Rusholme’s Curry Mile is 650 metres long, and Sanam has been on it since 1963

Sanam’s founder, Abdul Ghafoor, started on Wilmslow Road in 1963 with jalebis and mithai, and the sweet counter is still the first thing you see through the door. Behind it is a dining room that opens at 10am and serves until midnight, every day. Sanam is the longest-running restaurant on the Curry Mile, which, measured on a map as The Manchester Mill did in August 2025, runs 0.65 km from the south end of Whitworth Park to just before Platt Fields. Nobody has ever called it the Curry Two-Thirds-of-a-Kilometre.

How it started

The people who built it came from Punjab, in Pakistan, in the 1950s and 60s to work in the textile mills, and settled in Rusholme, where housing was cheaper. Hyphen’s 2022 history names the New Taj Mahal, opened in 1959, as the first Indian restaurant on the road, and the name “Curry Mile” stuck in the 1980s. Abdul Akhtar, son of Sanam’s owner, told Hyphen that at its height there were “80-odd South Asian food businesses along here”, and that coaches came from Leicester with 40 or 50 people aboard.

What changed

Hyphen dates the decline to about 2005, with the 2008 crash on top. In 2011 the government tightened Tier 2 work visas, so a chef from outside the EU needed a job paying £28,260 to qualify, and the old curry houses struggled to staff their kitchens. The gaps filled from the Middle East: by August 2025 the Mill found the road “perhaps better known for its shawarma shops” than for Pakistani cooking.

Sanam

Start at the counter and buy jalebis to take away, then sit down for the Pakistani dishes the family has cooked here for six decades; Hyphen’s list from the kitchen includes haleem.

Wilmslow Road, Rusholme · open daily 10am–midnight · walk-in

Mughli Charcoal Pit

At number 30, near the Whitworth Park end, Mughli cooks what it calls “Indian soul food” over a charcoal pit, and won a Deliveroo Restaurant Award in 2024. The chops are the order: at its newer Mughli Canteen on Coleman Street the menu lists them as “charred, not burnt” at £16.

Wilmslow Road, Rusholme · chops £16 at the Canteen · opens 5.30pm Mon–Fri, earlier at weekends · book

From Piccadilly Gardens, the 142 and 143 buses run down Oxford Road and along the length of the strip.

Checked October 2026.