122. Tiers For Fears.

   As Birmingham restauranteurs come to terms with the reality of the COVID-19 Regulations Tier 3 designation for the city there are more reactions from local leading names in the industry. In a question put to his customers on his Facebook page Glynn Purnell sought to gain information about the potential success of a takeaway service for his restaurant until the present crisis is over.

  Alex Claridge’s The Wilderness announced the non-reopening of his Jewellery Quarter restaurant by e-mail to his clients and used it is an opportunity to promote a tee shirt the restaurant is selling with the inscription, “It can’t rain all the time”. We hope that is true.

  

And Simpsons and The Cross at Kenilworth:-

 

 Jabbar Khan, the founder of Lasan, made famous by its then head chef Aktar Islam, and other restaurants, meanwhile is planning to open a new restaurant on Harborne High Street in the unit formerly housing a Cafe Rouge though the type of cuisine to be served there is not yet known. The restaurant is being designed by the Spencer Swindon Design group which designed the interior of the Plough Inn which will be opposite Khan’s new eatery. Khan has described it as going to be, “elegant and urban chic”. In the first part of the twentieth century, Brummies usually referred to the area using the derogatory term “Hungry Harborne” because the notoriously snobbish inhabitants liked to give the impression that they had rather more wealth than was actually the case and to maintain this image they would rather miss a meal than not have the items which projected prosperity. Perhaps Khan’s new restaurant may help to prevent the locals from still being ‘hungry’ and with its ‘urban chic’ still project the image of prosperity. I suppose the arbiter of that will be the effect of COVID-19 on jobs in an area where young professionals, unemployed, furloughed or still working, like to think of themselves as cool. Then again, t’was ever so.

121. Veil Of Tiers.

Tier 3 - Hell by Giotto di Bondone 1267-1337, Scrovegni Chapel Padua.

   Late in the morning of Thursday 26 November the Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, announced the plans  Boris Johnson’s government had made for when England would exit the 4 week long COVID-19 ‘lockdown’. There were to be 3 Tiers as before but in the newly renamed Very High Tier 3 restaurants and hotels and public houses were to remain shut apart from the provision of takeaway meals. The precise locations of the unfortunate Tier 3 areas were to have been revealed on a government website but so great was the number of people trying to discover in which tier their own area had been placed that the site soon crashed. But the truth was soon revealed - Birmingham, Staffordshire, West Midlands and Warwickshire were all allocated a place in the Hell of Tier 3 while Herefordshire, Gloucestershire, Worcestershire and Shropshire were consigned to the Purgatory of Tier 2. Indeed of the whole of England only Cornwall, Scilly Islands and Isle Of Wight had found their way into the Heaven of Tier 1.

  This announcement was a great disappointment and cause for concern for the future of the hospitality industry in the West Midlands.  Notable Birmingham restaurants broke the news to their customers with various messages on line and The Birmingham Post headlined the threat to the industry in anticipation of the city’s allocation to Tier 3.

  Only 5 days prior to the government’s announcement, Sam Morgan, patron of Craft and 8, had been publicising that the restaurant had been putting into place more of its ‘dining pods’ which had proved to be very popular during the preceding weeks and helped to ensure heavily booked reservation lists for the restaurant.

 

So in the words of Haircut One Hundred (I have no idea why they suddenly came to mind):-

  And is that the boiling lake of Tier 3 Hell where the lost souls of restauranteurs end up? I hope not.

120. Birmingham Restauranteurs Fight Back The Tiers.

“Shouldn’t we be drinking this with a substantial meal?“

  Before the second ‘Lockdown’ the Labour leader of Birmingham City Council, Councillor Ward, had been broadcasting how much he thought that Birmingham should be in a 4 week-long national lockdown (regardless of its consequent dire effects on the hospitality industry) and his Director of Public Health was clearly an ardent supporter of the Labour administration’s point of view and from recent statements his views clearly have not changed. With just a day to go till the government allocates the various areas of Britain to the three COVID-19 tiers - Tier 3 meaning that restaurants must remain closed except for takeaway meals - some Birmingham restaurants, though hardly any of the leading restaurants are among them,  have written to the Conservative West Midlands Mayor demanding that he lobbies the government to prevent Birmingham entering Tier 3, a view with which I sympathise  naturally. 

Cllr Ward supports Tier 3 and Lockdowns

 

 

However what is irritating about this message is the fact, probably due to political motivations of some, that the message has been sent to the Mayor rather than Birmingham’s Labour City Council leader and his Public Health specialist who have been the most ardent of supporters for stringent measures in the city against the hospitality industry. The present fanatical Labour Council is setting about destroying the city centre with its “clean air zone” which will charge motorists exorbitant amounts of money to drive into the city and other measures which will ensure Birmingham remains a ghost city long after the COVID-19 crisis is over. I suggest that the signatories of this letter drop a line to former driving instructor Mr Ward and his friends as well as that they have already sent to Andrew Street the Mayor and try to convince them of the damage they are doing to Birmingham’s distinguished city restaurants. Finally it might be remembered by all of Birmingham’s restauranteurs that it’s not the government that spreads the virus, it’s the people who don’t follow the rules.

 

Finally - this could only happen in London:-

Personally, I don’t even like burgers that much. But you have to admit it, he’s a lad isn’t he?

119. Eight Ate At Eight At Seven.

 

  Before I lose the power of all recall of the event - time takes a toll on my faculty of memory - I have to recall my evening of great pleasure passed at the opening public evening of Andrew Sheridan’s 8 or possibly Around 8 - the precise name isn’t clear in my mind. The date was 8 October 2020, I have a dated, signed menu to prove it. The setting - the bar area of the Craft Dining Rooms, now divided from the main dining area and sparkling and cleverly lit. Just eight diners; there will be 16 when the need for social distancing is over. All strangers and socially distanced but soon, and keeping to the appropriate degree of separation, chatting pleasantly in this immaculate relaxed environment.

  The evening started at 7PM, brought forward by an hour due to the then 10PM curfew. It was of course meant to start at 8PM to fit in with the theme but there you have it, the best laid plans of mice and men and so on. It took a little while for me to realise that the positioning of the plates had been precisely calculated to enable the diner to photograph their food to perfection and Chef and his staff chatted to the Lucky 8 about the food, the concept, the restaurant, the whole story. What nice people they all are. Andrew Sheridan said that a couple of evenings before, his very first service of 8 was to distinguished local chefs including Paul Foster of Salt in Stratford upon Avon and apparently and not surprisingly had gone down pretty well. But we were the Few, the Happy Few, to be there at the first service to the public.

  The menu in eight parts had dishes with variants of eight in its name and each course had relevance to the progress of Sheridan’s culinary career. I shall not enlarge on that mainly because I didn’t hear everything that was said and for much of the time I was staring enraptured at the sight of each new dish as it came along. The menu didn’t reveal too much so the serving of the food brought gasps and purrs of pleasure.

  There was a tear and share bread of great pleasure which as I was a single diner I did not have to share at all and had some left over to savour at the next day’s breakfast (too good to waste even a crumb), then V8, a sweet tomato tart with fabulous pastry and a clear sweet accompanying vegetable liquor. To paraphrase The Tempest, “Such things are dreams made on...” Exquisite.

  

  Then the remarkable Oxidised, a remarkable beef carpaccio with cep and beef fat truffle, cheese and thinly sliced brioche. Palpitating pleasure. Just look at it:-

  Square root of 8  Smoky celeriac with the clearest vegetable broth and then Lucky 8, a special bacon and cheese sandwich if you wish to think of it that way. Not my favourite dish that evening though others would disagree.

 

 And now we’re into a full gallop and Eight Days A Week brings with it a fabulous scallop, apple and sorrel dish. Luxurious, delicious and exceptional.

  And then to a gourmand’s fondest dream, Resurrection. A mind bogglingly beautiful venison Wellington, good in so many ways that it must be a dish served to those who have been saints in their earthly lives at the refectory tables of Heaven, utterly perfectly cooked and delicious venison stuffed with the right amount of foie gras surrounded by earthy mushroom duxelles and magnificently wonderful buttery pastry. It must have taken months if not years of practice to achieve such  a fabulous faultless dish. Such things are dreams made on, oh I’ve said that already but I don't apologise for repeating it.

 

  Feeling pretty full by now but the joy continues. 8 - 10 - 2006 - warm deconstructed carrot cake served for two to share but being only one I get enough to enable me to take half home with me to enjoy the next day. As the title of one of Delia Smith’s books told us, “One is fun”. The dish was accompanied by an orange carrot jam, so gorgeously delicious that it is more often, I should think, fed to the immortals in their palaces on Olympus and a lustrous sweet light cream. 

 

 And so the fat old bloke prepares soon to sing as 8.01 comes to the table to appropriately bring the After Eight combination of mint and chocolate. We chatter, still appropriately socially distanced, but 10 AM approaches. We all speak in glowing terms of the pleasure of 8, inwardly self-congratulatory I suspect, of being the First of The Few The Happy Few (to combine Churchill and Shakespeare) - come to think about it, the meal was pretty much that combination - gastronomic poetry and drama with a pugnacious Englishness at a time when a war is raging outside on the street as COVID-19 continues to marshal its forces. As the hands on the clock hurry towards 10 we grab our coats and get our hats and head off for the taxis before the crowds pouring out of the pubs can beat us to it, showering our delighted thanks on Andrew Sheridan and everyone who has made this a magnificent evening of gastronomic marvels here in Birmingham. 

118. Second Wave Art.

 

  It’s hard to think that any major Birmingham chef has come up with more imaginative ways to save his business than The Wilderness’ Alex Claridge. And now, as we enter the third week of the Second Wave ‘Lockdown’, with its fresh assault on the viability of countless businesses which have been the pride and joy of so many hard-working, inventive and self-sacrificing people, we find Claridge coming up with a new angle - the sale of new original art, ironic, humorous and related to his business. Great stuff. 

  I have been enthusiastic about our great local restaurants using art to promote their businesses - see Blogs 97, 100 and 101 - great cuisine is art even though since the 1980s there have been numerous attempts - more unsatisfactory than the modern experts would admit - to subvert cuisine into science. I think, at least I have a feeling that art is winning, and chefs are once more rejoicing in the art of gastronomy rather than the science of gastronomy. And a good thing too if you ask me.

  So why not use art to promote and celebrate gastronomy as well as using it as a means of keeping  businesses afloat during these COVID days?

  So this week, an e mail from The Wilderness arrived promoting a takeaway dish for those who are lost in the wilderness based on a Claridge classic to while away these COVID days and long dark nights - the Unhappy Meal - the source of the inspiration for the dish is undoubted. Described thus, “A limited edition of our much-loved ‘Big Mac’ dish. Taking inspiration from the most notorious of fast food, we’ve created a beef tartare dressed in a coal oil and finished with gherkin ketchup, aged cheddar custard, soy caramel and pickles. Paired with potato fries, and a maple, malt and cinnamon milkshake, this is the most extravagant meal deal you’ll find. For the adventurous and hungry, we’ve partnered with Exmoor caviar to offer a supplementary supersize with Exmoor Royal Beluski caviar. Priced from £30 foot 2 people. I’m loving it”.

  The accompanying photographic portrait of the dish is full-on food porn and enough to drive lusty men insane with desire. Lusty women too for that matter.

  But I like the accompanying offers. The Wilderness is also offering for sale 2 pieces of art connected to the Unhappy Meal 2020 culinary gem. The first, which most appeals to me, is a splendid unhappy Clown (vaguely recognisable I think) photograph with the colourful subject, glum, forehead pressed to knuckles, sitting in darkness surrounded by discarded cardboard milkshake cups and used fast food packaging looking for all the world as though he has had a pretty depressing lockdown and the weight of the future of his business weighing on his mind, no doubt allegorical of the state of mind of many restaurant owners, chefs and all their staff. The photograph is by Emma Tronson and is sold in an edition of just 10, signed by the photographer, Alex Claridge and Marius Gedminas. I managed to secure the last unsold photograph.

  There is also a limited edition (of 10) giclee print of an illustration by Liam Kerr titled, not surprisingly, ‘Unhappy Meal” which depicts a fairly familiar clown figure with a ‘W’ badge on his chest, dropping, apparently in disgust, a paper bag which presumably is one used for takeaway fast food. An interesting item and pleasingly priced at just £15 unmounted.

  Claridge not for the first time has brought art not just into his food but his whole way of doing things.

  While I’m on the subject of signed photographs (which I was at some point above) I so far have failed to mention that Glynn Purnell’s book A Purnell’s Journey There And Back Again, described in Blog 116, was sold with a signed photograph inside depicting Purnell looking, er, well I’m not sure but maybe his feelings at the time were somewhat coloured by standing in the St Andrews football ground where the Birmingham City Football team does its best on a regular basis to cause pain and anguish to its supporters of whom Glynn Purnell is currently one of the most notable.

  There’s art everywhere at the moment. Fine dining restaurants have been selling high class takeaways throughout the ‘lockdowns’ and in between them, and Carter’s of Moseley has been right in the lead here in Birmingham in using this alternative means of keeping the business going. In one of the online communications about available reservation times the restaurant used a modern version of a Bertie Bassett lookalike picture mounted on one of the restaurant walls with the inscription, obviously heartfelt, “CONTROL + ANXIETY 2020”..

  Brad Carter has previously written a book, Staff, with recipes not from those of his restaurant but something a little more doable in the home setting. The book has now been reissued in an expanded format and retitled Staff - Expanded B-Sides. As I haven’t seen the original version and not yet received my copy of the revised edition I shall have to report back when the parcel deliverer knocks on my door with what may just be something quite interesting.

117. Wave Two; BBC Plans A Christmas Great British Menu.

   Another COVID-19 wave, another lockdown. Restaurants close and open and close again and - hopefully - reopen, but not just yet. In the happy interval between closed shutters I went to Andrew Sheridan’s public opening night for About Eight, which had to start at 7 given the government restrictions that demanded the restaurant saw its eight customers off the premises by 10PM and which was an evening of socially distanced gastronomic brilliance. Of which more, I hope, in the near future. 

  Then a pre-lockdown evening in Stratford upon Avon, shockingly quiet, vaguely eerie and missing only Hamlet’s father’s ghost rearing his face over the closed and deserted Royal Shakespeare Theatre, but made delightful and cosy by an early evening saunter to the impeccable family-run restaurant Sorrento where I purred and whimpered with pleasure at a wonderful plate of lemon sole in an exquisite lemon butter sauce served with new potatoes plain and simple (chef had fought off the temptation to sauté them and cover them in rosemary and thyme and the rest as so many chefs would have felt obliged to do) and sensibly cooked broccoli. The sole was a far more enjoyable dish than I remember having in a once two star restaurant further southwest in the West Midlands which had served up 3 little pieces of the lovely fish in the most bitter and unpleasant beurre noisette and sprawled in a bowl of what seemed like thousands of  exhausting broad beans which gave no pleasure whatsoever.

  On Wave 2 Lockdown-eve, 4 November, I was once more at Opheem which was the last restaurant I visited before the previous lockdown and the first I visited after the first lockdown was ended. I like the symmetry of it. This is a wondrous Palace of Pleasures where it would not have been disrespectful of me to faint with delight at just about every first taste of the little appetisers and the magnificent and several courses including the turbot from paradise and the most perfectly flavoured bhuna. Are two stars possible in January?

  And so here we are all vaguely isolated and unsociable. It’s quite relaxing really, well up to a point anyway. Meanwhile that evil entity, the BBC, has announced a Christmas Great British Menu Special, which will feature no fewer than twelve notable British chefs, one of them not so much notable as notorious, who will cook a “a six course boxed festive feast dedicated to the nation’s key workers”. Andi Oliver moves from acting as judge to becoming presenter (they seem to have dumped the dreadful Scottish comedienne seen in this summer’s series) though there must be some foreboding at the news that another comedienne will fill Ms Oliver’s judge’s seat. I have no idea what perceived expertise this newcomer has but these things must be borne. At least Waldorf and Statler are back (otherwise known as Peyton and Fort) to deliver once more their what seems like centuries worth of judging experience (Fort, I’m sure remembers when a young Frenchman called L’Escoffier was laughed out of the kitchen because of his outrageous sauces). 

  The competing chefs, no doubt having their period of lockdown loss of income compensated for by huge paycheques courtesy of the television licence payer via the ever generous BBC (including the over-75 year olds it is now bleeding money from) are Jason Atherton, Pip Lacey, Tom Barnes, Niall Keating, Tommy Banks, Alex Greene, Richard Bainbridge, Simon Rogan, Matt Gillan, James Cochran, Lisa Goodwin-Allen and Tom Aikens. I don’t see, as we might have expected, the names of any chefs representing West Midlands restaurants but plenty from London and the Home Counties and the BBC’s new happy hunting ground of the north-west within reach of the Manchester-based BBC luvvies. I’ll leave the reader to decide which of the above chefs may be described as “notorious”.

116. Some Journey, Some Book.

  

  Not so much a coffee table book as more a banqueting table book (I suppose quite fittingly) the tome which houses Glynn Purnell’s latest voyage into writing is bigger in physical size and heavier than any 18th century family Bible would ever have aspired to be and in and out of its slipcase it’s also rather beautiful. I do like gorgeous books as much as I like gorgeous food and when I have one I often carry it around with me for days after I have obtained it but alas I can not do so with Glynn Purnell’s book unless I am prepared to run the constant risk of seriously rupturing myself.

  This book is a great pleasure to possess. I have it on my heaving bookshelf next to my much loved 1966 copy of the English translation of Michel Joyant’s book of Toulouse-Lautrec’s The Art Of Cuisine and the signed copy of the more modestly sized but memorable Salt Is Essential (and other things I have learned from 50 years at the stove) by West Midland’s gastronomy pioneer Shaun Hill.

  There’s every reason to say when you first catch sight of A Purnell’s Journey There And Back Again the words “Self” and “Indulgent” but when just grazing on the first few pages of this autobiography-recipe book-photography book hybrid any such curmudgeonliness melts away as he recounts his childhood days in Chelmsley Wood which summon up thoughts of the old Hovis advert and decent, devoted family life of the hard-working, striving working class Brummie family, devoted to each other, of times gone by. It’s all about Birmingham, the struggle to achieve, food (of course) and family. 

  With forwards by Sat Bains, Andreas Antona and Claude Bosi, chefs with instantly recognisable names make appearances in the pages of the book as Purnell charts his career with anecdotes that illuminate the kitchen to the reader as much as any ‘Chef’s Table’ will for the diners at it. 

There are some wonderful touches. I like the lining of the case that contains the book itself - it is the pattern of the wallpaper in Purnell’s. A nice little touch.

Great stuff indeed!