107. Last Out, First In.

  As March drew to a close, the last restaurant I visited before the balloon went up and the lights went down was the immaculate Opheem (Blog 88). It seemed perfectly right therefore that the first place at which I should dine out as I ventured out into this unnerving new Birmingham was again Opheem - I liked the symmetry of it but mainly I was just desperate to get back there and relive the happy delights of last March.

  Thus venturing for the first time on to a cross-city train in late afternoon, the carriage being largely devoid of human life though two or three of them could not find it in themselves to wear a facemask - well only one actually was unmasked while two others seemed to think the right way to wear a mask was on the chin leaving the mouth and nose exposed to inhale and exhale any viruses in the carriage air, I headed for New Street Station and a return to contact with other humans who like food.

  The welcome back to Opheem was delightful and I was rapidly made comfortable in the bar area and was soon joyously relaxed as I sipped at a sublime Monkey 47. My first two snacks were served to me as I lounged in my comfortable chair. Pleasure had returned to my life. The first snack was an oyster shell housing an oyster emulsion with blazingly spicy jalapeño juice and pickled onion and next to it a little cone with a pea ice cream sitting on soothing coconut with a pleasurable mild spiciness elbowing its way in. I could have sat there all night nibbling away at a few more of these pleasures. But I was escorted to the bar to be introduced to my third snack - a flaxseed cracker shard made memorable with little pipings of mustard and vinegar gels dotting its surface. Some of the ingredients of the upcoming menu were explained to me and I was introduced to the pink fir sweet potato from no further away than Warwickshire - to whom I was a new acquaintance (the potato not Warwickshire). The potato is remarkably sweet apparently and waxy (I thought that that might be good for chips but it has so much sugar that it rapidly caramelises and chips burn still only partially cooked). Then off to the dining room.

  Starter - Bhutta, from Madras - back to the word, “Sublime”. A most perfectly enjoyable grilled corn with a wondrously spiced butter. Unmissable.

  Tisria, from West Bengal - fabulously delicious marinated Orkney scallop with slices of radish and a Bengali lime and coriander dressing. 

Tisria came with its own swirling mists:-

  Now here the meal took a turn wisely aimed at ensuring the diner would not have eaten the 10 course tasting meal without feeling as full as any man can hope to feel. And here the pink fir potatoes from Warwickshire came into their own.

Aloo Tuk, from Sind. Pickled and barbecued pink fir potatoes with croutons covered with a potato foam and with a tamarind purée. The flavour and texture were delicious and by the end of the course I was beginning to feel that I was comfortably filling up.

Pao, a new bread for the restaurant- a generously portioned milk loaf with accompanying onion and lamb butter. Wonderful but a potato course followed by an impressive piece of bread is rapidly filling and a little difficult for an old bloke like me to cope with. I wouldn’t want to have missed it but the strain was beginning to show.

A refreshing sorbet to give time for the scenery to change to prepare the stage for the main acts.

 Dopiaza, from Delhi. A boldly cooked and delicious monkfish served with Roscoff onion broth and a spiced onion compote. Perhaps the caramelised onion’s charred flavour was a little heavy for me but this was one of the peaks of the meal for me. But there again this was a meal with as many peaks as the Himalayas.

  And finally to meat. By then feeling rather full. Dukka Maas from Mangalore. What a joy to be served with not just the omnipresent pork belly but also some fine loin. Beautifully cooked except that the loin was rather salty. I tried not to imagine the dear little faces of the curly haired Mangalitza pigs which provided the base for this dish as I cut lightly into the meat. The Roscoff onion contained tasty keema fragments and the hispi cabbage was there doing what it usually does. Sadly after the potato and bread courses I could make little headway with the lovely Basmati rice served with is dish.

A pre-dessert and then on to Pista which is a fine dining equivalent of a Jaffa cake made from Manjari chocolate and served with a neat little swirl of pistachio ice cream.

  I was looking forward to some Lassi and greatly amused by what turned up to represent it. With shards of meringue riding atop the dish, strawberry ice cream and strawberry jam were nestled in the bottom of the bowl alongside half a small milk bottle-sized strawberry lassi and separately a bowl of what looked like a single strawberry on a heap of something I was told was not for eating. The faux-strawberry was a cheering liquid-filled strawberry-flavoured chocolate and quite an appropriate ending to this phase of the meal.

  Back to the bar - all part of the deal - for a delicious Darjeeling chai accompanied by a Darjeeling tea-flavoured pannacotta and last but not least 2 petits fours - a rapturous Turkish delight and the final refreshment of a raspberry jelly.

  So it was good night for now to Opheem where the food may really be the most exciting around and the staff really know how to look after their customers. I felt very comfortable there and the very well-spaced seating and tables made me feel very safe. So my dining adventures have started again and away we go with a turbo lift-off at Opheem. My stomach told me I’d eaten rather more than I probably should have done but I would have been sorry to have missed any of the splendid dishes.

105. Michelin Guide-Featured Restaurants Of The 1970s.

 As the weeks of inactivity pass by and having now spent months in or in the vicinity of my home at the southwest edge of the city and never once venturing even to the large shopping centre a couple of miles away and certainly not risking life by travelling on public transport, the old proverb that the Devil makes work for idle hands comes to mind. And old Beelzebub has got the upper hand and tempted me into completing my collection of modern British Michelin Guides. Well, as demonic temptations go it’s not the worse sin the old Devil could have come up with and it is one which is pleasingly cheap with some very nice copies of the various editions being on sale on internet sites for as little as just over £2 post free.  It’s also a victimless crime apart from my local postman who now greets me with increasing bemusement and the words, “Some more books for you”.
  As we know the first edition of the guide to be published after publication had ceased in 1931 was the 1974 edition. It featured a paltry seven Birmingham restaurants, two of which served Italian style food and one was located in Sutton Coldfield and one in West Bromwich. The Guide found Birmingham city centre to be a gastronomic desert saved only by Italian food which was served by La Capanna and also Lorenzo which was something of a venue for any celebrity who found themselves stranded in Birmingham and in need of being seen by celebrity spotters and decently fed at the same time.
  In the whole of the 1970s (74-80) Birmingham was represented in the Guide by only 14 restaurants. Italian was very much the theme of the half-decade. British food, if it had defined itself by then, was treated with the contempt it was perceived to deserve as restaurants serving French, South Asian and even Austrian cuisine were prominent in the publication.
  In fact Indian food was represented in the 70s solely by the splendid Rajdoot, then located in Albert Street - it served not only delicious dishes but there was a lot of theatre about the place and it was not only a place to eat what was for many still exotic food but also a destination in its own right.
  Below is the list of featured restaurants and the editions of the Guide in which they appeared:-

Burlington 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979.
Lorenzo (Italian), 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980.
La Capanna (Italian), 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980.
Lambert Court, 1974.
Danish Food Centre, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978.
Royal (Sutton Coldfield), 1974.
Manor House (West Bromwich, Hall Green Road), 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979.
Diment’s (Sutton Coldfield), 1975, 1976.
La Gondola (Sutton Coldfield, Italian), 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980.
Rajdoot (Indian), 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980.
Pinocchio ((Italian), 1978, 1979, 1980.
Giovanni’s (Kings Heath, Italian), 1978, 1979, 1980.
La Copper Kettle (Bearwood, Provençal), 1978, 1979, 1980.
La Caverna (Sheldon, Italian), 1979, 1980.

  It’s worth mentioning Lorenzo, or in some editions Lorenzo’s, which was opened by Lorenzo Ferrari in the early 1970s in a building in Park Street which dated back to 1863 and had been first a concert hall and then, from 1912, a cinema. As written above, throughout its life it had a reputation as a celebrity haunt and only closed in 1993 when Ferrari retired to Italy. The restaurant retained its Michelin listing right up until the year Ferrari closed it.

Lorenzo’s, Park Street, Digbeth, closed eventually in 1993.

Lorenzo Ferrari

Chef at Lorenzo’s, Tony Contaldo

104. It’s 1973 And There’s Something Nasty In The Fridge

Saturn Devouring His Son by Francisco José de Goya, 1820-23.

  When the 1974 Michelin Great Britain and Ireland Guide was published, the first edition since 1931, I had little interest - probably none at all - in good quality food. I was a student and most evenings on returning to my flat which I shared with three other non-foodies I cooked myself an omelette and ate it with some warmed up baked beans (Heinz so I suppose I must always have had some appreciation of fine food at whatever price) and fruity brown sauce. I can’t remember seasoning my omelette but I suppose the brown sauce - also Heinz I think and not obtainable for a long time since though Branston Fruity Sauce is a worthy substitute - must have been all that was needed as a condiment for my own particular signature dish.
  My flat mates were very divided on food and the big kitchen in the flat was necessary to encompass the multiple meal preparations taking place simultaneously - one flatmate was addicted on an almost daily basis to a Birds Eye or perhaps Findus boil-in-the-bag fish in white sauce, the second co-habitant existed largely on a menu of unaccompanied bars of chocolate, glssses of milk and some cheap cereal pre-bed and the third - a large young man from Bradford distinguished by a vast mop of thick, wiry and unruly hair which seemed uncombable - saw everyday, unlike we others, as a potential culinary adventure which usually involved some unspeakably unpleasant-looking and vaguely malodorous piece of offal which culminated one afternoon in we other three returning home to open the door of the usually near-to-empty fridge to be greeted by the menacing and somewhat stomach-turning sight of an enormous uncooked bull’s testicle laid out on a large plate awaiting the attentions of our Masterchef with the uncontrollable hair. There was a general gathering in the kitchen to watch the ceremony of the cooking of the testicle and to listen unbelievingly how the chef considered it to be an excellent dish (though I have shut out from my memory quite how he prepared the dish). So excellent was it that rather surprisingly no other gigantic bull’s testicle ever again was known to materialise in our communal refrigerator though we three unwilling observers of Unruly Hair Cuisine have long suffered a form of post-traumatic stress since the revelation of what was lying on a plate in the fridge that day.

Something nasty in the fridge

  Someone rather foolishly had the idea that we should have a communal meal and each of us in turn should cook for the others. My cuisine was limited to omelette and beans and my flat mates made it clear that I would have to try harder when it was my turn to cook though I would have thought that the effort involved in preparing a decent omelette was no lesser than that involved in unwrapping a bar of chocolate or dropping a plastic bag of fish in sauce in a pan of boiling water. To make the point one of my flat mates handed me his cookbook which his mother had forced on him when he first came to university and which had not been opened up till then. It all looked far too wearisome to me and I didn't like the thought of either the cost of, or the handling of, raw meat which, though we as medical students were currently involved in dissecting human cadavers, lacked appeal to me.
  Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, I discovered a dish which was entirely made up of vegetables and had the intriguing name of Mock Goose and this clearly met my needs to enable me to present to my flat mates a dish which had required preparation and cooking without stretching a very limited budget and get involved with raw meat. It basically involved slicing up three or four types of root vegetables and apples and braising them in the oven for a period  of time. The result was not a happy one and played a large part in putting a stop to the fantasy of the desirability of communal eating in our four-man community. Though the recipe was about as straightforward as you might hope for it became obvious that I had neither sliced the vegetables finely enough nor did I leave them to braise for an adequate length of time and the result was a meal reminiscent of that cooked by one of Celebrity Masterchef’s loopier first round contestants - inedible, tragically undercooked, thickly sliced vegetables and nothing else.
  At least we were spared our wiry-haired flat mate’s Offal surprise as a result of my Nul points effort and so on balance I feel my flat mates had something to thank me for after all.
  But outside of our grubby little flat (actually it was really quite clean and surprisingly acceptable but you would be disappointed for that to be true of a student flat in the early 1970s, when everyone still looked very much like characters out of Withnail And I) the British food scene was coming alive and Michelin was thinking that the Ingleesh might possibly have one or two dining establishments around where a Frenchman might find a passable meal if he were unfortunate enough to find himself in this uncouth benighted country though they would have to be establishments run by and cooked in by Frenchmen or at least be places where some form of continental European cuisine was being served.
  And that brings me to the subject of this piece - was anywhere in Birmingham recommended by Michelin in Birmingham in the 1970s when the first editions of the Michelin GB Guide reappeared? The answer is revealed in Blog 105.

Footnote - For anyone wanting to experience for themselves the unimaginable hedonistic pleasure of Mock goose it’s worth noting that in some ways this is a hoary and venerable British dish originally recorded in 1742 in the cookbook The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy by Hannah Glasse. She described a dish in which pork knuckle was stuffed with sage and onion, salted and peppered and served with gravy and apple sauce though why this should be called Mock Goose or Poor Man’s Goose is not entirely clear to me (why not just called it pork with sage and onion stuffing and apple sauce?)

  Later, in 1897, the dish had devolved into sausage removed from its skin baked in layers with mashed potato and again seasoned with finely chopped onion and sage (actually that sounds quite good, I might make it sometime). No mention of apple here but I should think an apple sauce would be an excellent accompaniment.

  By the time of the Second World War, with meat heavily rationed and the population glad to eat almost anything, a version of the all-vegetable Mock Goose surfaces and that, I think, was the basis for the dish outlined in my flatmate’s student cookbook and with which I regaled my house companions with such great and appreciated success.