A busy couple of weeks for a food lover.
Yesterday, a visit to Purnell's which for me remains Birmingham's leading fine dining restaurant regardless of what Tripadvisor, Good Food Guide and others may think.
The Purnell's experience kicks off in the very heights of pleasure with the appetisers of potatoes in black coats to be dipped into a devastatingly delicious chorizo mayonnaise plus the heaven-inspired edible charcoal and now, something new, another creation of brilliance - the chickpea chip. The latest simple-but-wondrous addition to Purnell's catalogue of gastronomic pleasure, I could eat the new chip on bread (Purnell's own light-as-a-feather pain de campagne would be ideal) as a modern day chip buttie and that would be fine dining indeed.
After the delights of the finger food and country bread all else is a bonus. No other restaurant in Birmingham can match Purnell's for the ingenuity of the dishes (The Wilderness may give us ingenuity but some of the dishes descend into madness verging on a gastronomic equivalent of a screenplay for a horror movie) and the ingenuity is matched by the excellence of the flavours and textures. Lunch serves up 5 close-to-unimpeachable courses and Sonal Clair's sensible and inspired recommendations will ensure apt and delicious wines to accompany them. The lunch menu doesn't change much during the course of a season but even if the basic idea travels across the months there are usually tweaks to ensure a second (or third or fourth or ....) visit does not induce a sensation of Groundhog Day. And so the first starter of heavenly chicken liver parfait looked different this time from previous visits and had various presentations of beetroot accompanying it (what Purnell likes to call 'textures'). A spot on dish except one small slice of beetroot whose texture approximated to that of leather and lost the dish a vote of a perfect 10. And so, on to the fish course, the Brixham cod dish had been altered beyond recognition and about as near to perfection as you'd want it to be. The fish was perfect and had been pan-finished I think rather than being the product of nothing more than a water bath. It was delicious and served with various textures of cauliflower including a gorgeously sweet pickled version of the vegetable and a fabulous cheese sauce which unified the fish and cauliflower so brilliantly. If the chicken liver parfait had not scored the perfect 10 then the cod had assuredly succeeded.
There had of course been the second starter which was also familiar - Cornish crab - but again altered though I recognised the delicious bisque and enjoyed the accompanying samphire and sea herbs. On to the meat course - slow cooked daube of beef, perhaps getting to be just a little too familiar now and it might be nice to have something different for spring. This dish is livened up by spiced pear and bbq celeriac and an unctious sauce but on my next visit I should like to have some different meat. The dessert of caramelised apple and tonka bean mille feuille with apple snow ensured that I was replete though it probably did not achieve the heights of some of the desserts I have eaten in Purnell's.
And when you are eating at Purnell's make sure you have the coffee to ensure you get the best petits fours in Birmingham - this time a cherry chocolate that could be mistaken for a sawn-through bird's egg (that theme of eggs comes through at Purnell's time and time again) and a ferociously flavoured passion fruit jelly with marshmallow.
Purnell remains, for me, the Doyen of Birmingham food.
Aktar Islam is another Birmingham gastronomic notable and, though it's a gruesome term, celebrity chef. Having opened his excellent restaurant Opheem a few months earlier the doors of his next venture Legna which sells Italian-style food, were opened on 11 December 2018.
Three friends and myself paid our first lunchtime visit there about two and half months later and were pleased to find a menu which had food at highly competitive prices - £20 for 3 courses - antipasti, primi and dolci. However there's a lesson we poor old things should have learned years ago - you get what you pay for (if you're lucky) and if you don't pay much you don't get much. Restauranteurs should know that too - if you don't charge a lot then your ability to afford to serve up something memorable to your customers is extremely limited and it takes a genius to produce the truly memorable on a tiny budget (though such genii do exist). The genius was not present in Legna that day.
It's a large stylish restaurant with pleasant staff. I was pleased to see Chef Aktar in the restaurant as we left though he will not be cooking there but present in these opening weeks to keep an eye on progress. The starter was picked out from a choice of two - a small fragment of bresaola with rocket, Parmesan and truffle and a delightful little spot of egg yolk located to the side of the plate. A pleasant starter not intended by its size to feed The Five Thousand but nicely presented as shown below.
On to the main course. It is a long time since I have been served something so inelegant in a restaurant striving to build up a fine dining reputation. I had chosen 'Bolognese' described in the menu as, "Beef and wild boar ragu, pappardelle and mozzarella", and a large lump of meat (tasty it is true and pleasingly tender) on some satisfactory pasta made an appearance. If you did not look at it it was perfectly eatable and satisfying.
On to the dessert - what was described as a new twist on Tiramisu, "Mascarpone, coffee, marsala" It was perfectly satisfactory but not devastatingly delicious and little more needs to be said. We left the restaurant having settled our various bills and I said to one of my friends that I would be happy to return to Legna but fixing in my mind that if I did so then I would most assuredly choose a more ambitious menu, harder on my pocket, but kinder to my gastronomic pleasure surely and also fairer in assessing what Akbar Islam has come up with in this stylish restaurant in Summer Row.
A number of chefs mentioned in previous Blogs started their careers training at the Birmingham College of Food which was renamed Birmingham University College in 2007 though the college dates back to the 19th century and became known as the Birmingham College of Food and Domestic Arts in 1957. The University College has 2 restaurants open to the public on a daily basis for them to taste the fayre that the students are producing during the course of their training and a friend and I recently visited the 'fine dining' half of the two, called The Atrium. At least we did after undergoing the very tortuous process of making a reservation through a supervisor whom one had to telephone but is not usually available but who then rings back when one is not available so that one must be ring back again and find the supervisor not to be available who then returns the call a second time and, with luck, manages to do so when the customer is available.
The restaurant looks as modern and pleasing a dining area as one could wish. The delightful and enthusiastic student waiters descend on one in considerable numbers which is charming rather than irritating. Not entirely unirritating as there seemed to be a particular red wine that was being pushed forward and the young lady who was acting as sommelier was particularly aggressive in her promotion of the wine, was put out that we were insisting that we would like some white wine with our fish and later returned to our table to tell us triumphantly that another table "of four" had had the promoted wine with their fish and that they had been perfectly satisfied. Hmmm .... I should have been somewhat displeased to have encountered that young lady in a commercial restaurant if the college fails to cure her of her faults before she matriculated.
I thoroughly enjoyed my starter of Wild Mushroom Ravioli (actually there was only one raviolo but well sized and satisfying) with crispy shallots, garlic mushroom and blue cheese and tarragon sauce. A fine and delicious - and memorable - dish.
Another treat was to follow - the main course of supreme of salmon served on a splendid ratatouille with a basil cream sauce and 'red pepper essence' with a gorgeous 'crispy lemon sole' goujon. This was an excellent dish that one would be happy to be served in a commercial restaurant. I was quite happy with my dessert - a warm pear and almond flan served with an amaretto ice cream. The total cost of this collection of semi-precious gems was just £18.50p - well worth the effort of negotiating one's way through the tortuous process of making a reservation.
