Ho hum. The Waitrose Good Food Guide has just been published and provided its list of the "best" restaurants in Britain. The Guide continues along its dull, icon-admiring, London and Home Counties-centric path as we may have expected and therefore we should not be surprised to find just one of the great Birmingham restaurants featured in the list and then at the very lowly place of number 47 (Adam's restaurant in Waterloo Street). We are not surprised that 21 out of 50 of the restaurants featured in the list (42%) are located in London and The Home Counties and that just 2 (4%) are found in the West Midlands (Adam's plus Le Champignon Sauvage in Cheltenham). Perhaps it is not surprising that, based on my experience there a couple of weeks ago, Simpsons has lost its 2018 place in the top 50 (no. 40).-and is not placed.
Claire Smyth's Core makes the highest entry ever into the list. I once joined friends for an expensive lunch at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay when she was in charge there and we were less impressed than we would have expected to be. In fact one dish was rendered horrible by the placing on the plate of a vile rubbery and unidentifiable item which one of my dining companions recalled that it must be a duck egg mentioned on the menu. Presumably Clare Smyth is not delivering such horrors at her new establishment.
The well thought of Harborne Kitchen is the West Midlands winner of the Best Local Restaurant award 2019 though the overall award goes to The Old Bank in Snettisham in Norfolk.
Clearly the Good Food Guide 2019 is of little use to those wishing to dine in the West Midlands as it appears to discriminate against our region yet again.
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