The Northern Quarter is a neighbourhood of stark and sometimes startling contrasts. Take the tableau that presents itself on Little Lever Street as we leave the site of this week's review:

In the foreground, an influencer is staging a full-scale fashion shoot: lights, camera and two holdalls of outfit changes on the floor. She's oblivious to the scene behind her, where paramedics are tending to what appears to be a drugs-related casualty.

I'm not sure which part of this vignette is more depressing.

A few streets away, a Hollywood film set has pitched up outside a pawnbroker and a charity shop, and Jared Leto loiters in the doorway of a chippy.

It's an area where homeless people camp on the same streets as bars charging up to £7.50 a pint, where sex shops brush up against boutique florists and bottle shops, and where the push-and-pull of old and new plays out in waves of demolition and development.

The Northern Quarter has changed beyond all recognition in the last few decades, but in a few places time seems to have stood still - nowhere more so than its backstreet curry caffs.

Rice and three is an institution about as Manc as the time Bez started keeping bees on The Printworks rooftop. Its origins are hotly contested. The family who owned This and That in the 80s claim it as their creation; whoever we have to thank, the mix-and-match meal has been a staple of cafes in the area for decades. 

Hidden away down the bin-lined, graffiti-scrawled alley of Back Piccadilly, Cafe Marhaba is up there with the best of them. Established in 1992, its shabby frontage still displays an 061 landline number above faded pictures of kebabs and curries.

Cafe Marhaba

Inside it's a no-frills affair too. Seating is a galley of five tables laid with plastic water jugs and glass tumblers, next to a spotlessly clean open kitchen counter. A menu on the wall lists 25 curries of Pakistani/North Indian origin, about half of which can be ordered as a rice and three combo for £6.

A lamb karahi is rich and robust, with a forceful thwack of chilli in the thick tomato-based sauce that clings around the generous hunks of meat.

Lamb karahi, chana, spinach and potato

A subtly-spiced chickpea curry offers a more mellow warmth, the pulses stewed until they collapse into the mound of fluffy pilau beneath them. A deep, dark spinach and potato dish wilted down from enough leaves to see Popeye through an Ironman race completes this triumvirate.

A second plate is piled with fish karahi, mushroom bhuna and daal mash. The fish fillet would not cope well under interrogation. It takes a mere prod with a fork before the whole thing falls apart, melting into light and delicate flakes of meat swimming in a gently spicy and gingery sauce.

Fish karahi, mushroom bhuna and daal mash

The bulky mushrooms have made a poor show of soaking up any of the bhuna's richness - a finer dice would fix that though. Finishing off this plate is a hefty portion of plump split peas bound together in a dense, sunny sauce with a hint of nose-tingling chilli.

The curries here are homely, hearty and exceptionally good value (prices start from £4.75 if you're ordering individual dishes) - but it's the breads, hand-made and baked to order in a tandoor oven behind the counter, that really set Cafe Marhaba apart.

Naan baked to order in the tandoor at Cafe Marhaba

Naans are stretched and slapped onto the scorching clay oven wall until they bubble and blister. The result is so soft and pillowy I want to lay my head on it and take a nap. It makes a better bed for a kebab, cushioning tender chunks of chicken tikka and shish and a mound of fresh salad.

Chicken tikka and shish kebab

The bill for three of us, with a couple of cans of pop from the fridge, comes to £21.70. In a rapidly-evolving area where value is a vanishing rarity, Cafe Marhaba is a reassuring constant. The Northern Quarter would be a poorer place without it.

  • Cafe Marhaba, 6 Back Piccadilly, Manchester, M1 1HP