96. Lockdown Diversions

  The ninth week. Things are starting to get difficult. Food is being consumed increasingly greedily; the labrador, herself a seasoned gourmande, takes one look at me and hurries off in the opposite direction believing, I think, that I might be sizing her up as an interesting new dish to try as this denial of the delicious drags on.
  Those who share this denial will know that various and increasingly numerous chefs are offering various forms of takeaway in this city but when you live 7 miles away in the extreme suburbs, a stone’s throw away from the border of the immediately rural Worcestershire, there’s little chance of a fine city restaurant delivering food as far out as this relative backwater. My suburb is to Birmingham what Vladivostok is to Moscow.
  The nearest supermarket is about 2 miles away and I’m not prepared to walk there and back. There are times I wish I drove a car. There’s an hourly bus but the government tells us not to use public transport though it would probably be as safe as being at home since it does not seem to have had any passengers for the last 8 weeks. But old men in the second half of their sixties are greatly at risk from the virus though the government excludes us from its concerns, drawing the line at 70 and above, and I’m not prepared to risk going to the supermarket yet even if I had wings and could fly there.
  And Sainsbury’s, which this particular supermarket is and whose loyal customer I’ve been, quite literally, for decades will not deliver to me and summarily dismisses me with an onscreen message shooing me away from it telling me that I’m not the right sort for them - too young I guess. Well if things ever do return to normal, and I suppose they will, I’ll repay Sainsbury’s loyalty to me with the same sort of loyalty to them - I’ll shop at Tesco which has managed to make a couple of deliveries to me and clearly has risen brilliantly to meet the needs of Britain’s shoppers.
  As I had a 10 day wait for my next Tesco delivery and the amount in my cupboards of one or two necessities was starting to look a little precarious I visited a couple of other sites. The message from Sainsbury’s telling me where to go was unchanged and uncompromising and I searched on and came to Iceland (no not the home of our former cod war enemies) and I was very impressed by their ability to make a delivery to me the following day. So I had a good look at what was on offer.
  These days it’s rare for me to have a ready meal but the Iceland ‘luxury’ range looked quite promising. Today I had the first of my lockdown ready meal purchases - sadly, this story does not have a happy ending. I really wanted to enjoy this dish as Iceland had at least taken the trouble to deliver it unlike the hopeless Sainsbury’s. ‘Sri Lankan chicken curry and rice’ - sounds distinctly promising. Following the instructions closely I was able to plate up some very acceptable Basmati rice and some very decent chicken of a nice texture and a pleasant-looking sauce. But then the flavour hit me, or rather it didn’t hit me. The dish was extraordinarily bland. Eventually a mild heat came through but experienced not in my mouth but in my stomach. It was only at the end of the meal that I was aware of some heat in my mouth. And there was not the merest hint of another detectable spice.I do not understand why the meal was so tasteless given that there are so many spices in the dish according to the ingredients information on the back (and no I haven’t got one of the symptoms of COVID-19 - loss of taste - I can taste everything else I eat). I can only conclude that the spices and coconut and so on were included in homeopathic doses.
  If the flavour of the dish had had more zing about it this would have been a perfectly satisfactory meal but really it’s just too dull to consider ever buying this particular ready meal again. If the chef who prepared it had presented it on The Great British Menu I fear that he/she would only have received 5 points for it unless Marcus Wareing  had been judging it in which case it would have been 4 or less.

  As to other ways of diverting my attention from the urges to seat myself at a table in a fine restaurant my trawling through old Michelin Guides continues and very interesting it is too. Today I started off at the West Midlands’ first ever Michelin star winner, the Dining Room at Mallory Court five miles outside Leamington Spa (held a star from 1980 to 1994 and again from 2003 to 2013). I read that the fairly recently appointed Head Chef there, Paul Evans, is working to try to reclaim the hotel’s twice held star and, given that the hotel is dog-friendly I suspect that Lucy the Labrador and I will be heading in the direction of that part of Warwickshire once things are more normal and safe. The hotel has two well thought of places to eat - The Dining Room itself and also a bistro - so a stay there sounds quite promising.

Paul Evans Head Chef at Mallory Court.

  I also stumbled on a piece about another promising place to eat in Leamington - The Tame Hare in Warwick Street which was opened by the young chef Jonathan Mills and his father, Simon Haigh. Some alluring-sounding dishes appear to be served up there so three nights in Leamington sounds like a good idea to try all three of these places. 

  Well, I’ve distracted myself from my fine food lust for a few minutes. It’s the best one could hope for.

Jonathan Mills at The Tame Hare.

94. Time Travelling Through The Michelin Guide - Croque-en-Bouche.

  I have an old nerd’s hobby - collecting Michelin Guides (yes really). I’m not completely obsessional about having to have every edition (though one day I may be) and of course my collection starts in 1974 when the British version began to be issued again after a break of 43 years - during which I suppose the Great Depression, the Second World War, Attlee’s determination to starve the British population whilst sending all the home grown food abroad, the 1950s and 1960s when people who had lived through the war were just happy to have food but were conservative in its preparation and sparing in its consumption and then the first inklings that food could be a little more interesting and even an enjoyable experience - when a guide to good food in Britain again seemed like a potentially useful tool to produce.

  As I yearn with increasing desperation to sit in my corner in Purnell’s, amused still by Glynn Purnell’s witty dishes and inwardly exuberant at the flavour of his creations or distressed by the emptiness of my life without experiencing the rebelliousness of Alex Claridge’s dishes at The Wilderness, where ever it is located when this is all over, or wistfully dreaming of another meal at Craft Dining Room or openly distressed at having gone so long without lunching at the near-gastronomic paradise that is Opheem or furious at being denied the chance to try out what Pulperia or Kray Treadwell’s new gaff will be offering, I need distraction and delving into Birmingham and the West Midlands’ recent gastronomic history by perusing the pages of old Michelin Guides is one of the ways I have found to achieve such distraction and consolation.

  And I keep discovering little facts which make that history more coherent. And fascinating. But those will only be revealed when I feel like it and they are no doubt known by others who’ve been enjoying dining out for decades. If only I’d realised the pleasure of good food when I was a lot younger. What tales I would tell.

  It seemed to me that a useful Michelin Guide edition might be that from 1994, Andreas Antona having opened Simpsons, the West Midlands wellspring, in 1993 - in Kenilworth of course, not Birmingham. Then there were only two three-starred restaurants in all of the British Isles - The Waterside Inn at Bray and La Tainte Claire in London. There were 8 two stars in the United Kingdom (7 in England and one in Scotland but none at all in the West Midlands) and just 47 one-stars (38 in England, 1 in Wales, 1 in Northern Ireland, 1 in Jersey and 6 in Scotland). Of the one stars only six were in the West Midlands - Lords of The Manor in Lower Slaughter, Bourton-on the-Water (Gloucestershire), Buckland Manor, Broadway (Worcestershire), Epicurean, Cheltenham (Gloucestershire),  Croque-en-Bouche, Great Malvern (Worcestershire), Mallory Court, Royal Leamington Spa (Warwickshire) and Oakes at Stroud (Gloucestershire). Even then the West Midlands’ Michelin Stars were heavily concentrated in Gloucestershire. None of the major cities were home to a Michelin-starred restaurant. If you lived in the West Midlands conurbation a meal at a Michelin-starred restaurant meant taking a ride out into the countryside and travelling some distance from home.

  Restaurants in Birmingham itself which were deemed worthy of a mention in the red book were:- Sir Edward Elgar’s at the Swallow Hotel on Hagley Road (4 crossed knives and forks) which I suspect was close to landing Birmingham’s first ever Michelin star several years before Simpsons arrived in the city to bring its first actual star, Sloans on Hawthorne Road in Edgbaston (3 k&f), Maharaja in Hurst Street (2 k&f), which I had long enjoyed visiting (what a shadow of its former self it is now), Purple Rooms (Chinese, 2 k&f)) in Hall Green, Henry’s in St Paul’s Square (Chinese, 2 k&f), Henry Wong (Chinese, 2 k&f) on Harborne High Street, Days of the Raj (Indian, 2 k&f) at Dale End and Franzl’s (Austrian, 1 k&f) in Bearwood, 

Maharajah, Hurst Street

Franzl’s Bearwood

Sloan’s Edgbaston

  Of the Michelin-starred West Midlands restaurants, one I will draw attention to here is Croque-en-Bouche in Malvern Wells which is an extremely important restaurant in the modern history of dining in the West Midlands because it was one of the three earliest of our restaurants, along with the somewhat shorter-lived Le Filbert Cottage in Henley-In-Arden (held its star for just one year) and The Dining Room at Mallory Court in Leamington (star awarded one year earlier in the 1980 Guide), being awarded a Michelin star in the 1981 Great Britain and Ireland Michelin Guide.

Estate agent’s photograph of the former Croque-en-Bouche.

  Croque-en-Bouche was run by the married couple Marion (the chef) and Robin (front of house) Jones (gastronomy’s very own Robin and Marion). It was opened in 1978 and was awarded its star 2 years later and held it until the couple retired from running the restaurant and closed it on 1 June 2002. Robin Jones originally opened a bistro in Lavender Hill in London in 1972 though he had no experience of the restaurant trade and employed Marion, a graduate of a Cordon Bleu course at a time when it was difficult for women to get to the top of the catering profession and romance bloomed and they were married in 1977. During their 2 day honeymoon in Bromyard they spotted the 24 room former baker’s shop for sale in Wells Road in Malvern and decided to open a restaurant there and opened Croque-en-Bouche in May 1978.

  Their former restaurant in Lavender Hill had been listed in The Good Food Guide but their new Malvern restaurant was a greater and rapid success. They received a star in the 1981 Michelin Guide and Croque-en-Bouche became something of a gastronomic Mecca for celebrities - a local newspaper recalled how the once fashionable actor Hugh Grant liked to visit the restaurant declaring it to be his “favourite” but in the same newspaper Robin Jones regretfully had to admit that, “I can’t even remember him coming.

 Half of the business proceeds came from Jones’ wine merchant business and much of the produce used in preparing Marion’s dishes were grown in the restaurant’s gardens which she thought was an important reason for the restaurant’s success. The article mentions that a dish served at the restaurant which was particularly celebrated was Marion’s frozen ginger and coffee meringue. The 1983 Michelin Guide notes the following dishes:- Crabe Bréhat, Pheasant ‘truffle’ with bacon and thyme (served October-February), Chocolate almond cake [Get in the Tardis now and set coordinates for Malvern Wells, November 1982]; 1987 Guide:- Soupe au pistou (served May-September), Crab mousse with a mango sauce, Leg of lamb with ginger, rosemary and soy [relocate Tardis, same spatial coordinate but now June 1986]; 1990 Guide:- Cannelloni with crab, avocado, coriander and tomato, Leg of lamb, roast as venison with a lovage stuffing and port sauce, Toffee rice pudding with wild strawberries (served July-September) [by now you know what to do with the Tardis - make it July 1989]; 1994 Guide:- Sushi selections, Roast leg of lamb with couscous, preserved lemon and pimiento, Salads and herbs from the garden. And finally to the 2001 Guide:- Crab and lobster croustade with bouillabaisse sauce, Japanese style selections, Salads and herbs from the garden. In the pages of the Michelin Guide the Tardis therefore travelled very nicely through what food was served by a great chef at Croque-en-Bouche in the glorious English West Midlands but also showed what was in and what was out gastronomically over those years.

  Croque-en-Bouche was mentioned enthusiastically among a handful of other British restaurants in a patronising commentary on British food by a writer in the The New York Times in April 1984. The writer quotes Somerset Maugham (I had not seen this before so it’s worth recording here to be squirrelled away when a derogatory comment about British food is required in the future and who knows, we may need it if the current triumphant British Food Hegemony is derailed by COVID-19) - “To eat well in England you should eat breakfast three times a day” (this is the correct quote not the bowdlerised version quoted in the New York Times).

  The estate agents who marketed the building which housed Croque-en-Bouche included in its sales literature the following “...For twenty four years until 2002 it was a Michelin star restaurant known as the Croque-en-Bouche. At that time almost a third of the garden was dedicated to the growing of vegetables and herbs.” Well it’s not everyone who can claim to live in a former Michelin star restaurant.

    Sadly I am unable to track down a photograph of Marion and Robin Jones.

  The BBC News website for Birmingham and the Black Country recently had an item featuring Stuart Deeley, winner of last year’s Masterchef The Professionals, in which he said that, despite the Covid-19 pandemic, he was still planning to go ahead with his new restaurant which he’d hoped to open in the early summer but has now been postponed until autumn of this year Coronavirus.

permitting. He still intends that it should find its home in Birmingham at a site he has already identified (in the Harborne/Edgbaston area).

  He was planning to have had a guest chef pop-up at Simpsons but that was due to have taken place after the Covid-19 lockdown had started and so had to be cancelled but he is quoted as saying that he is passing the time planning dishes for the new restaurant and writing recipes. 

95. West Midlands-Born Chef Wins Great British Menu 2020.

After eight weeks of devoted television viewing where we discovered for sure that what chefs think is great is exactly the opposite from what judges, representing the informed diner, think is great - and vice versa - except perhaps everyone can spot an irritating Scottish comedienne when they see one but are too polite to say, we learned that Stoke-born chef Niall Keating was the winner of the fish course in the 2020 Great British Menu and furthermore, so immaculate was it that it won him the title of Great British Menu Champion of Champions 2020

  He gave a commanding and stupendously calm performance in the GBM kitchen at the Banquet itself as he prepared 100 plates of his soon-to-be legendary Witches of the Northern Lights. The dish which was greeted in breathless wonderment by the diners and served in small witches’ cauldrons was made up of lobster and bone marrow with spring onion and chives and three squid ink-blackened tortellini with a lobster dashi. The dish and its title were inspired by the books of the His Dark Materials series by Philip Pullman.

  So a triumph for the West Midlander but not particularly for the West Midlands as he works at 2 Michelin-starred The Dining Room at Whatley Manor in the invented county of The Cotswolds (according to the BBC) which in reality means not south Worcestershire or Gloucestershire but Wiltshire which is definitely not in the West Midlands. It looks like he’s got a great job there but perhaps one day he’ll come back home to delight we Mercians if there is a restaurant scene left in the region for him to come back to.

Andi Oliver gives Matthew Fort a helping hand with his Owl Hoot

Owl Hoot poured successfully

4 contented judges

Preparing 300 tortellini for the banquet

Quite a lot of lobster and bone marrow tortellini