Eat Goody Review

Forget deadlines, exams and awkward encounters with people who you’ve kanoodled with: lunch is the most troublesome part of university life. The inevitable point in the day where you face the stress, woe and palaver of choosing your noon-time epicurean fate.

Economically, one should really bring a packed lunch, ideally some envy-inducing monster baguette, oozing with silky smoked salmon and smooth cream cheese, but I find my hectic morning schedule of ignoring the alarm clock conflicts with this and any attempts to hastily throw something together results in lunch being a limp morsel of poorly spread marmite sandwiches.

Realising that my dependency on supermarket lunchtime deals had gone too far after I was buzzing with excitement about the possibilities of pre-made lunches outside of the ones available at Sainsburys’ when the new Morrisons opened up on campus. Even if you try every one sandwich available, you’ll find that they all just seem to taste like mayonnaise.

An end to this trouble is found up a seemingly secretive stairway next to the Sugden sports centre, a lunchtime haven of Korean food, Eat Goody (I have no idea why it needed to be suffixed with a ‘y’, but it certainly feels like it was the right decision to make).

After stepping into the wonderful world of Korean culture, you have the opportunity to pick your favourite mystery beverage. The ‘aloe vera drink’ is my favourite, maybe due to some masochistic pleasure derived from gulping down what is essentially shampoo. I recommend trying to choose a different drink every time: the rice punch is like a curiously fizzy rice-pudding laced with ginger and the real jelly found in the Korean Fanta puts those childhood panda-pop fraudsters to shame.

When it comes to filling your belly, there is a wonderfully exotic range of dishes to choose from and the lunch time deal is a very reasonable £3.95 and comes in a box like you see in Hollywood films? I’ll reemphasise that last part again, for almost the entirety of my life I was disappointed with the foil containers my far east takeout would arrive in, and now thanks to Eat Goody I can finally feel like I’m a Hollywood star in sunny California, whilst being a grotty student in grim Manchester.

Open for lunch during the week, each day is a different culinary conquest. The most excellent bibimbap is what I would call the burger and chips of Korean cuisine, with fresh vegetables and meat or tofu on a bed of rice, the general principle is to then cake it with a huge squidge of the piquant chili sauce and then whizz it around until it’s all been mixed up into a mess. It’s just like when you would mix up your ice cream in the bowl as a kid, but without the disappointment of being faced with a dairy soup.

The call of Eat Goody is mostly required is when I am ghastly hungover and making an appearance at university to only try and fool myself into believing I’m doing some work. When this is the case and my body is in dire need of sustenance I summon, for only a mere £1.20 extra, a whole coffee cup full off sweet chili chicken alongside the main, and I literally mean a coffee cup of chicken (however, I don’t quite recall seeing see that in any movie).

And you get to eat in a basement with a giant flat-screen glaring out K-Pop.

Food 9
Hangover treatment 8
Bonkers beverages 11

Eat Goody
1 Hillcourt Street,
Manchester,
M1 7HU

http://www.eatgoody.co.uk
0161 274 3000