2003
Opened on the Curry Mile
One of the first Middle Eastern restaurants on a then-mostly-South-Asian strip.
Wilmslow Road in the early 2000s was a strip of South Asian curry houses — busy, beloved, but mostly unchanging. Abdullah Albaydar had just arrived from Jordan, looking for somewhere "our kind of food was available." He didn't find it. So he opened it.
Al Jazeera was one of the first Middle Eastern restaurants on the Curry Mile, and the strip has rearranged itself around food like ours ever since. The customers came first — Gulf students at the universities, families displaced by the Arab Spring later — and then the strip caught up. Twenty-two years on, the lights still come on at eleven in the morning and stay on until two at night. Every day. No shortcuts.
The grill is the centre of the kitchen. Faham chicken on the bone, marinated overnight, finished slow over open coals until the skin lacquers. Sea bass, charred whole, lemon-scattered. Lamb chops, kobeda from the tandoor, qabuli pilau cooked the way it's eaten in Kabul — basmati with sweet carrot, raisins, cardamom. The menu is a fusion that reflects what the Curry Mile actually is: Levantine, Persian, Afghan, with the South Asian tikka tradition kept on the board because that's what was here when we arrived, and what people came in asking for.
I serve only what I would buy for myself. — Abdullah Albaydar
Curry Mile rents are not what they were. We pay forty thousand a year, plus VAT, for one shop. The apps take a quarter of every order. The math is tight, the work is constant, the satisfaction is in the regulars who walk in and don't need to look at the menu — they know what they want, and they know it'll be the same as last week.
That's the restaurant. Twenty-two years of charcoal, halal, family-run. If you've eaten here before, you know. If you haven't yet — the door's open until two.