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.
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