It was a great pleasure to have lunch at Ben Tesh's Folium earlier this week. The menu is depicted and my companions and myself chose the five course menu - mackerel and oyster, turbot, lamb, yoghurt and spruce and chocolate, cobnut and burnt cream. Each course was very fine - unimpeachable in fact - deliciously elegant in execution. The turbot was perfect and the lamb cooked perfectly for my taste. The sheep yogurt dish was refreshing and revitalising with flavour of spruce and the chocolate, cobnut and burnt cream dish was appreciated by all three of us with intermittent sighs of pleasure. This restaurant is less whimsical than some in Birmingham but characterised by consistent exceptional cooking. I shall not leave it so long again before venturing back into the Jewellery Quarter to return to Folium which by accident I keep referring to as Elysium which is not unreasonable as a far amount of ambrosia is served there.
I took Lucy The Labrador with me on a trip to the Birmingham Frankfurt Christmas fair a couple of days ago and foolishly decided to have a currywurst at one of the fast food stalls which specialised in hot dogs. I wish I had not as the product served up was one of the most exceptionally unpleasant (allegedly edible) substances I have put in my mouth in a long time. The sausage was, frankly, horrible and the accompanying 'curry sauce' was of unprecented vileness, a sort of red, nastily acidic concoction. Lucy The Labrador who is not averse to consuming a little bit of spicy food was discerning enough to reject any of the sausage which had the red fluid on it though she did manage to persuade herself to swallow some of the naked wurst. I lived in fear that we would both have an upset stomach after this item of 'fast food' but mercifully I have suffered from nothing more than a revulsion at the thought of eating another sausage and a, hopefully temporary, reduction of appetite as every time I consider eating something a vision of this monstrous sausage rears into view.
This Christmas market is well past it's sellby date - there's nothing fresh or interesting about it, most of the goods on sale are indescribably tacky and much of the food is, well, at the very least, unappealing but then again much of it is based on German cuisine whose reputation is as bad as that of British food in the 1950s so what should we expect?
