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.