Saturday 27 October 2018

41. Does Sheffield's Jöro Point The Way?


  To return to the main subject of Blog 39, I add a few extra thoughts about where is the future of dining out going to place us fairly soon? This week I visited Sheffield, not in the brief of this Blog for sure, but I was able to dine at what might be viewed as a cutting edge restaurant in that city which has been notorious for its poor gastronomic reputation over the past 30 years or so.
  My dining companion and I set out for Jöro (which is apparently Old Norse for 'earth') and were quite impressed when we arrived at a very stylish little restaurant housed in the Krynki shipping container development which seemed like just the right place for what we thought of as a rather adventurous place to dine.
  The restaurant states that its philosophy is based on a blend of influence from Nordic regions and Japan which they have nick-named 'Scandi-Jap-Mashup', the New Nordic Kitchen. Hmmm. The focus is on creating minimum fuss and producing delicious food using the best obtainable ingredients especially from local sources.
  Chef Luke French opened Jöro with his fiancée Stacey in December 2016 having worked for a short period as a youngster at Daniel Clifford's Midsummer House in Cambridge from whence he fled feeling overwhelmed by the place and then travelled around and worked in Asia and then worked in Sheffield for several years before trying out Jöro as a pop-up restaurant in the city. The chef most admired by Luke French is Paul Cunningham (a photograph of him occupies a prominent place in the restaurant), an English chef who holds two Michelin stars at his restaurant, Henne Kirkeby Kro, in Denmark. Presumably this foregoing paragraph explains the 'Scandi-Jap-Mashup' served up in Jöro. This is very interesting as one can not help but wonder if British exit from the European Union may result in young British chefs doing less of this international travelling especially on the European continent with the result that we see a contraction of foreign influence, especially European, on the future direction of British cuisine.


  A fixed 9 or 11 course Tasting menu is all that is served at Jöro and the menu may vary nightly. The home page of Jöro's website leads with the phrase, 'A meal built of many small plates'. Whether that concept actually works is sometimes questionable. A menu similar to that served to my dining companion and myself is depicted below. Some of the 'small plates' were indeed small gems. The mackerel with yuzu and coastal herbs, depicted at the head of the Blog was wondrously fresh and marine and the blue cheese and onion dish was delicious.
  In the middle of the meal things got a little out of hand. A small piece of duck, with an enjoyable, crunchy coating with plum sauce was really no better and less satisfying than a trip to a reasonable Chinese restaurant would have brought to the diner and immediately afterwards was, and to be honest it was a lovely piece of belly pork, another dish with a classic Chinese restaurant sauce - plum - which made me wonder why I hadn't just gone out 'for a Chinese'. The lowest point came next with a vaguely unpleasant dish containing charred broccoli and another brassica and not a lot else. I've made this point before (see Blog 5) - a plate of a single vegetable does not a course make and usually they're not very enjoyable. Please Chefs, serve your vegetables with something else.
  The meal as a whole was very good allowing for these false steps and it all represented tremendously good value. I'm not really convinced that we need to combine Scandinavian and Japanese food but it makes a change. I'd be very happy if Jöro upped sticks and settled down here in Birmingham and I could go there more often. As he matures I expect that Chef will swerve away from serving a plate full of brassicas and straight Chinese restaurant steals; some of the dishes worked very well and I would be happy to eat them again. But the brassicas - oh dear, a shiver goes down my back every time I think of the dish.
  O, I must go back again if only to have another piece of Chef's Ginger Miso fudge served as a petit four with the coffee.
  So perhaps we are still heading in the direction of using the freshest and most immediately available ingredients with less theatre both on the plate and in the restaurant but served in unusual and original forms and in chic, original environments. Refreshing dishes with a cleanness to them even though they may not always work.
  Jöro was awarded a Michelin Bib in the 2019 edition and the 2019 Good Food Guide rated it as having a 'cooking score' of 5 which, improbably, is just one less than Purnell's which I think says more about the underscoring of Purnell's than it does about the overscoring of Jöro.




Tuesday 23 October 2018

40. Opheem.


  It's only fitting that Birmingham should have a great south Asian restaurant and Opheem fits the bill. For Aktar Islam, there is life after Lasan and for Birmingham diners his afterlife is a paradise of delicious food.
  The new restaurant is smart, modern and chic - as far away from one's idea of what a 'curry house' should look like as one could imagine. It is spacious and eye-catching and reeks 21st centuryness which is no bad thing. The staff are rising to the task - professional, helpful, polite, knowledgable and friendly without being overbearing.
  But, as always, in the end it's about the food. Michelin has already awarded the restaurant a plate, and rightly so, and my dining companion and I both relished an eminently pleasing lunch today. The experience had everything that one should wish to say one had enjoyed 'Fine Dining' and there was not a course which did not cause us to praise chef's offerings.
  For a start there were 3 spicy amuses bouches (illustrated above) and then some lovely sourdough bread with a delicious lamb pâté. And so to the starter. My dining companion thought his stupendous scallop to be thoroughly enjoyable and I had kukkut from The Punjab which was a perfectly spicy Goosnargh chicken with grains and pumpkin which did not add to the flavour but gave a bit of bite to the dish.
  My companion derived great pleasure from his dish served from the Traditional menu - Karahai, chicken tossed with whole coriander seeds, chilli and bell pepper and I opted to have my main course from the special menu choosing, enjoying fish as I do, Allepy, a beautifully cooked piece of halibut, mildly spiced, served with a delightful Kerala coconut milk, spinach, kohlrabi, squid in an immaculately crispy coating and raw mango. An extremely enjoyable dish. And, as the menu reminds us, a winning course on The Great British Menu.
  I lusted after one of the delicious-sounding desserts but my companion was too full to venture on to the third course so I politely declined to eat when he could not but I shall not miss the opportunity to try one next time I visit - and there will be 'a next time' and hopefully in the near future.
  Aktar Islam has added to Birmingham's great culinary reputation by opening Opheem.







Saturday 13 October 2018

39. As Time Goes By.



  I am fascinated by food trends as they develop over the years here in Britain and of course in Birmingham in particular. In medieval times people of various strata of English society consumed the same food for centuries depending on their social status - a peasant could not eat what a king ate. Now, there are many dishes available to the reasonably well off as they are to a monarch, even the less well off may eat them if only by stretching their purses or more likely their credit cards, to give themselves a special treat. And people are not eating what they have had for centuries, rather tastes change rapidly in line with the advance of communications technology - if television shows a notable chef producing a new dish then other chefs may copy it and the watching public will demand a chance to try it for themselves. Now we not only eat our food but photograph it and some of it is indeed very photogenic.
  Chefs and restaurateurs have cleverly made us want to go to them so that they can serve us the cheapest cuts of meat in tiny quantities along with cheaper types of fish, odd bits of viscera to which the English thought they had said goodbye when rationing was ended in the early 1950s all served with odd grains and minute amounts of vegetables which of course are said to be good for us all served very prettily but extravagantly priced.
  With the arrival of Fine Dining all sorts of food stuff found it's way on to restaurant plates. The new items which no restauranteur would have dreamt of serving previously unless he were French and accustomed to the dreadful quality of food originating from that country which had satisfied the taste of peasants for centuries, were excused by all sorts of fatuous reasoning:- "I want to use the WHOLE of the animal", "I want to use SUSTAINABLE fish" "This (cheap) cut of meat is much TASTIER". A lot of spinning went on and the English dining public fell for it.
  How far can it go? We have already plumbed the depths of cheap ingredients and it's hard to think of items which can cost less for chefs to use. Well I suppose, 'I'm a Celebrity' fashion, there's still kangaroo anuses and witchetty grubs and no doubt someone will get there in time even if there isn't a Chef who has yet arrived there. But we've pretty well reached the end of the road of what an Englishman will eat and pay a large sum for the torture of doing so.
  But it's surprising what has survived for 15 or more years and is still out there. A particular bête noir of mine is pork belly. I remember when it was a cheap cut and respectable people thought it was below their dignity to consume this fatty lump in need of slow slow cooking. A dear elderly aunt of mine loved it - she called it belly draft which may just be a term local to The West Midlands - saying she preferred the fat, full of flavour, to the meat but to be honest the texture to me was just unpleasant no matter what it tasted like.
  I wish chefs could forget about the existence of pork belly and consign it to history and give chefs in forty years time the chance to rediscover it. And if chefs must cook it then at least cook it well. I used to cook it for my aunt and it really was rather good even if I say so myself. I had a very good pork belly dish last year at Paul Foster's Salt and Glyn Purnell still serves it up reasonably admirably from time to time. But this week I had one of the most horrible pork belly dishes that I can recall, not in the West Midlands I might add though it was in a restaurant I have found to be generally very pleasing, which usually represents good enough value and with a seaview to boot which ought to be good enough to put it in the running for a Bib Gourmand. But this one dish would have been enough to spoil its chances of even a Michelin Plate. I have the feeling that the committed young Head Chef must have been away to enable such a dish to be let loose in his restaurant.
  A large lump of belly was served containing a thin streak of not-very-nice-tasting meat and a vast array of fat between it and the spongy skin with no hint of crispiness about it. There was some crispiness served on the plate, adorned as it was by the thinnest sliver of crackling which was actually hard and potentially tooth-breaking and little black pudding bon-bons which added to the complete failure of the dish by being pleasingly crispy on the outside but horribly overcooked inside with the contents being dry and unpalatable. Nor did the disaster end there - the mash potato was claggy and lacking in any butteriness, the remarkably large half-'slow braised vanilla carrot' was seriously overcooked and I have no recall of being aware of the Thatcher's cider sauce being present on the plate so unmemorable was it. And then there were leaves, probably pea shoots, strewn inappropriately over the dish and, attempting to add a bizarrely twee finish to the dish's appearance which was otherwise particularly rustic, a couple of seriously out-of-place edible viola flowers. No wonder I retain my dislike of pork belly. This dish did nothing to make me want chefs to keep the cut in their repertoires.


  It had all started so well. Now we step back a couple of eras. The Sixties to the Eighties. Fondly remembered by all those old enough - Prawn cocktail - martini glass, little crustaceans, Marie Rose sauce, lettuce, finely chopped and hopefully not too limp, a slice of almost tasteless English-grown tomato and a couple of slivers of cucumber. The starter gave Chef's rendition of the classic item, reproducing it nicely and serving up a somewhat improved version. Served with mildly toasted white bread which was the only failure of the rebirth as the dish would have been so much nicer with little slices of nicely buttered thinly-sliced fresh white bread as it was in its own proper time in history. The only other problem with this starter was the way the cocktail glass was balanced precariously on a narrow board which was attractive visually but practically difficult because it was too narrow to use without its falling off the board. Oh yes!, there were more violas though I admit they looked more appropriate on the prawn cocktail than they did on the pork belly. Still, it was a splendid presentation and a tasty dish.


  At other times during this week I have had a couple of delicious fish dishes - below is shown a gloriously rustic but thoroughly tasty dish of pan fried hake (not a water bath in sight), samphire, crispy capers and nicely sautéed potatoes. When you're dining at the seaside there's something special about a well-cooked fish dish especially when it's up against a rather less well-cooked plate of pork belly.


  Which eventually brings me round to where I was intending to be. Food trends. In 2011 The Caterer published an article on the various eras of food offered in British restaurants in the 60 years that The Good Food Guide had been published since its first edition in 1951. As I was born only a couple of years after this first edition it pretty well tells the story of the food eaten in England since I was a child.
  Mercifully I was spared rationing with the final parts of it ending about the time I was born, the now, in this era of Corbyn, much admired Labour government of Clement Attlee having allowed it to continue for many years after the end of the Second World War and causing it to earn the general opprobrium of the population which had voted for it in 1945. I was therefore born into a world of fresh fruit and sweets and good quality cuts of meat which the generation before me could only dream of. Unlimited quantities of eggs and real good quality bread and bacon and anything that a hotel guest here in England might now expect as his right as part of his 'Full English breakfast'. If anyone who thinks that a Labour government is a good idea let them read the annual novels of Angela Thirkell who records the demoralising and sapping nature of rationing when imposed on a population which is no longer at war. It's no wonder that Britain earned a reputation for poor cuisine in the Fifties - no-one had had anything edible to eat for the previous 13 or years or so.
  The Caterer labelled the 1950s the age of Good Pubs and Steakhoses and you can hardly blame the British of that time for enjoying the cuisine emanating from such establishments since good beer and good steaks were prizes they had long been denied by War and the socialists' political dogma. The dishes which came into vogue included Game soup, oeufs en cocotte, pâté de maison, salmon mayonnaise, chicken Maryland, mixed grill, sherry trifle, crêpes Suzette and rum baba (if you must, baba au rhum). Ah yes, I may have been very young then but I remember them well and some of these old friends, having travelled through a phase when chefs felt they should serve them 'deconstructed' (presumably because that was easier than serving them 'constructed') are, like the poor, with us always.
  And so The Sixties sprung themselves on us with rock and roll giving way to pop. The Caterer labels the time, 'The Rise of The Restaurant' which resulted from Britain's growing wealth reaching the middle class and the skilled working class who felt a social status pressure to start dining out. In came previously unimagined foods which resulted in dishes such as avocado with prawns, smoked fish mousse, melon with port, coq au vin, steak Diane, trout with banana and almonds, zabaglione, chocolate rum mousse and omelette flambéd with rum, kirsch or Grand Marnier. Much of which, viewed now, sounds rather gruesome.
  The Seventies - 'The Culinary Greats' - brought Britain, but not Birmingham of course, the Roux Brothers, Raymond Blanc, Niko Ladenis and Anton Mosimann - not an English name among them - and foodies, if they existed and I suppose they did, were in raptures about mushrooms with Gruyère, garlic and white wine, smoked mackerel pâté, scampi provençale, duck a l'orange, beef en croûte, chocolate roulade, chicken Kiev and crème brûlée - presumably food was sophisticated if a number of vowels in the titles of the dishes were adorned with accents or had names taken from continental places or were, quite simply, a painful Franglais.
  The Eighties - 'Home grown talent' - 'home-grown' chefs including Shaun Hill (see Blog 7) who was Chef Proprietor at The Merchant House in Ludlow as well as others influenced by Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson using native produce from small local suppliers. Nouvelle cuisine which had arrived in the seventies was still hanging about in the early eighties. Trendy dishes were Twice cooked soufflé, gravad lax, watercress mousse, steak au poivre, mignons of Angus beef with Marsala and pink peppercorn sauce, steamed fillets of salmon and sole with a leek sauce, medallions of veal with tarragon and saffron sauce, tarte fine aux pommes, lemon tart, summer pudding and passion fruit soufflé. Still a lot of words with accents and still a good smattering of Franglais.
  The Nineties - The Rise of the Pub and Grand restaurants - British dishes have finally become trendy and more casualness ensures an extension of the gastronomic franchise to most of the population. Now we have chicken boudin with fennel and saffron, marinated fillet of salmon with lime, ginger and coriander salsa, layered terrine of fois gras and chicken on a Californian muscat jelly, rack of lamb with red pepper and olive compote, blackened rib of beef with Cajun spices, sea bass steamed in a parcel with spring onions, ginger, shiitake mushrooms, lime juice and sesame oil and caramelised lemon tart. The Gastropub had arrived.
  The Oughties - The rise of Britain (and Birmingham) as a culinary destination - Television promoted the restaurant industry's profile and raised awareness of food with the general public. Celebrity chefs further raised the profile of Fine food and the public was keen to try the glorious-looking dishes and confections they found on the various media. Those would could afford it were prepared to pay a lot of money for fine dishes but had high expectations of what they were spending their money on. Culinary fashions gave us Beetroot and black pudding salad with a poached egg, smoked haddock risotto with saffron and curry oil, slow-braised pig cheeks (cheaper even than pork belly) with potato purée and grain mustard sauce, saddle of venison with red cabbage and beetroot beignets, wild sea bass with scallops, rocket, asparagus and caviar beurre blanc, mackerel fillets with pine nuts, rosemary and apple sauce, vanilla pannacotta with Alphonse mango, warm chocolate fondant with pistachio ice-cream and, finally, passion fruit soufflé with passion fruit and banana sorbet. Not many accents and Franglais virtually extinguished.
  The Teenies or whatever we call this decade - The Rise and Fall of Fine Dining - where does one go when one has found the cheapest food possible and dressed it up to make it look exquisite, subjected it to extraordinary gastronomy to make it taste exquisite and sold it at such a price that you HAVE to belief that it is indeed exquisite? Forage on land and sea for ever more obscure herbs, cater to the increasing trend to vegetarian - nay, vegan - food, concoct dishes centred on ancient varieties of fruit, vegetable and animal and continue to resist the philanthropic urge to dump your water bath. So now we have Lamb sweetbread with asparagus, girolle mushrooms, garlic and parsley, Coquelet with hispi cabbage, apple and mushroom, Cornish mackerel with a salad of heritage tomatoes, lumpfish roe and basil, Cornish crab, chorizo mayonnaise and honeycomb, Black oyster with cucumber and charcoal, Orkney scallop with nasturtium and bonito butter and Foraged mushroom dashi with sea spaghetti (all these have been on recent menus in leading Birmingham restaurants).
  English society has changed beyond recognition since I was eating my off-ration sweeties as a child. Now we live under a new tyranny of suppression of free speech lest it result in the causing of offence. There is also the offence of using someone else's culture to one's own ends. Few people do this more than chefs as evidenced by the above dishes which borrow something from other people's cultures around the world. Perhaps this will be the culinary trend of The Twenties - the imperative to avoid offence and not use dishes from other people's cultures. Which means I suppose that we may all be back to dining on roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, faggots and peas, Lancashire hotpot and Cod and chips again, all no doubt with scatterings of freshly foraged wood sorrel and burdock and, of course, edible violas, to jazz them up a bit.


Friday 5 October 2018

38. Michelin Guide 2019 - Around The West Midlands.



  What joy. My copy of The Michelin Guide Great Britain Ireland 2019 arrived today. As I pulled it from its packaging I immediately recognised that its weight was lighter than last year's edition. Mmmm .... why's that then? 750 pages this year, 900 pages last year. Last year's pages were printed on glossier, higher quality paper than this new 2019 edition. Obviously there's a grand effort afoot to reduce costs. Let's hope The Guide doesn't lose a star as a result!
  As detailed in Blog 35 Birmingham retained all four of its single stars - Adam's, Carter's Of Moseley, Purnell's and Simpsons. The city's Michelin Plate status has increased a little - out goes Lasan after Aqbar Islam gave up his role there and Turner's At 69 which of course closed earlier this year while Andy Waters, Asha's, Opus and The Wilderness retain their status and in comes Ben Tesh's Folium, Harborne Kitchen and Aqbar Islam's new venture Opheem.
  A little further afield Kenilworth's The Cross At Kenilworth retains its single star, Hampton In Arden's Peel's likewise holds on to its star and as reported in Blog 35 Stratford upon Avon's Salt has been awarded its first star. In Stratford also No. 9 Church St. pleasingly holds on to its Michelin Plate as do Lamb's in Sheep Street and Rooftop at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre.
  Over in Cheltenham we already know that David Everett-Matthias' Le Champignon Sauvage is down a star from two to one but the town has 10 Michelin Plates while last year it had 12! Cheltenham's gastronomic status has gone downhill a little this year but we must not forget that it still has 3 more Plates than Birmingham. The restaurants which have held on to their Plates are Lumière, Daffodil, Bhoomi, Curry Corner, East India Café, Prithvi, White Spoon, No. 131 and Purslane while Koj is awarded a Plate for the first time.
  The city of Wolverhampton has a single Michelin Plate in the form of Bilash, Worcester has one Plate (Old Rectifying House), Warwick has 1 Plate (Tailors), Leamington Spa and Coventry do not get a single mention in the Guide while Shrewsbury has a single Plate (The Haughmond). Burton-Upon-Trent is home to 99 Station Street which has a Michelin Plate and Henley-In-Arden has two Plate-holding restaurants - Cheal's of Henley and Bluebell.
  At Ludlow The Charlton Arms has a Bib Gourmand and Forelles (at Fishmore Hall), Mortimers and Old Downton Lodge are all recognised with a Plate. Lichfield has 2 Plates - The Boat Inn and Wine House, Broadway also has 2 Plates - Buckland Manor and Russell's, Ilmington has 1 Plate (Howard Arms), Great Malvern has 1 Plate (L'Amuse Bouche) and 1 Bib Gourmand (The Inn at Welland), Gloucester is not mentioned but Stafford has 1 Plate (Moat House). The Old Butchers at Stow-On-The-World has a Michelin Plate and surrounding the town are Fox Inn, Cafe at Daylesford Organic, Kings Head Inn and Feathered Nest which all possess a Michelin Plate.
  At Leintwardine The Lion holds a Plate, in Hereford there is Castle House in possession of a Plate, Long Compton is home to Red Lion (possessor of a Plate) and at Chipping Norton there is Wild Thyme which holds a Plate. Stoke on Trent does not get a mention in the Guide.
  This is not an exhaustive list of restaurants mentioned in The Michelin Guide 2019 in the West Midlands but covers many places in our region.


Wednesday 3 October 2018

37. The Wildness Of The Wilderness.

  

  A recent visit to Alex Claridge's The Wilderness with several friends for a celebratory dinner resulted in us all choosing to have his long and fascinating complete tasting menu with, unusual for me to do, the wine pairing. The menu is depicted here but only gives a vague idea of what was on offer.
  Claridge's 3 appetisers were all sublime and made me think someone as clever as Claridge should open an amuse bouche only restaurant - finger food paradise - and would probably do very well from the point of view of attracting customers.
  His Big Mac (surely a name likely to upset Macdonald's if the name is ever noticed by them but then again that's probably not going to worry our buccaneer chef) - a lesson in how delicious steak tartare can be - led out the cavalcade of originality and occasionally jaw-dropping dishes. His Tomato, ricotta and elderflower starter sent everyone at the table into raptures and I adored the red Thai scallop though this brought in a parade of dishes some of which had a heat and spiciness to them which was a little too much for some of the party and rather surprising. It seemed rather like 'Claridge does Southern Asia' and not everyone welcomed it.
  There were two consecutive oyster dishes reflecting Claridge's apparent wish to not do things in the way that any ordinary chef would. Several of the group found the spicy heat of the 'Crispy oyster, Tabasco, aioli and pork' to be more than they could bear though I thoroughly enjoyed the dish.
  Spiciness continued in one of my favourite dishes NAFB (standing for Not another f---ing balti) where tamarind was combined with quail in one of life's more unlikely curries. But on balance perhaps there were just too many dishes with repeating hotness that we might not have opted for with a little foreknowledge.
  One of my dining companions pointed out, I think quite rightly, that the Duck and Venison dishes were too similar though there was quite a wide space in the running order between them. Both dishes, by the way, were delicious. The several desserts were perfectly enjoyable and, mercifully, there were no ants in sight.
  The wine flight was less satisfactory with the opening spritzer being adventurous but more medicinal than enjoyable.
  I enjoyed the atmosphere of the restaurant, the blackness was perfectly acceptable and gave an edgy ambience to the meal though, given the choice, I might have opted for something a little cosier but I don't think that 'cosy' is something Claridge chooses to do. The music for which The Wilderness has gained a notoriety particularly among some whining Tripadvisors added to the edge of the place but the group was able to converse quite comfortably despite their likely borderline deafness that comes with old age. The music suits the place, the place suits the food and the food suits me.
  It is preposterous that The Wilderness has not found a place in this year's Good Food Guide. I can barely wait to see what novelty Claridge has come up with when he opens the new Wilderness in Bennett's Hill at the end of the year. Presumably he has something very interesting lined up for professional critics and food lovers alike (I'm not sure that professional critics are real food lovers).







Tuesday 2 October 2018

36. Le Champignon Sauvage Loses A Star, No New Recognition For Purnell.


  In Blog 35 I covered some of the headlines from the Michelin Guide 2019 awards ceremony.
  While all is stable in Birmingham - one star retained by Purnell's, Simpsons, Carter's Of Moseley and Adam's - one notable blow to West Midlands gastronomy has been the loss by Cheltenham's Le Champignon Sauvage of one of its two stars. To be fair, I did not feel on both of my visits there in the past couple of years, that the food I ate at the hoary restaurant - the West Midlands gastronomic doyen - lived up to its 2 star reputation. I recall a horrific dish of admittedly beautifully cooked plaice immersed in a bowl of unpleasantly bitter beurre noisette buried under an incomprehensibly large pile of broad beans. More broad beans than are dreamed of in my philosophy, Horatio. I think that the restaurant has been receiving its dual star status in recent years on the basis of former glories rather than present day reality so while its fall from grace (well, it still has one star) is sad and disappointing, it does not come as a surprise.
  It's pleasing to see Ludlow gradually return to being a place of gastronomic pilgrimage. As mentioned in Blog 35, The Charlton Arms became one of 3 West Midlands restaurants to be awarded a Bib Gourmand in this year's awards. Lucy The Labrador and I will be setting off for Ludlow again in the near future and look forward to dropping in on The Charlton Arms. The restaurant is beautifully situated at Ludford Bridge where Lancastrians and Yorkists fought a significant battle during the Wars of The Roses and just below a splendid weir where dippers can be seen diving into the tumbling river in search of fish.


  The publication date for the Guide itself is said to be set for 22 October 2018 though Amazon was originally planning to sell it from 2 October.

  I had a wonderful lunch at Purnell's today. With a dinner appointment this evening I couldn't risk having more than the three course set lunch but it was absolutely delicious. I had the finger food faux black potatoes with his 'edible charcoal' (squid ink-dyed savoury meringue) served with a more-and-moreish chorizo dip alongside his 'sardine on toast' - a fresh and appetising piece of sardine on a beautifully crispy tiny tartlet, 3 slices of Purnell's own feather-light pain de campagne, the heavenly chicken liver parfait with red wine salsify and grains and coriander, the wondrous Thai-influenced Brixham cod served with Indian red lentils, picked carrots, coconut and coriander, and then, for once eschewing the dessert, I treated myself to the restaurant's fabulous selection of stupendous British cheeses served with crispy savoury thin biscuits and a delightful apricot chutney.
  Purnell, after more than 10 years, continues to deliver great food. The service and atmosphere in the restaurant is perfect and the front of house is in superb hands under the guidance of Sonal Clare. Purnell deserves more than one Michelin star. Perhaps he should move his restaurant to London to get the recognition he deserves though on second thoughts - don't do it! Oh, and don't even think of going to career-wrecking Manchester!



Monday 1 October 2018

35. First Michelin Star For Stratford upon Avon.




  The Michelin Guide Bib Gourmand Awards having been announced 3 days ago - the West Midlands gained three new Bib Gourmands (Charlton Arms in Ludlow, The Leaping Hare at Stanton in Gloucestershire and The Bell Inn at Langton in Gloucestershire) and lost none -  we now know the higher awards which have just been announced at a long and tedious ceremony hosted by a very inexpert interviewer at the BFI IMAX Cinema in Waterloo. Winning chefs were asked a couple of questions each which made the ceremony drag on for even longer and it was all preceded by a toe-curlingly embarrassing interview with Gordon Ramsay whose waist seems to be expanding rapidly in his middle age.
  There were no new stars for Birmingham but Paul Foster's well thought of Salt in Stratford upon Avon was awarded one star only about 15 or 16 months after it first opened. I visited two or three times in 2017 soon after it opened its doors to the food-loving public and I posted a review on Tripadvisor which is shown below. Yes, I know I hate Tripadvisor but sometimes it seems worthwhile to write about a new restaurant if one has a positive opinion about it to give it some support.



  It's disappointing that Birmingham has not upped its star count this year but there were only 18 new stars in the United Kingdom this year plus 3 restaurants taking 2 stars. Manchester which likes to pretend it's the Second City once more failed to be awarded a single star and remains a Michelin desert. Of the 18 new single star winners it's not surprising that six are located in London and 3 more in the Home Counties. Michelin is fun to read but its opinions are only those of people who think they're greater experts than the rest of us and often prove that they are not.