It's not often that a reflection on a visit to one of Birmingham's new restaurant would start off with a picture of the restaurant's floor and some photographs of the wallpaper in the men's lavatories but this is Nocturnal Animals and the floor and the gent's loos' wallpaper says everything you need to know about this wonderful new dining place in the heart of Birmingham. Well perhaps not quite since it says nothing about the food though as the sign over the pass area says, "It's only f---ing food".
People will often talk about their dining experience and Nocturnal Animals is certainly an experience with a capital E and a capital experience it is. The restaurant floor is colourful and the gents' lavatories wallpaper would be almost genteel until inspected more closely when one discovers that the design features rather unusual viewpoints of the sights of Edinburgh. The gents' loos also have a mysterious black hand emerging from the wall which looks like it ought to be shaken but let's face it, you just don't know where it's been. So bemused by it was I that I forgot to take a photograph of it.
Before getting to the restaurant and its floor and loos you must ofcourse enter through the ground floor bar with its migraine-inducing floor and bright lights and then passing down a white, light flooded passage which makes you feel you've had a cardiac arrest and are now entering a new astral plane and then go downstairs to the restaurant proper, much of it black like its mother ship in the Jewellery Quarter but with much more light to make the place look like it's much more fun, and be greeted delightfully and seated in an instantly comfortable chair. By this time the cocktail you've selected from a rather funky menu given to you upstairs is doing its work very well and you realise just what fun Nocturnal Animals is. The 1980s music is helping to merry you along as well. A quick trip to the loo involves going down another exotic corridor with its strip lighting forever changing colour making you feel quite certain you have arrived in Wonderland.
So, at last, the menu. And the excitement reaches its peak as you discover just what Nocturnal Animals is going to feed to you. The lunch menu said 'dinner' so I take it that the food and prices are the same at all times of the day. There are two choices - a shorter menu for a very reasonable £28 or the full menu for £55. We chose the short menu only to change our minds when we were thoroughly delighted by the delicious first course which was a sort of cauliflower satay. The cauliflower was the first dish to appear not being preceded by bread be it the ubiquitous sourdough or any other type for that matter nor any amuses bouches, pleasingly.
A parade of interesting confections followed - some quail in a south Asian setting made tasty with tamarind and boosted by a pleasant little samosa. This colourful dish was made visually more striking by being served on a plastic plate of swirling white and red. I was starting to get the fun of eating at Nocturnal Animals.
Onwards through a tough little piece of octopus with sweetness and sourness as well as garlicness and then on to another plastic plate, this time of swirling blue and white, on which was sitting some far eastern flavoured salmon. Then some fine pork belly made sweet and sticky with the Chef's version of a barbecue sauce and a perfect blob of yuzu flavour which countered the fat of the pork. I am not a fan of pork belly but this was an enjoyable way to serve it - like an upmarket spare rib but with more meat and no bone.
And so to the highly flavoured 180 day aged sirloin on a mildly curried sauce and thoroughly enjoyable black garlic gnocchi with the whole course finely completed with lovely slices of pickled carrot. Again all the colour was rendered vibrant served as the course was on another one of those splendid blue and white plastic plates. Such fun.
The dessert was served on another spectacular plastic plate which looked like a black napkin laid out on the table with a form of mildly flavoured tiramisu lying on it though if I had been served it without knowing how it was described on the menu I would not have used the word tiramisu. The three locusts placed on the dish didn't seem to lend an air of Italian authenticity either.
Of course the restaurant owner Alex Claridge's initial fame in Birmingham came with the spark of near-notoriety he lit when citric-flavoured ants were lined up on his cheese tartlet dessert when The Wilderness lurked, moss and all, in Dudley Street. So perhaps it wasn't too surprising to find a new species of insect seeking attention on another rather elegant pudding. Sadly, the ants fitted in very well while the locusts just looked out-of-place and tasted rather unpleasant, especially the after-taste, though they certainly had a crunch to them though I would have been happy to have not experienced that particular bit of added texture. Clever people who want to direct our lives having lost ground in the Brexit referendum are currently telling us that we should eat insects rather than meat as they are a more environment friendly source of protein. I can hardly believe that the idea is going to catch on in Birmingham after my locust bejewelled dessert.
So there we have it, daytime creatures eating lunch at Nocturnal Animals, named apparently not after badgers and slow lorises (though it could be argued that I and my dining companion could be easily compared with that latter creature) but after the well-thought of 2016 film which features a lot 1980s music as is to be heard in the restaurant. The restaurant is also offering a twist on traditional English high teas which sounds interesting and would be well worth trying if they're as much fun as the lunches. The kitchen staff are led by former Professional Masterchef competitor and pastry chef Brett Connor with the cocktails menu being devised by James Bowker.
The Japanese/Far Eastern theme so trendy at the moment dominates many of the dishes so I suppose we must live with the fashion until it has run its course which I suppose it will. I wonder if English pies and roasts are all the rage in Japan at the moment.
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