"This 'old school butty shop' does a blinding barm, but the sausage roll was gutting"

Nostalgia and food don’t always mix. I’m not sure who’s necessarily looking back with rose-tinted specs at the well-done steaks of the Berni Inn (with a glass of orange juice coming in as a ‘starter’), for example.

We’ve been mocked for hundreds of years for our crappy beige food, and for a long time it was pretty justified. Not now. So why wind the clock back when we’ve made such leaps and bounds in the right direction?

Enter Caff, an ‘old school butty shop’, that sprouted up at the none-more-Manc address of Tony Wilson Place at the end of last year. It’s less a shop than half a shipping container, branded up, painted sunshine yellow and turned into a kiosk.

Indulge in more of Ben Arnold's food writing covering Greater Manchester...

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It’s the doing of the team behind Grub, the pioneering street food traders market on Red Bank, and harks back to times when white baps were filled with watery tomatoes, watery lettuce and watery pink ham, all things that - possibly for the better - took a hike when the panini turned up on the scene, all crispy and continental.

Did we lose something halcyon from our work day lunch when such dreary sandwiches got usurped by ciabatta? Or should we have said goodbye and good riddance to the ham salad barm when we had the chance?

Recently, Caff was named in the top 30 things in the UK currently ‘exciting’ the writers on the esteemed Observer Food Monthly. That such a humble butty cabin should make such an impression is notable, if a bit surprising given what's going on in the city right now.

It seems to be doing a lot