The takeaway inside an ex-council house in Blackley serves the 'best curry you'll ever have'

manchestereveningnews.co.uk:

Michael Dias, who smiles constantly, was probably around eight years old when he first entered the hospitality business. He was the face of his parents’ restaurant in Corlim in the north of Goa, close to the famous Basilica of Bom Jesus, home to the remains of St. Francis Xavier.

Right on the tourist trail, Michael would be tasked with enticing passing tourists to come and eat, but along with his brother and his two sisters, they all grew up on the restaurant floor. “My dad would always put me right in the front of the restaurant, to bring in the people,” he says. “It’s where I picked everything up!”

He even made the sign for his parents’ place, he says, and decades later, he and his son made the sign for the takeaway the family now runs from their ex-council house in Blackley. It is ornately carved from a piece of wood, and it stands proudly in their neat front garden. It is called Liv’s Takeaway, a shortened version of his son and daughter’s names - Livren and Livrinda - and the food is just marvellous.

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The neighbours have been tremendously supportive at having an unexpected takeaway pop up next door. “Even before we started the takeaway, and we would have the windows open, they’d smell it and come and say ‘What’s cooking today, Michael?’, and we would share it with them,” he says. “But when we opened a takeaway, yes, it was a little bit of a shock for them.”

Michael and his wife Cefona, who cook together in their tiny domestic kitchen on a four-ring hob, met at high school. They were childhood sweethearts. “It was love at first sight,” he says, and Cefona blushes. They married in 2001.

Cefona is originally from