Life of pie

By Michael Holland

The historic name M. Manze over a shop door has been the sign of good quality pie and mash for over 100 years, and with the fourth generation of the family now proudly flying the Manze flag that tradition will not be stopping in the near future.

Rick Poole, his daughter Emma, and her husband Tom run the three M. Manze shops now that Rick’s brothers, Graham and Geoff, have retired. Emma concentrates on the social media, Tom, the business, while Rick, with his years of experience, looks after quality control in the kitchen. "It’s a good 3-way split,” says Rick, when I met him and Emma.

I needed some backstory so Rick obliged. “The 87 Tower Bridge Road shop was originally a Cooke’s (The East London pie and mash dynasty). Robert Cooke’s daughter Ada married Michele Manze from the icecream shop at 85 Tower Bridge Road, and they were given 87 as a present.”

This became the first to bear the Manze name and is the empire’s flagship. But what about the Pooles, I asked? “The Pooles had a pie and mash shop in Shadwell in the 19th century and Ada was related to them too.” Michele and Ada eventually had five pie shops. “Two in Chrisp Street, Poplar; Southwark Park Road, Peckham and Tower Bridge Road,” says Rick. “But between my grandfather and his brothers there were 14 pie and mash shops around London with the Manze name.”

I asked why she wants to work in this business: “It’s a passion, and we have the family history to carry on as well as the London tradition of pie and mash - I don’t want to let that tradition die,” she says.

As the other shops got sold off the buyers kept the Manze name above the door because it had built a reputation they wanted to keep, but it is just the Peckham and Tower Bridge Road establishments that have a true connection to the Manze name, plus the Sutton pie shop they opened in 1998 to feed the demand of Londoners moving to the suburbs.

Emma recalls doing her first Saturday shift when she was 17 in Sutton, where her mum worked. Now, with children of her own (Albert and Arthur), she and husband Tom have taken the place of Geoff and Graham to work alongside her father.

Rick added: “It’s because of the whole tradition of pie and mash that I’m still here - My two brothers didn’t want to retire but due to age and health they decided to bow out.”

What’s changed? “Bringing in some new blood with new ideas is for the better,” he begins. “After 40 odd years you can get a bit stale so you have to change with the times, like with our internet chilled delivery business and local hot delivery, but you have to keep the core, traditional pie ’n’ mash and not move away from that.” Emma adds, “Fresh eyes looking at the business can only be a good thing… What we’re asked most frequently is if we deliver to Europe, so we’re looking into that, especially Spain where there is a large number of British expats. At the moment we’re testing how long we can keep it chilled for… Yesterday, on Facebook, I was asked if we could deliver to Australia!”

“A new website is now up and running which makes online booking a lot easier as it’s more customerfriendly,” Emma continues. “It shows people what we deliver and that we deliver all over the UK; it gets the

"What we’re asked most frequently is if we deliver to Europe, so we’re looking into that, especially Spain where there is a large number of British expats"

message out to those people who moved out of London and think they can’t have their pie and mash anymore. The website also gives a bit of family history.”

“We’ve been doing deliveries for 15 years now… it’s grown into another business, more or less,” interjects Rick.

Over the years there were times when pie shops were under pressure. Rick recalls that “with the mad cow disease we were big on traceability and were able to say that all our beef was British, to say what farms we bought from, and because we butcher the meat ourselves we knew it was safe.”

How do you combat competition from all around the world now? “We keep plodding on. Of course the number of customers changed - there was a time when we could open in the morning at 9 and stay open right the way through to 12 o’clock at night. That kind of trade has gone; we now take all week to sell what we once sold in one day.”

And the future? “We’re looking to do more deliveries while never detracting from what our core business is.” Emma says the vegetarian and vegan pies are very popular these days. “We get a lot of Deliveroo orders for them,” she says.

Before we finished, I needed Rick to dispel some longstanding myths:

Liquor: “We haven’t used eel stock in our liquor for over 40 years now. We never used that much before but changed the original recipe because some people were allergic to it.”

Upside down pies: “In the old days the temperamental coal ovens sometimes overcooked the pies, so we’d serve the pie upside down to hide the burnt crust.”

So there you have it from the experts, proving that the pie and mash in Ada’s blood from both sides of her family has truly trickled down through the generations.

Manze Pie and Mash is at 87 Tower Bridge Road, SE1 4TW. Phone: 020 7407 2985. www.manze.co.uk