Yezzan Khalil, proprietor of the Gladstone Barber and Bistro, a quite singular place in Stalybridge, has been visiting the Palestinian West Bank since he was a baby. He has 26 cousins there, uncles, aunties, nan, granddad. When he was there a few years back, they ordered in some beef for a family feast. A cow arrived a few hours later, alive, and on the back of a pick-up truck.
“So at least you know it’s fresh,” he says. “Another time, for a family wedding, we’d picked a bull from the farm. There are three parts to a wedding, and one is putting on a massive party for everyone in your town, to give a bit back. The guy actually offered me to do the prayer and the knife. I couldn’t do it. Didn’t have it in me!”
Unsurprisingly, it’s not that bit that he misses when he’s not there. “Fresh hummus and falafel,” he says. “The hummus shops. You’ll send one of the cousins off in the morning, the little ones, with a few quid, and they’ll come back with this tray, decorated with pickled vegetables, spices, olive oil. It’s beautiful. Everything is based around food there. Everywhere you go, you can smell something cooking.”
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So, as you might expect, he takes the hummus at his restaurant and barbershop (more about that combination later) pretty seriously. The chickpeas and tahini, the sesame seed paste crucial to good hummus, are sourced carefully, the latter imported from Lebanon.
The falafel, meanwhile, is his dad’s family recipe, as is the specially balanced spice mix for the lamb shawarma. There is cumin, cinnamon, cloves, allspice – about 18 elements all together, but in varying proportions. He grinds a huge batch of it fresh each week, but will not reveal the recipe, even to Yaz.
His dad Said, a chef by trade, is from the northern city of Jenin in the West Bank. He met Yaz’s mum, Amanda, originally from Bredbury, in Goa while she was travelling around India. He was there studying at university, and they spent almost the next decade travelling India and South East Asia together before they came back to settle in the UK, first in London, and then Stockport.
Yaz and his six brothers – one a barber in the shop too, but soon to be a professional boxer – now very much appreciate the food his mum would cook for them when they were growing up. But at the time? Not so much. “We just wanted fish and chips, and we’d get some Ethiopian stew with beans in it,” he says. “The last couple of years, it’s been Georgian food. She’s adamant it’s going to be the next big thing. She’s usually bang on the money with trends.”
Yaz has ‘always been a barber’, and he’s always wanted to open a restaurant. So Gladstone ticks both boxes. And when he says he’s always been a barber, he really means it. He started cutting his friends’ hair when he was 11. Then he worked part-time in a barber after school, and could easily pick up over £100 in tips on a weekend.
He’d seen bars and barbershops work together while travelling in America, so restaurant and barber didn’t feel like that much of a leap. The barbershop, it should be said, isn’t in the same room as the restaurant. It’s separated by floor to ceiling glass panes, lending it something of the fishbowl.
“It has a good people-watching thing, barbering,” says Darcey, Yaz’s partner in business and in life. “It’s quite therapeutic to watch. There’s an atmosphere created for both sides.” Oddly, people still arrive not realising there’s a barbershop on site, while others arrive not realising there’s a restaurant.
Darcey had always worked in hospitality, and with some recognisable names in the industry too. But it was not always a good experience. “I’d worked for so many companies that didn’t care,” she says. “They didn’t care if you were tired, they didn’t care if you’d worked 14 days in a row, they didn’t care if you’d worked till 2am and then put you on again at 9am. Hospitality doesn’t have to be like that.”
When they opened the barber and bistro in 2020, she’d not planned to work there, but was soon inevitably drawn in. Now she wants to make it a better experience for their team than she had.
But while Yaz wears his heritage on his sleeve – and on his chest, he’s usually sporting a Palestinian football top of some description – the menu is a varied and fascinating one.
“We are by no means a Palestinian restaurant,” Yaz says. “We don’t brand ourselves as that. It’s heavily influenced. But it’s just about food that excites us.” So alongside the traditional breakfasts and brunches – steak and eggs, eggs benedict – there is shakshuka, the Middle Eastern stew of tomatoes and peppers with two poached eggs baked in.
The chicken musakhan, ‘the boss’s favourite’ as dubbed on the menu, is a perfectly executed wing bone-in chicken breast – tough to get right, but executed perfectly here – the cooking juices spooned over, with sumac-spiced onions, yoghurt and flaked almonds. It comes on a traditional Palestinian taboon bread, as does the melting lamb shawarma. The fries, covered in za’tar – a mix of sharp dried sumac, oregano, sesame seeds and salt – are something else.
But then there’s a fried chicken sandwich too, and on a Sunday, a traditional roast, which has become something of a hit. The place is full every week, and now they’re getting bookings from Monday onwards. There are hints of the Palestinian spicing, but just hints. The shawarma mix gets rubbed on the beef, and there’s a bit of tahini in the cauliflower cheese. “It makes it really creamy and nutty,” says Darcey.
Yaz’s dad is still the bistro’s harshest critic. “He’ll come in and he’ll order a portion of the falafel and a portion of the hummus, and the chefs will all be watching him through the pass as he eats it,” says Darcey. “Everything gets inspected. He just wants to make sure that his recipes are being done to the best standard.”
“He just cares that much,” says Yaz. “He’s a tough judge, but that’s always kept me very driven. It’s about consistency.” The plan is to open a place next year in Manchester, the same idea replicated but perfected. “We’ve learned so much. But we’re still a work in progress.”
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