On the corner at the end of a cobblestoned street in Ancoats lies one of Manchester’s best kept secrets - a take-away that has been quietly serving out some of the city’s best Caribbean food for almost a decade now.
The family-run Rad’s, located on Jersey Street, has been selling everything from jerk chicken and curried goat to ackee and saltfish to customers since 2014 and demand for their homemade delights sees people queuing outside pretty much every lunchtime.
“We don’t really do any promotion - we just rely on word of mouth,” Robert Davidson, 63, who runs the restaurant with wife Cynthia and son Adrian, tells the M.E.N following a busy lunchtime rush. “We let the food do the talking.”
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Robert says that almost everything on the menu is made from scratch, paying homage to old family recipes that have been passed down from generation to generation and their unique spice blends won’t be found anywhere else.
“Obviously, we’re meeting some of their requirements,” Robert humbly says when asked why Rad’s is a popular lunchtime spot. He says that there have even been instances where people have come from Canada and France to try their jerk chicken.
“I’m not even sure how they hear about us,” he says. “We get a lot of people from football fraternities as well as medical professionals and actors. I guess they spread the word for us.”
Robert says that many people presume the name of Rad’s comes from the fact the takeaway lies on the corner of Radium Street, but the real reason is much more simpler. “It’s actually just my initials,” he laughs. “Robert Anthony Davidson. People used to think it was a bit of a funny name to choose back when we opened but it’s just stuck over time, it just fits now.”
Owing, in part, to Rad’s particular lunchtime rush, the takeaway offers a special meal deal from 11am to 3pm that offers a big portion of food from £7.50 with their famous jerk chicken, mutton, steak ackee, and saltfish on offer for £8.50.
“We suppress our menu,” Robert explains. “We could do a much varied menu if we felt like it but we have to decide how much work we can do and it’s also about knowing what you’re good at.
“Most people will come in for the jerk, but that’s because some people don’t know about some of the other things we do. Sometimes they’ll ask what we recommend. We have regulars who will go through the menu and change up what they have but others will just always stick to the same thing because they know it’s good.
"But, on any given day, it's very hard for us to say what will be the best-selling dish. It always surprises us."
Before setting up Rad’s, Robert was actually part of a celebration cakes business which made a number of big cakes for businesses and celebrities. Their shop at the Arndale lasted around 20 years, before Robert decided to switch things up completely.
“We were first before all of what you see now,” he says of the cake business. “We could replicate pretty much anything in cake - if you could draw it, we could make it. But I knew it wasn’t something that we could run with forever. Our forte was always in cakes but we don't actually even serve a single cake here now."
Following his time at the Arndale, Robert spotted the building where Rad’s is now situated and knew, in the early 2000s, that Ancoats was going to be an area with a regeneration boom.
“Castlefield was just in its heyday at the time but I knew right then that was not the right side of Manchester for us,” Robert says. “I just knew that this part of Manchester was going to grow.
“This building used to be a handbag factory and the owner had decided he wanted to retire. There were a few people interested in taking on this building but we decided to pray about it and approached the owner to say we’d like to take it on.
“We offered to pay him in cash and said he could stay in the building for as long as he liked. Things went back and forth for about a year and then, out of the blue, he just rang me and said ‘If you want it, just come and get it’.
"I came down straight away and that was how we got this building. It was a godsend. It really was the perfect time for both us and the area.”
Speaking about getting to work so closely with his family every day, Robert says: “Working with each other is almost like a way of life now. Sometimes we have our ups and downs but its courses for horses. It’s nice to be able to do things together.”
That being said, Robert says he is now starting to consider retirement. But he's still thinking about branching out when it comes to keeping the Rad’s name going strong.
“We do all of our own blend of spices here and we are looking to reproduce what we are doing but on a wider scale,” he explains. “We are wanting to go online with our own spicing company, it is ready but it’s just about finding the time to tweak it and figure it all out.”
But for now, Rad’s remains the popular spot for lunch that it pretty much has been since opening up back in 2014. And not only are there people who visit from all over the world to try their jerk chicken, there are also some famous faces who Robert can say are frequent diners - but he says getting a name out of him won’t be happening anytime soon.
“You wouldn’t even believe some of the famous people we’ve had here,” he laughs.
Rad's, 62 Jersey Street, Ancoats, M4 6JW.
