30. Lunch At Maribel.

  In Blog 22 I mentioned how much I and my dining companions enjoyed the 7 course dinner at the recently opened Maribel in Brindley Place which is the restaurant where Richard Turner has chosen to continue his career after closing his own restaurant in Harborne at the beginning of the year.

  What a great relief he did decide to continue to delight the diners of Birmingham with his impeccable cooking which can be appreciated as much through his brilliantly good value £30 lunch as through his longer lasting multi-course meals. In fact the dishes available for the set lunch are to be found in his longer menus and in themselves showcase very nicely Turner's cooking. Each dish is enormously and profoundly tasty - no chef could be expected to do any better in providing wondrous flavours in a meal.

  The dishes prove by themselves that Richard Turner is a truly great chef who knows not just how to cook excellent food but always adds something over and above what would be expected in flavour and deliciousness.

  Starter - Heritage tomatoes with goats cheese and an exemplary tomato pressé with as powerful and scintillating a flavour as any tomato could render up to the human feeding on it. The stuff that dreams are made of. Preceded by 4 excellent to fabulous appetisers - the forever memorable 36 month aged gruyère gougère (a meal consisting entirely of these taste bombs would make one a happy person), the almost as immensely enjoyable smoked eel with horseradish, apple and nasturtium, the pleasurable raw scallop with wasabi, cucumber and oyster leaf and finally the very happy poached quail egg with anchovy, chicken and Berkswell cheese served on a small cos lettuce leaf all followed by a generous slice of sour dough bread with yeast butter.

  Main course - I do not usually choose veal but that was the main course prescribed on the lunch menu. And very fine it was too served with an excellent sweetbread, profoundly tasting veal tongue and a lovely little kidney. I'm not an offal man and I would not have opted to have these little savouries but if I must have offal, even the finest, then this is how you can get me to eat it. Alongside the main veal dish a little dish of veal hotpot was served which was again immensely tasty though I did have a tiny splinter of bone in one of my pieces of meat.

  Dessert - Much to my great pleasure the prescribed pudding was the wonderful dish of Mara des bois strawberries with meringue and gorgeous rice pudding lurking like a temptress in the base of the dessert.

  The petit four which accompanied the coffee was the immensely pleasurable mini-cornet indulgence containing a beetroot sorbet with a raspberry cream. A different type of petit four but up there among the best as a delight to accompany the coffee.

  Clearly Maribel is offering superb good value with its lunchtime menu and a couple of hours of great pleasure to boot. Such is the excellent value of the meal that the lack of choice for the set menu is perfectly understandable but I wish that there was a choice from 2 different dishes for the main course at least. Nevertheless Birmingham cuisine marches on with Richard Turner piloting Maribel among the highest fliers for diners in the city.

  

29. Vegan Delight.

  The Birmingham Post reports this week, as I believe does the Evening Mail, that Simpsons has 'now been recognised as one of the best' restaurant's in Britain to serve a vegan menu. 'The Michelin starred restaurant has made PETA's (The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals Foundation) list of ten best restaurants for vegan fine dining in 2018. It's the first time PETA has judged fine dining restaurants for vegans'....'The charity singled out Simpsons' senior sous chef Leo Kattou, stating: "From a stint on Masterchef The Professionals to creating beautiful vegan menus to delight visitors to this Michelin-starred restaurant, Leo does it all...."'.

  Co-incidentally I had lunch at Simpsons this week with a companion with whom I had visited the place about a year ago. It was pleasing that the service appeared to be far less chaotic than on our previous visit and the food was ofcourse cooked pleasingly though neither of us felt really excited by what we had been served. Perhaps more frissons of pleasure may have been experienced if we had ventured into menus over and above the basic lunch menu.

  I found the Cornish mackerel starter to be perfectly satisfactory, the immaculately cooked sea bream main course to be enjoyable but the fermented Kenilworth plums to be rather lacking in, er, plums or pluminess at least. I was most excited by the delightful little cow-shaped milk jug brought with the coffee and the accompanying petits fours were very good but hardly original and at £7 startlingly expensive. I had overlooked the availability of a vegan menu but it's something to bear in mind for the future.

  By another coincidence another friend had asked me to join him for dinner at the Acorn Restaurant in Bath a couple of days after my visit to Simpsons. This of course has nothing to do with Birmingham but if anyone in the city is going into vegan food in a big way then the Acorn is a signpost along the road of how to do it. It made for a wondrous couple of hours of great pleasure which make one emerge from the premises wondering why not eat vegan food all the time if it could always be like the wonderful prizes which are delivered to one's table at the Acorn.

  I had a 'summer salad' of radish sorbet, charred cucumber (though really it doesn't seem to me that there's an awful lot you can do to cucumber to make it a valuable contributor to society except perhaps to pickle it), pickled lettuce, samphire (which made the dish achieve its goal) and pickled mustard seed), then a main course of One Whole Cauliflower broken down and cooked in various ways - roasted florets, truffled purée, molasses pickled core and sautéed leaf all served with a wondrous almond milk croquetta infused with fenugreek and onion, spelt grain in a smoked almond emulsion and tarragon oil. Perhaps the only thing that was not quite right with the main course was that there were so many wonderful flavours and textures in the dish that the usually robust, and I think wonderful, flavour of cauliflower had got itself rather lost.

  I had a charming, happy little dessert of Strawberries and Cream which involved freshly juiced strawberry jelly with a strawberry duxelle, fennel bulb cream and a stupendous thyme and anise meringue. Very pleasurable and worth travelling all the way to Bath to indulge oneself in.

28. Great British Menu Returns - Transfusions Or Black Pudding?

  I am depressed to read that The Great British Menu will return to BBC Television on 13 August for its 13th season in a completely unchanged format what with it featuring a tedious over-riding theme (this year, the 70th anniversary of the National Health Service - what else could it be? - lauding, one expects the 'heroes' of the NHS - nowadays everyone's a hero - whilst insisting that chefs prepare food related to the subject though hopefully not at all like the monstrous food which the NHS itself serves up to its unfortunate prisoners - sorry, patients). Perhaps the starter will have to have the flavour of disinfectant about it or the main course made up from offal which could otherwise be used as potential material for organ transplantation or any cheese used should be covered with a a fine penicillin - the possibilities are legion.

  The tired old format continues with the same old faces being used as the chef judges who give advice to the contestants for the first four days which is completely contrary to what the 3 judges want to see in the Friday final. And by the end of the 8 weeks or so one has grown tired of watching the same variation on a theme from the contestants. Last year, everyone had to do a strawberry dish, the theme being Wimbledon (see Blog 8); this year the theme being the NHS, perhaps everyone will feel the need to build a dish around black pudding in honour of blood transfusions.

  And most annoying of all is that the Central region is once more represented by chefs who do not work in our region. There is Marianne Lumb who was working in London when the series was filmed, Ryan Simpson-Trotman who works in Henley on Thames in Oxfordshire (Home Counties) 

and Sabrina Gidda who again works in London. It may be the case that the featured chefs were born or perhaps trained in the Midlands or East Anglia but I'm sure many of us Mercians or East Anglians would enjoy getting a view of what our restaurants are turning out not yet another look at a chef who has chosen to move out to the alien south-east.

  I can't see myself getting too obsessional about watching The Great British Menu this year - it's tired, dull, clichéd and viciously London-centric at the cost of the British regions.

  Meanwhile this glorious summer of, er, Gin continues. Our local Sainsbury in Longbridge is promoting the equally glorious Tanqueray Flor de Sevilla which is truly and magnificently delicious 

when served with Fever-Tree Elderflower tonic water and a slice of orange.

  Finally it's worth recording that the chef with most Michelin stars to his name - 28 in all - Joel Robuchon died today at the age of 73 from pancreatic cancer. No connection at all, as far as I can see, with Birmingham but clearly a notable individual in modern cuisine with restaurants scattered all over the world including the 1 starred  L'Atelier de Joel Robuchon in London.