57. Harden’s 2018. Time Moves On.

  Following on from Blog 56, it’s interesting to look at a more recent edition of Harden’s Guide with the title Harden’s Best UK Restaurants 2018 printed boldly in burning red and yellow (plus a little blue) now on the cover.
  Little else has changed apart from the book’s dimensions, the percentage of the book taken up by restaurants in the United Kingdom outside of London (up marginally from 39.3% in 2011 to 45.4% in 2018) and the reversal of the scoring scheme so that marks now range from 5 (exceptional) down to 1 (poor) with the inbetween scores representing Very good (4), Good (3) and Average (2).
  So how did the West Midlands in general and Birmingham in particular fare in the more recent book?
 ‘Top scorers’ for restaurants outside London -

  £90 - Adam’s Birmingham.       5 5 4
            Lumière Cheltenham.      5 5 4
            Le Champignons Sauvage Cheltenham.    5 5 2
            Purnell’s Birmingham      4 5 4

  £80 - Carter’s Of Moseley Birmingham.       4 4 3

  £70 - Old Downton Lodge Ludlow.       4 4 4
            Cheal’s Of Henley Henley in Arden 4 4 3
            Fishmore Hall Ludlow            4 4 3
            The Cross At Kenilworth Kenilworth.         4 4 3

  £60 - Lasan Birmingham.           5 4 2
           Eckington Manor Pershore.           4 3 4
           Sebastian’s Oswestry.        4 5 3
           Purslane Cheltenham.        4 4 3
           The Butcher’s Arms Eldersfield        4 4 3

  £50 - Prithvi Cheltenham.           5 4 4
           Bosquet Kenilworth.          5 4 3

  £40 - Harborne Kitchen Birmingham          5 4 4
           Pascal At The Old Vicarage Burton On Trent.         5 4 4.

  Sadly only about 6.8% of restaurants on the 2018 ‘Top scorers’ list were located in the West Midlands and this has not really changed from 2011 when the percentage of non-London ‘Top scorers’ was about 6%.

  The Birmingham restaurants mentioned in the 2018 list were Adam’s, Al Frash, Carter’s Of Moseley, Edgbaston Hotel, Harborne Kitchen, Jyoti’s Vegetarian, Lasan, Not Real Indian (NRI), Opus, Original Patty Men, The Plough Harborne, Purnell’s, Rofuto, Sabah Sabah, San Carlo, Simpson’s, Tom’s Kitchen and The Wilderness. Interestingly the 2018 list includes 18 restaurants which was actually one less than the number of restaurants which received recognition in the 2011 edition. We might note of course that Turner’s had been closed rather wilfully by Richard Turner and therefore did not feature in the list and although his restaurant had disappeared from the Harborne dining scene others had taken its place.
  Between 2011 and 2018 the list changed considerably with only Jyoti, Lasan, Opus, Purnell’s and Simpsons appearing in both. The Birmingham dining scene continues to evolve.

56. Harden’s 2011 - Where We Ate In 2011.

Among my old food guides I have a Harden’s Reporter Edition 2011. I took it off my bookshelves entirely randomly I admit but a it’s nice reminder of what was in and was out in the dining scene in Birmingham and the West Midlands almost 10 years ago.
  The guide rates the restaurant experience under 3 headings - food, service and ambience which is fair enough though it’s not hard to feel, like charity is to faith and hope, that the greatest of these is food.
  We will not be surprised that most of the book is given over to the London food scene while the rest of the United Kingdom is a mere appendage to the main bulk of the text. So how did Birmingham and the West Midlands fare in those post-financial crisis days when David Cameron was hugging hoodies and Gordon Brown was saying nasty things about old ladies who had supported the Labour Party for decades and Brexit was an uninvented word?
  The ‘top scorers’ were listed within their own price brackets and each aspect of the restaurant ie food, service and ambience was rated 1 (exceptional) to 5 (poor) with the numbers in between being 2 (very good), 3 (good) and 4 (average) which actually seems to be rather a good scoring system. The West Midlands top scorers were:-

  £70+  La Bécasse Ludlow                1 1 2
             Simpsons Birmingham.         1 1 2
  £60+  Mr Underhills Ludlow.           1 2 2
            Le Champignon Sauvage Cheltenham     1 2 2
            Purnell’s Birmingham.            1 3 3
            Turner’s Birmingham              2 3 4
  £50+  Lumière Cheltenham               1 2 2
            Brockencote Hall Chaddesley Corbett     2 2 2
            Russell’s Broadway                 2 2 2
            Opus Birmingham                   2 1 3
            Edmund’s Birmingham           2 2 3
            Bosquet Kenilworth                2 2 4
  £40+  The Art Kitchen Warwick       1 2 2

    Therefore at that time the West Midlands had only 13 listed ‘Top scorer’ restaurants out of well over 200 which were situated outside London. Birmingham was home to five of them and of those three (Simpsons, Purnell’s and Opus) are with us still.

  The complete list of Birmingham restaurants included in the directory then was:- Asha’s Indian Bar and Restaurant, Bank, Buonissimo, Cafe Ikon Ikon Gallery, Chez Jules, Chung Ying Garden, Cielo, Edmunds, Hotel du Vin et Bistro, Itihaas, Jyoti, Kinnaree Thai, Lasan, Must, Opus, Pascal’s Purnell’s, San Carlo, Simpson’s and Turner’s. The fact that a number of these have long closed emphasises the fragility of the restaurant trade.

55. Something Good Comes Out Of Manchester, Purnell To Be Sent To Coventry.

  Gastronomically, it’s fair to say that little of any worth has emerged from the Michelin star desert of Manchester in recent years. Notable chefs have opened restaurants there in the hope of turning the place’s reputation around and all have failed. But at last something delightful has come to Birmingham from Manchester - Tattu - the restaurant opened on 1 February 2019 in the bowels of the Grand Hotel, soon to be reopened (hopefully), well actually in the hotel’s old boiler room, serving contemporary Chinese food in grand style as one would expect given the location (by which I mean The Grand not the boiler room).

  I lunched there in March and was almost paralysed by the wonderful atmosphere, the splendid decor and the gorgeous-looking food which tasted even better than it looked. My lunching companion and I chose to eat from the £52 menu for two people or more which is served as 4 courses or, as the restaurant prefers it, 4 ‘waves’. Everything was delightful and generously portioned ensuring that ‘you weren’t hungry an hour after the meal’ as the old adage about Chinese food used to go.

  Tattu’s first restaurant was opened by Adam and Drew Jones, two brothers, in 2015 with a second branch opening its doors in Leeds in 2017. It was stated that the restaurant serves ‘contemporary Chinese cuisine that fuses traditional flavours with modern cooking techniques and playful presentation’. I like it a lot. The food there is a great pleasure and it is worth going just to see how the interior has been designed. The best new restaurant in Birmingham so far this year.

 I do enjoy the BBC’s Saturday Kitchen but especially when Birmingham’s own Glynn Purnell is hosting it as he did very successfully last weekend. Few hosts have such a wonderful sense of humour coupled with a pleasant vague mischievousness which makes the programme easy and happy viewing. In the recent show Purnell ventured into the realm of Mexican cuisine on which he emphasised more than once that he was not an expert but the viewer, tormented permanently by the ability to see the food but never to taste it, could see that the dish had Purnell’s own ever-inventive twist to it which increased the pain of being unable to reach out and put the food into one’s mouth.

 Meanwhile the Good Food Guide has reported that Glynn Purnell is planning to open his third restaurant in 2021 but in Coventry when it will be the UK City Of Culture. The plans sound exciting -  with the restaurant to be sited in the converted coach house of a restored 14th century monastery. I can’t wait to get on the train to Coventry to dine there or perhaps, given the location, I should plan to travel by coach and horse which I feel is appropriate since my maternal great-grandfather was a coachman, his own father having arrived in Birmingham in the 1850’s after farming in south Warwickshire prior to that.

54. Modern Banquets In Stratford-upon-Avon.

  I like to collect menus from different periods as they reflect an important aspect of how people have lived since they started to dine out in modern times. Fashions in food change like fashions in clothing and the food consumed at any one time says a lot about culture, wealth, taste (in both senses of the word) and technology. 

  In Blog 16 I detailed a menu for a large public meal served in Birmingham in 1896 and now, below, I include the menus for the past three years of the Shakespeare Birthday lunch held in neighbouring Stratford-upon-Avon since the 1990s to commemorate the anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth (and death). A lot has changed about those menus in the past 120 years. I depict all three for 2017, 2018 and 2019 for consideration and comparison. They may or may not be as sumptuous or extravagant as the meal served in 1896 and it is not even easy to decide which menu from whichever era one would prefer to be offered. But it is fun to see what has and has not changed in that period regardless of how drastically different England is now - in all sorts of ways - compared with 1896.

  The first menu depicted here is that of the 2017 lunch. The principal guest speaker who had been awarded the 2017 Pragnell Shakespeare Birthday Award (an international award given to someone for their ‘outstanding achievement in extending the appreciation and enjoyment of the works of William Shakespeare and in the general advancement of Shakespearean knowledge and understanding’) was the actor Sir Anthony Sher who had lately played King Lear and Falstaff at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford. The menu offered the following dishes:-

Starter - Gravalax of salmon with artichoke and citrus salad with a caper dressing OR Brie and caramelised purple onion tartlet with balsamic caramelised fig with watercress and herb

Main - Honey and lemon marinated chicken supreme with leek and mustard mash, fine beans, glazed carrots with tarragon sauce OR Asparagus, spring onion and tarragon risotto with wild rocket and aged balsamic

Dessert - Chocolate salted caramel torte with caramel ice cream.

 The 2018 lunch was marked by the presenting of the Pragnall Award to the remarkable and splendid actress Jane Lapotaire. The menu featured:-

Starter - Smoked salmon and trout rillette with pickled fennel, orange and saffron mayonnaise OR Goats cheese and tomato tart

Main - Roadted rump Pfizer’s local lamb, crushed potato, spiced aubergine, fine beans, roasted carrots and olive jus OR Roasted vegetable Wellington, spinach and wild mushroom cream

Dessert - Baked vanilla cheesecake, blueberry compote and raspberry wafer OR Fresh fruit salad.

  And so to the 2019 lunch and menu. The Pragnell award winner was not, this time, a thespian but a distinguished Polish Shakespearean academic and founder of the theatre in Gdańsk. The dishes served were little changed over the three years that the lunch had been held at the Crowne Plaza and continued to show what a limited choice of ingredients can be offered now with so many dishes being unservable for a variety of reasons. With over 400 diners the chef is faced with an almost insurmountable wall of reasons as to why a certain dish can not be served. I was seated at a table made up almost entirely of old people some of whom must have lived through the post-war period of rationing if not through wartime rationing itself. You would think that those times of being glad to eat whatever was offered would have steeled their bodies for any food that might have been on the menu. But no, anything but. There were 3 or 4 out of the eight people sitting at my table who could not eat something or other that was being served and the hapless waiting staff were faced with several 

instances of what could or could not be tolerated on the diners’ plates. Plates were being brought to the table and taken away again and returned with different items on them only to find they had to be removed again because something still was not quite right. It was like sitting at a table with a collection of finicky eight year olds.

  Anyway, for the record the food choices were:-

Starter - Salmon gravidlax - cured salmon, dill and brandy seasoned with salt and sugar OR Mediterranean stuffed mushroom - Mushroom stuffed with Provençale vegetables with a Mediterranean herb crust.

Main - Corn fed chicken - with Dauphinoise potato, forest mushrooms and red wine jus OR 

Courgette canneloni - Courgette containing puy lentils, pomodorino and vine cherry tomato (no pasta in sight, this is what may have been called in the past, rather less elegantly, ‘stuffed courgette’

Dessert - Chocolate truffle torte - with orange Anglaise and poached berries (the custard was a mere smear on the plate and more of it was needed badly) OR Fresh fruit salad.

The chicken breast was of reasonable proportion but not particularly exciting - sometimes it is possible to raise the roof with a delicious chicken but just how easy that is when one is catering for 400 guests is a question I’m glad I don’t have to answer. It’s all very well admiring those star chefs who appear on television and whose names we know and who are serving covers of 40 to 80 (if 

they’re lucky) per meal but it seems to me that the real heroes are those who serve meals to hundreds of incredibly fussy diners at a banquet such as this. Well done to them if they make such meals edible let alone pleasurable.