Having moaned a lot about Moseley (see previous Blog), I have to recognise that one of Birmingham’s leading fine dining restaurants is located in the shabby chic (to be polite) suburb. I hate going to Moseley and so therefore I have not visited Carter’s of Moseley anywhere near as many times as I should have done. Well, to be honest I’ve lunched there just the one time (see Blog 5).
But the ongoing but hopefully now passing pandemic has given us all chance to renew acquaintance with some of these Birmingham Glory names if only by ordering an eat at home meal from some of them. And so my attention was taken by a digital missive from Carter’s, whimsical and humorous I thought, and I ordered a restaurant kit from them which promised to help me relive the nineties - which now I think about it was something I didn’t particularly want to do as it was a period of sustained professional hard work and pressure - with a crispy pancake and smiley face potato fried potatoes and ‘Techno slaw’. A strange action for me to take you might think as crispy pancakes had never appealed to me when they were in vogue and I had never eaten one but I was there ready to give this funky little menu a go.
It all arrived in an enormous box with more packing than ingredients and the menu and cooking instructions were presented on a colourful sheet well worth keeping and framing as an item of art from this very odd era. I thought that having so very few ingredients promised an easy time ahead.
The preparation of this meal helped me to understand that a) I do not have the makings of a chef and b) why I like to go out to eat and not work in the kitchen except on a few of my old faithful dishes which I make when I have the patience to do so. This meal involved using an inordinate number of dishes and plates all of which needed washing up at the end of it all (no, I don’t have a kitchen porter) and while everything on paper was exceedingly simple I just about ruined everything. And I really ought to have known better than, no matter how funky it promised to be, ordering a meal which consisted entirely of fried food apart from the coleslaw. True, the coleslaw was edible and vaguely pleasant but I made a complete hash of the smiley face potatoes (well none ended up with smiley faces, let’s put it that way) though I fried them reasonably well. I broke the crispy pancake while coating it with polenta and I almost certainly overcooked it with the result being dry and the beef cheek cubes turning out hard and rubbery. I ate the food with little enjoyment - well, none actually - and I resolved that this would be my last eat at home meal (except of course for takeaways from the local Bangladeshi restaurant and fish and chips - excellent cod by the way - from the local ‘chippie’ which arrive fully cooked and just in need of plating up and nothing more).
This resolution is made possible by the knowledge that restaurants will soon be fully open again and I have a large number of reservations made and in my diary. Surely no-one wants to endure the pain involved in preparing and then clearing up after these meals when all that pain is taken away by settling into a comfortable chair at a table in a beloved restaurant where welcoming familiar faces flatter you and schmooze you and do what they can to make you enjoy a culinary pleasure with someone else to do the washing up. There’s a lot of talk that restaurants will continue to offer these dine at home services once they open fully but I think the public will want to go back to the full service and not to endure all the drudgery that accompanies preparing a meal and that the demand for eat at home services from smart restaurants will soon fall away.
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| Beef cheek and ogleshield pancake, smiley potatoes and techno slaw but not as Brad Carter intended it. |
What it should have looked like:-
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