usually has the queue stretching from the food market all the way towards Market Street tram stop.
From Wednesday through to Sunday every week, the queue starts gathering from around 11am, and by lunchtime proper, it’s getting in people’s way as they try to navigate their way through the gardens. Some may even get tangled up in it by accident and end up getting their lunch. This is no bad thing.
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Rita serves up what shouldn’t necessarily be a little seen combination of dishes, but nonetheless, for reasons known only to the cosmos, you don’t often see both Caribbean and African food happening at the same time. So on Rita’s menu, it is a mix of Caribbean curry goat and jerk chicken (a huge box for a great value £7), with rice and peas, but also throwing in jollof rice, in a journey from the West Indies to West Africa - Ghana and Nigeria - and back again.
“When I was growing up, jollof rice was an occasion dish,” she tells me. “For Christmas or parties, at least it was where I grew up in Ashanti. But everyone has their own signature way of doing things.”
Where the two cuisines meet is most likely with the scotch bonnet pepper, seen as much in Caribbean food as it is in Ghanaian. In Ghana, they’re more often called the Kpakpo Shito pepper, and while they can be scorching hot, if used with care there’s nothing that tastes quite like them.
“I grew up cooking, probably from around the age of eight,” she says. “We were just a cooking family. It’s what we did.” She learned the bulk of the recipes she still uses today - particularly the jollof rice, spiced with ginger, garlic, bay, thyme and mixed through with tomatoes and onion - from her mother.
Rita arrived in the UK, and she can recall the date precisely, on August 31, 1985. She was 18, and her mother had married a man from England and moved the family to Manchester. She brushed up her English enrolling at college, and worked at Smithfield Market, getting up at 5am to go and wash pots in the cafe, which served up breakfasts for the hungry market workers.
From there, she worked in an assortment of food vans, first flipping burgers at Old Trafford, and then for Manchester fast food icon Eddie Osman, the man behind Porky Pigs. She learned a lot from him, working for the Porky Pigs stalls and others on Piccadilly Gardens for around 10 years. "I'm like everyone's aunty on the market," she chuckles.
She made her own Ghanaian food for her church group, but it was only when she took on her own stall three years ago that she revealed her talents to the general public. And it’s grown ever since, with her family gradually coming in to help her with the growing demand.
Their eldest daughter Leya has since branched out herself, and while studying for a law degree, also managed to open Piccadilly Bakes, the cake stall opposite her mum’s.
Is it hard working and living together? “Yes!” says Rita, without having to give it a second thought, but also with a smile. “It’s good, but it’s challenging.” But she says that whatever stresses and strains might come out through the day, by the time they’re home, it’s all gone.
Plans for expansion are already steaming ahead. Originally cooking out of their domestic kitchen for the stall, they had an extension built at home as the popularity grew, and put a much bigger catering kitchen in there. They’ve already outgrown that, and are now constructing an industrial kitchen in a container unit, which should be ready for them by Christmas.
And little by little, Rita wants to introduce more Ghanaian dishes onto the menu. Like peanut soup, a stew with chicken and peanuts which is a favourite at home, served with fufu, a stiff and sticky oatmeal type accompaniment to stews and soups, but made with cassava. Let’s hope that when she does, Piccadilly Gardens can cope with the queues.
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