A 16-year-old boy arrived in Britain with nothing... now he's a south Manchester celebrity - all thanks to his incredible £3.50 chicken shawarma

Roughly every couple of minutes, someone is beeping their horn, or shouting out of a car window to Alonso Ahsan outside his shop on Stockport Road. He smiles and waves back to all of them. He’s owned the Levenshulme Bakery for just about five years, but he’s pretty much a local celebrity at this stage.

And it’s all down to the power of good shawarma. Anyone with even a passing desire to seek out the city’s truly great sandwiches will likely already know Alonso, AJ and Zheko and all those at the Levvy Bakery, a quite singular kebab spot among a glut of pretenders.

It is bustling all day long, from when the doors open at 10am to when it closes at 9pm. You simply don’t get that unless you’re doing something right.

And you can do all the sums and equations you like - location, footfall, turnover, margins - but what Alonso does is authentic to its core. While Manchester has been his home for 20 years, this food goes much deeper than pandering to the average Manc’s affection for a late night snack, chased home from the pub.

A Kurdish Iraqi, Alonso remembers as a child being fascinated by the bakeries in Mosul, where he grew up, Iraq’s second city, up in the north (perhaps another reason why he’s found his own affinity with Manchester).

He arrived in the UK when he was 16, alone. He had no family here, no support network, it was just him, something no teenager would choose or should find themselves having to do. He says that he lost both of his parents in the 90s.

I ask how, but I sense I’m pushing somewhere he doesn’t want to go, and he says he ‘can’t really remember’ much of that time now. We move on, but I get the feeling things have been far from easy for him. He attended an ESOL course at college to learn English, and now