84. A Trip To Hereford - The Bookshop.

Lucy The Labrador wondering how many steaks she could eat out of this Hereford bull. Answer - None. It’s a statue.

  A few weeks ago I studied the most recently published Good Food Guide to give myself inspiration for a trip to another West Midlands town or city where I could try out the restaurants it recommends there. It is a long time since I visited Hereford and therefore made arrangements to stay in the town for a couple of nights at a charming guest house on the edge of the city centre titled No 21. The quiet and comfortable b & b which really does serve a ten out of ten breakfast was particularly appealing as it took in guests with their accompanying dogs and Lucy The Labrador was not to be left out from the excursion.

 I was planning to go to the recommended Madam and Adam right by the river at the old bridge on Bridge Street and the also recommended The Bookshop further in town. Then the rains came and properties in Hereford near the river were flooded and Madam and Adam was forced to close for extensive repairs (see Blog 82). It’s terribly sad.

  On my first evening then I had nowhere to eat arranged. I set off for Beefy Boys on a cold drizzly late February evening with the streets of the town pretty well deserted. I eventually discovered this once revered burger restaurant and found that the streets of Hereford must be deserted because everyone was at this particular eatery. I was relieved that there wasn’t a table available. Pandemonium reigned in the place with numerous young people making as much noise as one can when food consumption is also taking place. The din was pretty well unbearable. I was glad to get out but could not bring myself to spend money in any of the surrounding chain restaurants and so I ambled back to the guest house stopping off for some very edible cod and chips on the way.

  Things were looking up the following evening. When I arrived at The Bookshop it was very early in the evening but within a few minutes the place was buzzing. The waiting staff were excellent. I had a not-too-memorable cocktail - ‘rhubarb bramble’ - and started off with some grilled sourdough made by the Alex Gooch artisan bakery in  Hay on Wye. Very edible especially with the beef dripping butter that came with it.

  Then a journey to a few minutes of what Paradise should be like. I had a 7oz fillet steak absolutely perfectly cooked according to my request and as delicious and as tender as any that could be rustled up in South America or anywhere else. I’m not much of a steak eater but it seemed preposterous to be in this steak restaurant in Hereford of all places and not to have the steak. And I did and I was glad. Two magnificent steak experiences in three days (see also Blog 83). To accompany the steak I had ‘smoky potatoes’ which is an accurate description of what was served (I think I should have had the chips) and a pot of garlic butter and there was some excellent salad on the plate with the meat. The steak did not really need anything to accompany it, it was so fine it could have stood alone and unadorned and would not have suffered for doing so. To accompany the steak I had a perfectly apt Malbec.

  Dessert seemed like a reasonable idea though not terribly necessary. I had a rather runny peanut butter parfait with added popcorn. A pleasant descent to bring me back to Earth after the sublime pleasure of the steak.

  I conclude that The Bookshop’s inclusion in The Good Food Guide is wholly acceptable.

   A trip to Hereford just to visit The Bookshop seems very reasonable.

83. Return Of The Native.

  Sometimes you have to give in to self-satisfaction and today I am basking in it. How pleased I am with myself that I have not yet shrugged off this mortal coil and as an old bloke now there’s a lot to look back on and so much to appreciate now while the old mortal coil keeps sparking.

  I’m also appallingly self-satisfied at my having developed an interest in food when I did and in living in and coming from the city and region where remarkable things are happening when it comes to food without having to suffer the horrors of living in London.

  And I’m terribly self-satisfied that here I am in Birmingham where a new generation of remarkable young chefs are taking the city’s food forward seemingly to new heights. And it’s good that some of them are Birmingham and West Midlands-born and look as though they are about to define what we eat around these parts in the coming years.

  Talking of which, I arrive at an exceedingly happy event which increases my self-satisfaction even more because I was there - Kray Treadwell’s return to Birmingham and his weekly pop-up restaurant at the new Selina hotel in Livery Street in the Jewellery Quarter. Kray, who came to attention when he won the Midlands heats of Great British Menu in 2019 by producing the most original if somewhat controversial dishes of the competition - his fish course, Disdain For Orthodoxy, a tribute to Punk music which delighted Matthew Fort but appalled some of the other judges and his remarkable Shharonnn! (a tribute to Birmingham musician Ozzie Osbourne) which swept the judges off their feet with the sheer pleasure of it) (see Blog 52) - originates from Solihull and first worked in a restaurant kitchen whilst at college in Glynn Purnell’s The Asquith. After working at Purnell’s he moved to York to work at The Blind Swine where he became aware of Michael O’Hare and then moved to O’Hare’s The Man Behind The Curtain in Leeds, clearly picking up some of his style from O’Hare, where he became Head Chef, a post he occupied for over 3 years during which period his participation in Great British Menu took place.

  And now he has returned to Birmingham and has done a joint pop-up with Andrew Sheridan at Craft Dining Rooms at the end of 2019 and now is doing several weekly pop-up sessions at Serena Hotel for which I set out recently to get my first taste of the Tredwell touch. The plan was 8 courses and 8 diners and everything was led off by a welcome glass of Prosecco accompanied by a little snack of a nature which involved some stretching of the mind to believe that it existed - crispy pork skin (which had the texture of a prawn cracker rather than a pork scratching) with a lemon curd and black olive dip. Well, it worked for me.

  Seated then at our proper table along came an oyster marinated in gin perfectly accompanied by melon similarly marinated in the same alcohol all with a little bit of gold leaf draped on it to emphasise the luxury of it all.

  Much enjoyable silliness followed with a piece of Parmesan coated in crispy breadcrumbs and accompanied with little cubes of soothing pineapple. Kray Tredwell follows Glynn Purnell in giving his own twist on that throwback to the 70s - cheese and pineapple on a stick.

  And then a true classic. Fabulously dressed spider crab - the crabbiest tasting crab dish I’ve had in years - with a little scone. Flavour of the highest level.

  Then our very own chance to sample a dish as close to one of the GBM dishes as possible - Shharonnn! complete with Ozzy Osbourne plate. Truly fabulously cooked fillet steak - delicious and tender beyond words - with American scones turned black, I assume with the use of squid ink. The steak alone would have sufficed - the scones were very salty and there was rather more of them than I needed. But I also identified on the plate little patches of the ‘blood-like beef sauce’ we’d seen on GBM and there were dark potato chips, in the compilation. Great stuff

  And so to the exquisite little dessert - a dainty little ginger sponge, as light as a feather, with ginger and coconut. Lovely.

  Afterwards everyone had some time to chat with Chef. I asked him about his new restaurant. He will not be working at La Mariposa, as I had previously read, but will be planning to open his own restaurant named after the birth weight of his baby, in the Custard Factory in Digbeth around May this year. He will probably be offering a tasting menu but cheaper than elsewhere to try to give chance for young people to come and experience fine dining.

  He is very much looking forward to being his own boss and cooking what he wants to cook. He comes over as serious and passionate about his food and isn’t worried about giving a critique of other hoary establishments. He recalled how he visited The Fat Duck in Bray as a teenager despite being pretty hard up and not being all that impressed, feeling that the place got its reputation more from the theatrics surrounding the serving of the food than from the quality of the dishes themselves.

  No matter, my Pop-Up first experience of Tredwell’s food tells me that while he might produce some dramatic-looking and witty dishes he certainly does not need a lot of props to convince me that he is a great chef. It looks as though the food scene in Birmingham is moving on to even greater heights and he will be one of the young men leading it.

 Post Scriptum - In the course of our conversation the subject of retirement came up (mine, not his obviously) and I asked about whether Richard Turner  (Turner’s, Maribel) was going to take up another venture but it seems that he has indeed retired. And who can blame him? I heartily recommend it as a way of life.

82. Dining Out In The West Midlands Amid Floods And Viruses

  February 2020 has been a month which people in the West Midlands might care to forget. Coronavirus is making the news abroad and a large area of Italy has been quarantined in the last couple of days. The virus hasn’t taken long to spread its tentacles out from the Far East to southern Europe and with an epidemic like this restaurant owners must be worrying that the virus will take root in our area in the foreseeable future. If people won’t go out or mix with strangers then giving up dining out for weeks or months is an obvious outcome. Who knows how badly this could affect our region’s burgeoning gastronomic trade.
  And matters haven’t been helped by the floods that have affected several West Midlands counties - Worcestershire, Shropshire, Herefordshire and Gloucestershire. I am off on a trip to Hereford in the near future and was looking forward to visiting the two Good Food Guide 2020-recommended restaurants during my visit - Madam And Adam on Bridge Street, far too close to the river Wye to have escaped the floods, and The Bookshop, which seems to have escaped the watery devastation.

  In Shropshire, the river Teme has also reeked havoc. A not surprising victim of the raging river was CSONS At the Green Cafe which is situated at the water’s edge at Dinham Mill in front of the building which once housed the Michelin-starred Mr Underhill’s. The usually lovely riverside location of The Green Cafe had doubtless played a significant part in the former restaurant’s securing of a Bib Gourmand but it is clearly problematical when the incessant rain turns the river into a raging torrent. CSONS At the Green Cafe announced that it had had to close due to flooding on its Facebook page on 16 February but was able to announce that it was able to reopen a couple of days later.

  The river was also very heavy in October 2019 and was close to flooding The Green Cafe but did not reach the height recently achieved in early February:-

  Given these apparent effects of global warming it is timely that the Michelin Guide Great Britain And Ireland 2021 will have a new award included in it to reward a restaurant’s contribution to sustainable gastronomy. The award is symbolised by a green clover and was introduced in the French Michelin Guide 2020 a month ago. Fifty French dining establishments received the award for their environmental practices.

81. Great British Menu To Return Fronted By A Comedian.

 It was announced recently that BBC2’s annual Great British Menu will return to our television screens this spring for its fifteenth series with some changes made to it. For the first time the programme will be hosted - by the comedian Susan Calman  - which will inject a piece of downmarket triteness (and somewhere no doubt inclusivity with which the BBC is currently obsessed) not previously witnessed in the history of GBM.
  The already rather stretched competitors will also now be expected to deliver 6 courses with an amuse bouche and a pre-dessert being added to the list of their labours. I assume that this gives 6 chefs the chance to present a dish at the final Banquet which this year has a children’s literature theme. Well, that is probably appropriate. Sometimes one wonders if fine dining really is something like a Mad Hatter’s tea party and it’s true that the BBC really is the nearest thing that we British have to a modern-day Wonderland

Andy Waters

  One question I recently realised that I needed to ask myself was “what happened to Andy Waters?”.
  Andy Waters had had links with Birmingham and the West Midlands for a long time. He started work as a commis chef at Chewton Glen in Hampshire and then came to Birmingham to work at The Plough and Harrow in Edgbaston for 8 years. Subsequently he worked under Paul Bocuse in Lyon in France and then returned to the West Midlands to work at Simpsons when it was situated in Kenilworth and where he was working with Glynn Purnell and Luke Tipping and then opened his own restaurant, Edmund’s (named after his late father who had died tragically at the age of 32), firstly in Henley in Arden in 2002 and later, in 2009, moving it to Brindley Place in Birmingham city centre. He also opened a restaurant at The Queen’s in Belbroughton in Worcestershire.
  Waters sold Edmund’s in 2012 - it became Edmunds Bistro de Luxe with Didier Philpott as Head Chef (he had been Head Chef at his own Toque D’Or in the building in the Jewellery Quarter that was subsequently to become the present home to Alex Claridge’s The Wilderness) - and opened a new restaurant, Waters On The Square, at Five Ways in 2012. However he closed this in 2014 after being approached by Genting Group to become Head Chef in a restaurant it was opening at Resort World at the National Exhibition Centre near Birmingham Airport. The new restaurant was named Andy Waters. Waters ended his association with the restaurant in November 2018 and Aaron Darnley became the new Head Chef there, the restaurant’s name being changed to Sky By Waters.

Didier Philpott at the renamed Edmund’s Bistro de Luxe

 Andy Waters took up the post of Head Chef at Pebble Beach restaurant in Barton on Sea in Hampshire in October 2019 where his menu features modern British dishes.

80. Scullery And Shakespeare.

With the West Midlands turned into a giant lake as the result of the incessant rain and resultant flooding, it was pleasing to find that Stratford-upon-Avon at least was only mildly affected with a fairly minor bursting of its banks by the Avon as it flowed through the town near the Royal Shakespeare Theatre and Holy Trinity Church where Shakespeare’s mortal remains lie at rest.

  The thing about Stratford is that it is a one industry town and that industry is Shakespeare. If anything goes wrong Shakespeare-wise then everyone there suffers. The disastrous decision by the Royal Shakespeare Theatre to feature endlessly on its main stage a pretty naff musical about a boy who wants to wear a dress and turn up to school in it has, so I am told, had a negative effect on some of the good restaurants in the town. It seems that the play, aimed at families with teenagers, is not attracting the usual people who visit the Royal Shakespeare Theatre and those it is attracting - its target audience - are more likely to end up in a cheapish pizza joint (though nothing is cheap in Stratford) than a good quality restaurant.  So it seems that the winter season has not been a kind one to some of Stratford’s restaurants. 

  Some probably have advantages in this situation - Salt, despite its glum waiting staff, has a Michelin star to attract the punters though when I walked past it one evening a couple of weeks ago it didn’t really look as though trade was booming, The Woodsman has the benefits of being situated in an upmarket hotel with a potentially captive clientele and also has the lure to the curious of being a fairly recently opened restaurant which has been feted by some professional critics and No 9 Church Street seems to have a loyal band of older local diners who turn up there from time to time though the thought of setting out to go there on dark wet evenings as we have had in recent weeks may act as a disincentive despite no matter how enjoyable the food served there might be. Then there are the cloned bistros on Sheep Street, close to the theatre and hotels, which have menus which hold more promise than they deliver and are well set up for passing trade.

  Then there is No 33 The Scullery, a dear little restaurant loved by Tripadvisors but ignored by Michelin and The Good Food Guide though the food there is really rather good. Situated on Greenhill Street, rather unpromisingly next door to a launderette, it doesn’t benefit to any degree from passing trade unlike the establishments of Sheep Street. But it does benefit from its justified Tripadvisor popularity and, I should think, local word of mouth.

  Small and narrow, it was opened by chef Andrew Edwards and his business partner Carl Pritchard towards the end of 2014 in the same spot vacated by Moro, a well thought of Italian restaurant which relocated to elsewhere in Stratford. I dined there quite often in its early days when things were rather quieter than now and you could have a little chat with chef about your opinion about his dishes at the end of your meal. The Stratford dining scene was quite different then - no Salt, no Woodsman, all the Sheep Street clones, some not very good Asian restaurants and some chains - just No 9 Church Street to tickle up one’s appetite. Andrew Edwards’ new little restaurant was a bright light newly lit for Stratford diners - he revealed himself to be a chef who could produce extremely enjoyable dishes with high quality, locally sourced ingredients without silly, flashy blobs and streaks scattered around the plate and substituting better cuts of meat for the prevailing and ubiquitous pork belly and cheeks of ox or pig. In short the arrival of No 33 The Scullery in Stratford was a step forward for this town where there’s a fair bit of money floating around and where one would expect that the locals would appreciate an alternative high quality food emporium.

   It isn’t a place where you feel you need very much more than the exceptionally fresh and delicious food prepared admirably expertly by Edwards but the restaurant is bright and cheerful, the serving team pleasant and helpful and the drinks are rather good. It was soon after The Scullery was opened that I discovered the sheer joy of Cotswold Gin from south Warwickshire and debuting in The Scullery and it’s still there along with, I see, Stratford gin. But back to the food. The point about the place is that Andrew Edwards is a really good cook. He knows how to produce excellent fish dishes without needing to immerse them in water baths and his meat is perfectly cooked by methods used by cooks rather than celebrity chefs. 

  He does have a habit of being rather inflexible and probably unseasonal with the vegetables he serves with his dishes; I have made the mange tout a particular enemy of mine over the years and that particular entity does seem to appear on his plates of food at any time of the year but, unlike so many restaurants, he does actually seem to realise that having some vegetables accompanying a meal is a good thing. It’s a particularly good thing if you’re not paying £5 for a small pot of mashed potatoes with a bit of garlic and bacon added to it, even if it’s delicious, as is the case in another Stratford restaurant. I’m sorry to say that I don’t entirely go along with him on how cooked a vegetable should be; some of his vegetables are a little al dente for my taste.

  Andrew Edwards has maintained an excellent standard of the food presented at No 33 since the restaurant opened. I say that because I have recently visited there again. A joyous evening.

  I had a starter of a wonderfully delicious warm goat’s cheese and beetroot tartlet with balsamic glaze sitting on some very pleasant leaves. The pastry was fine and nicely thin and perfectly crispy. Goat’s cheese can be an unpleasant little number when it wants to be but this tartlet with the sweetness of the beetroot made the cheese that rode on its back excruciatingly moreish. A great little dish.

  It’s hard to have any credibility as a food lover if one can not wax lyrical about game. I often fail dreadfully on that score. But seeing what was on offer on the No 33 The Scullery ‘Specials’ board drove me with great anticipation to plunge deep into the world of game - I chose exquisitely cooked medallions of venison served with a truly fabulous bitter chocolate and port sauce with slices of small  sautéed potatoes which soaked up deliciously some of the sauce making them little taste bombs of pleasure. The picture below shows that there was a nice green and orange selection of vegetables also claiming a place on the plate but among them you can see a wicked not-too-little mange tout pushing its way into the foreground of the pretty still life. The venison was generously portioned and looked and tasted magnificent but the addition of the sauce really made it a dish to savour and remember. 

  For pudding a very edible salted caramel cheesecake with a few squirts of raspberry coulis and an amusing little texture on top in the form a few bits of pop corn.

  Hopefully the Royal Shakespeare Theatre will get over all the current silliness going on there at the moment about trying to address every concern that its liberal elite thinks that a good liberal member of society should have and give back Shakespeare to its punters and bring them all out to support the town’s only industry and ensure that great little restaurants like No 33 The Scullery and other businesses in the town don’t suffer because of the policies of the theatre’s increasingly loopy artistic production elite.

79. Into The 2020s With Purnell’s.

  I am lucky enough to visit most of the better Birmingham restaurants from time to time but, now in my eleventh year of visiting Cornwall Street, Purnell’s remains my favourite. Every time I visit  I think that the food there keeps getting better and better.

  A sunny February afternoon in Birmingham, everywhere more and more glamorous high rise buildings are shooting upwards, the tram line gradually extends itself along Broad Street, Brindley Place has a new restaurant every time you look and Paradise Place promises to deliver much in the near future. But take a turn through the Colmore Business District and there it is - still there - the almost anonymous, secretive-looking Purnell’s on a corner in Cornwall Street almost opposite Opus which is much easier to spot. You could miss it if you didn’t know where it was.

  Straight to the food. The single Purnell’s chip, now hardly recognisable with its fluffy coat of grated cheese and neatly covered by a single sorrel leaf, languishing on a neat piece of slate alongside Glynn Purnell’s gorgeous pieces of black meringue - ‘edible charcoal’ - and black potatoes, heavenly light lemon-flavoured mash potato, in a raven black coat. Triumphant Purnell gems. I suppose the new cheesy chip is a grand little Purnell joke playing on the gruesome trend in recent years of the young in particular to want their chips drenched in melted cheese and thus add even more to the enormous number of calories that can be consumed in one meal. Purnell’s cheesy chip is an elegant version of keeping up with youth and its ill-judged fads. 

  On to the starter proper - escabeche of a red beetroot (a juicy lightly-pickled wafer-thin slice) with the addition of other types of beetroot, a sprig of watercress with little blobs of watercress sauce and a wasabi crumble lifting everything from a beetroot dish to a forever memorable beetroot dish.

  The second starter. Delicious to the level of 10 out of 10. The most perfect chicken liver parfait balanced beautifully by little pieces of red wine-marinated pear with a clever little katalfi nest sitting on top to add a wholly enjoyable nibbly element and all with a pretty little hat of a single red-veined sorrel leaf. Feed me this course every day please.

The fish course. Now it seems the fish course has a new term added to the menu - the initially apparently perplexingly unnecessary French-English language fusion of Fish du jour which is of course another splendid little Purnell joke thrown in as an amuse de langue rather than an amuse bouche to sustain the smile on our faces while we’re waiting for the course to come along which it does with perfect timing. The fish du jour is tasty pollack with a greener than green parsley sauce, very edible chopped up clams and a kohlrabi remoulade. Something new, I think, and very pretty too especially if you like green things.

    I moan a lot about the ceaseless serving of pork belly or ox/pig cheeks as the main meat course in good quality restaurants. I understand why the meats feature so often on menus but generally wish that chefs could come up with something different more often. So if you’re going to find a beef cheek on your plate yet again then it’s got to be really good. So it was that I looked down at a plate of slow cooked daube of beef served with barbecued leek (very good), mushroom ragout, creamed celeriac and the overwhelming primitive pleasure of a deep fried breadcrumbed onion ring. The beef was bathed in a glistening unctiousness  as one looked down on one’s plate and that unctiousness was carried through to the eating. The beef was, beyond doubt, unimpeachable. I nibbled my onion ring in little sections to prolong the pleasure though I would have been even happier if the onion had been somewhat sweeter and perhaps cooked for a few seconds longer. Still, given that this was a course based on nothing more than ox cheek, it had all come together pretty triumphantly.

   

  I’m an unusual individual in that I generally avoid chocolate desserts. But the chocolate tart served up with its excellent, crispy pastry and accompanied by the two gorgeously complementary flavours of dramatic mango and dreamy passion fruit, was a happy dish with which to close the meal.

  The service remains as excellent as ever in its own amiably and comfortably relaxed but highly efficient way though there are new faces dealing with the customers. Sonal Clare has now left his managerial role at Purnell’s and exchanged his lounge suit for jeans and trainers as general manager at The Wilderness and his place has been taken over seamlessly by Jarek Samborski, originally from Poland, who began training as a chef in Lublin but found himself instead working front of house and then coming to Britain and working firstly in Sussex. He came to Birmingham in 2015 and was appointed Assistant Restaurant Manager under Sonal Clare in October of that year. This sustained period of familiarisation with Purnell’s is clearly showing through. He has the necessary charm and understanding of his customers and can clearly schmooze his diners highly effectively though in a different way from the polished Clare-schmooze. His wine recommendations are to be highly trusted. He said that he has now appointed a new sommelier - Adrian - who told me he had been at Purnell’s for just 3 weeks having arrived from France and naturally he is still finding his way around. Perhaps he will introduce a greater emphasis on French wine, he joked that he would but many a true word is spoken in just.

  Purnell’s is still Purnell’s. That’s how I like it.

Jarek Samborski 

78. Lunch At Purnell’s Bistro.

  Over the years, since Glynn Purnell opened it as his second string city centre restaurant, firstly with the name The Asquith (originally located in Edgbaston), in 2011, the food at Purnell’s Bistro in Newhall street has been rather inconsistent in its quality.

   Purnell had opened the Edgbaston Asquith in the building in Montague Road which had been home to Jessica’s where he had earned his first Michelin star till he decided to move on to open his own restaurant, Purnell’s, in Cornwall Street, but after only 6 months and after problems with his landlord, he decided to move The Asquith to its current location. The head chef in Edgbaston had been Jason Eaves and he moved to the Newhall Street location when the Asquith was relocated but he decided to go travelling internationally in 2012 and Purnell decided to close and rebrand the restaurant as Ginger’s Bar and Purnell’s Bistro. 

  Although the Edgbaston Asquith closed before I got around to eating there I did dine at the Newhall Street Asquith in early March 2012 when I think Jason Eaves must still have been Head Chef and I had a thoroughly good evening of cocktails from Ginger’s Bar followed by a dinner of Brixham scallops served with leek and potato velouté, leek fondue and ‘bacon crumble’, braised ox cheek Rossini accompanied by puy lentils, pomme purée and fois gras and vanilla panna cotta served with a red current sorbet. The menu sounds that little more sophisticated than it reads now. And it was very good.

  After Jason Eves departed the standard of food remained very satisfactory and I enjoyed a birthday dinner there with 11 guests in May 2013 but since then experiences at Purnell’s have been variable from both the food and service points of view. Despite being a fairly frequent visitor to Ginger’s Bar I had not eaten at Purnell’s Bistro for a year or two so I was not quite sure what to expect when I lunched there with friends recently.

  What I had, the pleasure no doubt boosted by two doses of Ginger’s Bar’s admirable whiskey-based Penicillin cocktail, made for a highly enjoyable lunch. I started with the thoroughly tasty Chicken and ham hock terrine nicely accompanied by a celeriac remoulade and apple purée. It looked simple but was truly delicious. 

  And so on to the main course. Much musing took place as to what to choose but I couldn’t resist what turned out to be unimpeachable Beer battered fish and chips with wonderfully cooked cod in perfectly crispy batter, highly successful chips, a spot-on tartare sauce and perfectly adequate mushy peas. I opted to have a vital additional element - malt vinegar served in a dinky little bottle. Perhaps that little bottle of vinegar should be served with the dish without the need to ask for it, just for perfection. The very best fish and chips I have had for a long time (yes of course it’s also the most expensive plate of fish and chips I’ve had for a while but really I can’t wait to go back to have a second helping and hope that the excellence of this first plate will be repeated in the second).

  I had a wonderfully enjoyable dessert in the form of a perfectly coconutty coconut parfait accompanied by pineapple and when consumed with the recommended drunk, a delicious rum, one found oneself eating and drinking a deconstructed pina colada. A modest little classic. I’ll eat that any day. 

  Purnell’s Bistro has been returned to me. I shall return to it.

  And on to another notable name in the increasingly spectacular Birmingham restaurant scene - Aktar Islam, he of the Opheem fame. Apparently we are now only a few days away from the opening of his Argentinian-style restaurant, Pulperia, in Brindley Place (see Blog 65). On Twitter some devastatingly enticing images can be seen of some of the food which will be on offer. The stuff that dreams are made of:- Galician prime rib, truffle mushroom tagliatelle, Morcilla, Fresian Cider House ribeye:-

  Don’t cry for me Argentina.

77. Craft Dining Rooms Double Act.

  6 February 2020, the start of a new year and a new decade. It seems like dining out in Birmingham is coming along leaps and bounds. A new generation of chefs is establishing themselves in the city as the year goes by. At the end of last year Andrew Sheridan took over the reigns at Craft Dining Rooms, last year’s Professional Masterchef winner Stu Deeley left The Wilderness and is currently awaiting the arrangements for his new restaurant in the Harborne/Edgbaston area to be finalised and Kray Treadwell has left Leeds and is cooking at a series of pop-ups at La Mariposa in the Jewellery Quarter in the run-up to the restaurant becoming fully operational.

 And everyone seems to be working with everyone else. At the end of 2019 Treadwell popped up at the Craft Dining Rooms and now we have an evening of exciting and mostly immaculate food at the same venue from an 8-course tasting menu in which Andrew Sheridan the host chef alternated his dishes with those of Stu Deeley.

  Firstly it’s worth mentioning that the Craft Dining Rooms have had some structural features added which have resulted in the restaurant looking less like a highly upmarket cafeteria and more like a smart and more intimate place to dine out. The place is also a lot warmer than it’s previous refrigerator-like personna though the alterations come at the cost of making it a long walk to the toilets, not nessarily a good thing after a cocktail and the 8 glasses of wine served as a result of ordering the wine flight, and the restaurant entrance door, reached by walking under an arch of slightly tacky artificial flowers, is rather difficult to locate. However the restaurant is generally improved by the alterations and is certainly cosier now than previously.

  And so to an evening in the company of the food of Andrew Sheridan and Stu Deeley’s food. The menu and wines were based on Craft Dining Rooms’ (CDR) resolution to feature British food and drinks. Thus the wine flight, which was excellent value, gave us wines from Kent, Devon, West Sussex, Essex and our very own Worcestershire. And generally they were rather good especially the sparkling wine, as I suppose we should expect, and the lovely Astley Late Harvest 2017 from Worcestershire. Astley is a village never Stourport on Severn, a little north of Worcester and if the rest of its wines are as good as this dessert wine then the West Midlands has a lot to be pleased about.

  

  Course 1 was Andrew Sheridan’s fabulous intensely flavoured chicken soup. A gem.

  Then to Stu Deeley’s smoked soy salmon served with little balls of pickled celeriac and smoked almond. I suddenly realised I was talking too much and not concentrating on the flavours of the food and sensibly passed the time taken up by eating the course for using my mouth to appreciate the flavours and textures rather than regaling my dining companions with banter and chatter.  

  Another little gem from Andrew Sheridan, ‘Cheddar, onion and apple’. Little crispy rectangles of pastry covered with onion dust and full of apple flavour. The Lychgate Bacchus 2018 from West Sussex, full of apple flavour itself, was an excellent accompaniment.

  And then from Stu Deeley an exquisite little piece of immaculately-cooked cod with a satay-flavoured sauce and fine little cotton-strands of spring onion to bring the mildest heat and crunch to the texture and to enhance the far-eastern effect. A great hit with all three of us at our table.

  At this point, tragically, and probably associated with the wine flight’s mounting collection of emptied glasses, I forgot to photograph the ‘Mushroom, truffle and onion’ course. It was delicious and splendidly truffley’. But we move on to the next course of pork belly, black pudding, langoustine with fennel and yuzu. All three of us felt that over the years we had developed pork-belly exhaustion and this course did not succeed in restoring any love we might ever have had for the cut of pork. To be honest the langoustine was rather nice but it didn’t add a lot to the meal for me and my companions and the black pudding was not the most delicious I have had in my black pudding eating history. But the crackling was spot on - very important.

  And then a happy little gem - a joyful little cylinder of rice pudding with delightful hay flavoured ice cream and apple mousse and apple butter purée which had been such a great success for Andrew Sheridan in the 2018 Great British Menu competition. Ambrosia (by which I do not mean the very edible tinned rice pudding but the food of the gods).

 And finally to the cheese course. A cheesy little tartlet or a tarty little cheeselet depending on your point of view with a chunk of cheddar and a tasty accompanying jelly. And with that undisputed satiation set in.

  If there’s one thing to bother oneself about that is the very patchy service at the Craft Dining Rooms. I am pleased that those responsible for service appreciate that punters don’t want a five minute lecture on their food or drink but a little explanation is helpful particularly when the menu itself is not heavy on detail. With some of the courses and some stages of the wine flight we received those desired details and explanations and with some we did not. Service should be regarded as a piece of theatre with the players not only delivering their lines but also delivering them in a manner audible and understandable to their audience/diners. In this era of the chef celebrity perhaps the waiter celebrity is a concept which should be boosted.