If you’ve ever wondered what it looks like to systematically plough through eight plates of food then Azuma on Cavendish Street is a good place to start.
Situated just across the road from Manchester Met’s Cambridge Halls, this unassuming spot leading into Hulme could easily be missed were it not for the carefully constructed flower archway hanging above the door.
It’s reminiscent of those showstopping displays you can’t help but gawk at as you head down King Street around Christmas time. Glitzily festooned exteriors with thousands of glistening baubles and twinkling lights bolted onto the front - literally stopping traffic in their wake.
Try MEN Premium for FREE by clicking here for no ads, fun puzzles and brilliant new features.
Azuma is more pared back than this though, after all, it’s what inside the building that counts.
There’s been a huge uptick in the number of Korean eateries, supermarkets and street food stalls popping up in Manchester in recent years - offering up everything from corn dogs covered with chopped up crispy French fries to Korean Fried Chicken cooked twice to get that extra crunch. Oseyo, the UK’s largest Asian supermarket chain, has also announced its opening a second Manchester branch later this year.
We’re also lucky to have a strong selection of Korean BBQ spots including Stockport favourite Baekdu and city centre staples Ban di Bul, Koreana and Annyeong. One of the city’s more hidden eateries though is Azuma. Both a Korean BBQ and Chinese hotpot restaurant, this place is probably the most fun you’re going to have on a Tuesday night.
While its exterior might be inconspicuous, inside the place is buzzing. On one side of the room, steam rises from the hot plates set into the tables as guests deftly flip strips of pork belly, chicken gizzard and squid tentacles, while further down, diners who have opted for the hot pot carefully lower spongy tripe and beefy scallops with hot pink tweezers into a bubbling hot cauldron of pig bone broth.
The two of us opt for the Azuma Korean BBQ Buffet, setting us back £28.80 a piece, plus a pint of Cobra (£4.80) and a very large pot of Chinese tea for an absolute steal at just £1.50. As is customary with all-you-can-eat dining affairs, there’s some terms and conditions to familiarise yourself with first.
This isn’t my first buffet, but I’m aware that just reading the small print is eating into the allotted two hours, but to summarise, it’s stipulated that all food is eaten before a top up and the management can charge £10 for takeaway boxes for excessive food.
With that nipped in the bud, we tick off what we would like to cook over the hot plate on a thin sliver of paper. You can sizzle just about anything on these grills, be it spicy chicken wings, heart or gizzard, or for seafood lovers there’s sliced fish and spicy squid tentacles.
We play it fairly safe and choose one meat from each of the proteins, quickly resulting in an assembly line of black pepper beef, original pork belly, king prawns and chicken wings. Topped up with egg fried rice, and a tray full of vegetables including sculptural discs of lotus root and courgette alongside onion rings, asparagus and what is essentially a full head of lettuce - we get started.
And then we just sit there, forgetting all the cooking skills passed down to us before a sympathetic waiter takes pity on us and switches the grill on and brushes some oil over the hotplate. I think we can take it from here.
Things get off to a rocky start, the grill is on pretty high so some of the meat cooks a little fast leaving a trail of burnt cut offs, but it’s ok, because once again we’re saved from further embarrassment by our waiter who explains how to lower the heat whilst simultaneously sweeping away the burnt bits with a spatula down the holes in the side of the grill.
Remember the tube Augustus Gloop was sucked up into in Charlie and the Chocolate factory - or the teleportation tubes used in Futurama - well, they’re back and this time they’re huge extraction fans hanging over the grill, handily stopping the restaurant from smelling of the food we’ve burnt.
Thankfully, we got into our stride not long after, but just know that a lot of effort goes into maintaining the integrity of a grill. Now in flow, no words are spoken, just silent nodding as one of us seasons and cooks the meat and vegetables, while the other keeps the grilling area clean, stopping only to stuff our mouths with the results of our hard labour.
The beef and pork stand out for me, and when we finally nail the cooking, they go down a treat when topped with Korean BBQ sauce and sliced spring onion. The prawns are a bit of a faff but once shelled are fresh and juicy, while the wings, which slowly cook on the perimeters of the grill, are well worth the wait.
Try MEN Premium for FREE by clicking here for no ads, fun puzzles and brilliant new features.
As the place empties out, the sound of stacks of plates falling in the kitchen and the gentle hum of the extraction creates a new background noise, as we, like two lunch hall stragglers, begin to lose our pace as we inevitably fill up. I blame the lettuce, which we take in turns to whittle down. What starts as assured tearing and crunching turns to feeble nibbles interspersed with small sips of tea merely to break up the monotony.
It’s the only real downside to be honest. The rest has been a delight - a classic DIY eating challenge absent of any pointless chit chat but full of chops, wings and crispy pork. And, as we exit into the night, a belly full of a whole head of lettuce, I can't help but wish I'd kept this Korean BBQ of dreams to myself.
