155. In Ludlow, Forelles Loses Head Chef Joe Gould.

 

  Previous Blogs have mentioned visits to Ludlow and stays at Fishmore Hall and enjoyable dinners in both its bistro and its Michelin-plated fine-dining restaurant, Forelles, housed in its handsome conservatory with a delightful view of Clee Hill in the distance and of handsome cattle in the neighbouring fields. In Blog 8 I outlined the history of Forelles restaurant and I have dined there during the reigns of three of its four chefs - the earliest chef was Marc Harriman (2007-9 - I did not experience his cooking) but I did eat there during the period of David Jaram (2009-15) and Andrew Birch (2015-18) and now during the period of chef Joe Gould who has just announced that he will be leaving Fishmore to work as Executive chef at Glenapp Castle Hotel in Ayrshire. We await developments of who will take over in the kitchen at Fishmore and look forward to finding out how the cuisine at Forelles will develop under new leadership.

 

 Having visited an exhibition at Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery this week and being unable to resist succumbing to buying a wonderful textile work, Towering In Fur Foe by Vivien Hewson, with which I am very pleased, combining as it does an image of Birmingham with witty humour and a lovely punning title (if it were food it would be by Glynn Purnell), I stopped off on the way back to New Street station for a quick lunch at the newly opened restaurant Rosa’s Thai Cafe just off Chamberlain Square. Think Thai fast food. This is not a particularly big branch of a chain which started off, so the story goes, in London’s east end. I opted for the £9.95p ‘Express lunch set’, choosing the starter of chicken satay (“2 char-grilled chicken skewers in a lemongrass marinade. Served with our addictive peanut sauce”) to be followed by red curry with chicken (“our signature red curry with bamboo shoots, red and green chillies and basil, served with jasmine rice”). You can’t expect too much when your paying under £10 for two courses.

Towering In Fur Foe by Vivien Hewson.

   I was surprised by the truly ‘express’ nature of the meal as both dishes arrived very shortly after ordering and simultaneously not long after I began to nibble some pumpkin crackers I had ordered to be consumed with a very necessary sweet chilli sauce. The food was what one could have expected for the modest price; the chicken was somewhat over cooked but edible and I do not think exact precision of cooking should be expected for what I payed but other than that, apart from the fact that I really didn’t like the ‘addictive’ peanut sauce which I found to be bitter, I felt as content as one could reasonably expect to be. But it would have been nice not to have starter and main course delivered together. The portion of jasmine rice was a generous size and the heat of the curry was mild despite the ‘two chillies’ guide depicted on the menu - the accompanying glass of Gingerella ginger ale was much more fiery than any of the food. I should have liked a little more heat in the curry. We Brummies can take it.

Express lunch - two course served together.

 

 This place seems alright for an unremarkable, modestly priced fast lunch and no doubt might be satisfactory for a pre-theatre bite to eat (if the Rep and the Concert Hall ever reopen) but it’s never going to set the Birmingham food scene on fire which is probably not what is intended. The small size and the location in a prestige building with accompanying probably high business rates makes me think that Rosa’s probably has a limited lifespan in the spot where it is. 

154. Waitrose Pulls The Plug On The Good Food Guide.

 Revenge is a dish best served cold.......

  There are some restauranteurs who may be embracing the above sentiment at the news that Waitrose has pulled the plug on the publication it took over, The Good Food Guide, most of all Alex Claridge whose The Wilderness failed to be included in the 2019 and final 2020 editions. Waitrose, which took over publication of the Guide seven years ago, announced yesterday (27 May 2021) that “We retain the brand but currently have no plans to publish future guides”.

 The story of the founding of The Good Food Guide is familiar to many. It was originally published in 1951 as a result of the efforts of its first editor, Raymond Postgate, to identify to people where food could be eaten in reasonable surroundings after the years of rationing imposed by the needs of the Second World War and the less necessary diktat of Attlee’s post-War Labour government. Postgate had founded the Good Food Club in 1949 and reviews were elicited from members of dining establishments in which they had eaten. Anyone who submitted a review was considered to be member of the club.

  I recently thought it might be interesting to own an early edition of The Good Food Guide in reasonable condition and was interested to see how rarely they are offered on internet sites and the astonishing price being asked for them. For instance a dealer advertising a 1955-56 3rd edition was asking a price of well over £300 (which would have paid for several lunches in Birmingham Michelin-starred restaurants) and a 1957-58 4th edition, in very fine condition, was also remarkably expensive. I was not tempted to pay such prices for either of these little books despite their rarity and interesting contents, instead I thought of the meals I might treat myself to as a reward for not spending money so incautiously!

  Just for the record, the final edition of the Guide published in 2019 listed eleven Birmingham restaurants - Adam’s, Carter’s of Moseley, Folium, Harborne Kitchen, Lasan, Opheem, Opus, The Oyster Club, Purnell’s, Purnell’s Bistro and Simpsons. The Guide was a rather pleasing book to own, having higher production standards than the Michelin Guide Great Britain and Ireland but its descriptions of restaurants were often flowery, vaguely pompous and full of superfluous details. It was nice to have a British rival to the Michelin Guide but I can live without it.

Raymond Postgate

153. Stratford Resurgens But No. 9 Closes.

 

  Lucy The Labrador and I were back in town and reinstalled after half a year’s absence at the Shakespeare Hotel in Chapel Street which over the years has become one of our second homes - old, atmospheric, friendly, comfortable, historic (like we two). The pandemic had taken its toll, many members of the previous staff whom we liked very much had moved on and there was still an air of palpable dismay about the place.

  One of the worst things about the hotel had been its restaurant - a Marco Pierre White New York-style concept which never looked happy in the surroundings of hoary panelling and low ceiling beams and honoured White more than it ever did Shakespeare. The food was edible but far too expensive for what it was and large photographs of White were scattered all around which was not to any degree tasteful. It never seemed right to be eating Italian-American cuisine in a place as English as the Shakespeare. What the hotel needed was a good modern English restaurant and - now that the pandemic has led to the Marco Pierre White restaurant closing which saddens because of the lovely staff who worked there but otherwise brings me relief knowing that the hotel could receive a great boost if the right sort of establishment takes over - that opportunity has arrived. There was a certain satisfaction to be experienced to see the photographs of White having been removed in the restaurant and in their place a bust of William Shakespeare restored to his rightful place, God bless him.

  But dinner must be had and so, off across the road to the Indigo Hotel where the Michelin Plated restaurant, The Woodsman is located.

  I have written reports about this excellent restaurant before and I was impatient to return there to see what was on offer to make my digestive juices flow. Here are the choices available for the starter and main courses:-

   I could not miss the opportunity of ordering the combination of seasonal English asparagus and Dorset crab as starter and after a little consideration opted for Berkshire pork chop as the main course. Unfortunately another starter was served to me which was a disappointment but I found it easier to have the unordered dish than to send it back as it looked interesting and proved to be very tasty - it was the Globe artichoke velouté with cuttlefish ragu and hazelnuts. To me this was highly innovative, I loved the texture of the nuts and the velouté itself, an attractive green, was pleasurable with the whole dish being visually impressive.

  On to the vast pork chop served with fennel choucroute, roast apricots and black pudding. The accompaniments matched the beautifully cooked chop very well and this made for a magnificent dish. The pork was tasty and tender as it could be and the apricot was pleasing but, for me at least, nothing really beats the humble apple as a sweet-acid companion with grilled or roast pork, call me old-fashioned if you will.

  The desserts were tempting but the chop had been so generously sized that I knew that it would be unwise to proceed further. This was a grand meal and a fine setting. I would be happy to visit The Woodsman whenever I may.

  The following fine spring evening, I set off to walk the 200 yards from The Shakespeare to Paul Foster’s Michelin-starred Salt and as I approached the restaurant I was shocked to find that its Michelin-listed next door neighbour No 9 Church Street, one of the most notable dining places in Stratford, had been closed permanently. Chef Patron Wayne Thomson who had run and cooked at No. 9 since 2010 left messages on a number of social media sites on 12 May 2021 announcing the charming little restaurant’s departure from the scene. For those who have enjoyed eating there over the years we can only feel that Parting is such sweet sorrow .... It appears that a Thai restaurant will open in the building “soon”.

  And so to dinner at Salt. The internal decor is unchanged and did not need to be. What had changed from my last visit three or four years ago was the welcome. I was greeted by an excellent waiter and the new Maître d’Hôtel and instantly felt pleased to be at Salt. I was a little disappointed to have only one choice of menu available to me - the £85 eight course Tasting menu (I should have read the information on the restaurant’s internet site and I would have known) - sometimes less is more particularly for an old bloke whose stomach tends to protest if he places too much food in it in too short a time space. But the menu was intriguing and so the evening got underway with olives and toasted almonds and tasty bread and butter.

  At last, seasonal English asparagus cooked perfectly served with little blobs of egg yolk, nicely cooked peas and asparagus salad.  An excellent start.

  And then a real gem, a fabulously delicious celebration of scallop. Slices of scallop, one optimally fried in butter, the other two served ceviche with the most wondrously flavoured sweet and sour dill purée, little pieces of grape, thin slices of cucumber and the necessary texture provided by crumble of rye cracker. A truly great dish.

  Then an altogether different kettle of fish - carrot cooked in chicken fat, crispy chicken skin (I could not identify any on my plate) and pickled carrot. There really seemed no point in having this dish on the menu. This was not a vegetarian menu so what is the point of a few bits of carrot in a bowl and not much else? This reminded me of a large dish of brassicas unaccompanied by anything else served to me at Joro in Sheffield some time ago or being served a starter of nothing more than a large mound of mashed potato once at Carter’s of Moseley - there really was no pleasure in it, eating it was a matter of just going through the motions. In a large non-vegetarian menu there really is no place for this eccentric voyage into isolated vegetable eating - Chefs please note - vegetables are best served as accompaniments of  protein. I did not finish the course nor did I photograph it. On to a dish of mushrooms - roasted hen of the woods, shimeji, goats curd and smoked bone marrow sauce. This was a very tasty dish as you might expect from the list of ingredients.

  On to an original and tasty dish full of clever flavours - a Coronation chicken with the poultry substituted by lamb sweetbreads. Contrary to the sentiments of many modern food lovers, having been brought up in the era after rationing ended when people wanted to eat real meat having been forced by first the War and then Attlee’s government to eat all sorts of innards of other species which they would not necessarily have chosen to do, I do not seek out sweetbreads. However here some were prepared to a fine standard which made the texture bearable and more importantly rendered very tasty by the sublime upmarket version of Coronation sauce with its pretty little golden sultanas and the gentle surf of curry washing on to its shores.

  And to the centrepiece - immaculately cooked and seasoned sirloin (how lovely it is to go back to restaurants now and find that a dish of beef is not a daube or an ox cheek but high quality cuts of meat - has the pandemic brought chefs to their senses wherein they realise that diners enjoy high quality cuts particularly if they are paying a lot of money for it? - the 2020s, it seems, may offer hope of a fine new direction for chefs and diners). With it, what joy, shockingly enjoyable minted new potatoes, totally apt pickled onion slices and a memorable, unctuous black garlic sauce. This dish identifies just why the Michelin inspectors handed Salt one of its macarons.

  The darling pinkness of the beef was matched by that of the exquisite, dainty strawberry and thyme tartlet, the pastry of which was as fine as one could hope for and its contents a fairyland of pure pleasure. And it came with a devastatingly inspired ice cream, lovage-flavoured, which could not have been improved on as a match for the dish. A high was reached and I was full of delights. I had to send my apologies to Chef Laura Kimber and her excellent assistant for not being able to move on to the final dessert course - “Chocolate, miso, tonka bean and peanut toffee”, which leaves the reader with watering mouth and needing to imagine how pleasurable it would have probably been but I was too full and that was the end of it. A five course meal would have sufficed and I would certainly have felt no less fortunate for having missed the carrot course but that was the menu and I have described it as I ate it with all its glories and one or two weaker points. 

  Back to The Shakespeare. There the expensive and poor Marco Pierre White restaurant has, like the dinosaurs, achieved extinction. Missed by few. A little way along the road No 9 Church Street has passed into West Midlands gastronomic history. Genuinely mourned. But Stratford seems resurgent. The Woodsman and Salt are there. Now if only The Shakespeare Hotel could set its heart (being in the town’s very heart) on giving space to an apt and relevant restaurant of quality and make its contribution to Stratford Resurgens.

Farewell, for now, Chef Wayne Thomson

152. Exhilaration, Relief And Excitement As Restaurants Reopen.

 My birthday weekend for reasons described in Blog 150 saw me dining with five good friends at two of Birmingham’s finest restaurants on two consecutive evenings. Two excellent choices which more than lived up to my expectations, in fact they excelled them by far.

  What really made it all so wonderful was the exhilarating atmosphere of excitement and relief that surrounded the reopening. The staff were enthusiastic, refreshed, even euphoric, and clearly determined to make the most of this renaissance. There were new dishes or old favourites updated to even greater deliciousness. This was the first weekend of the end of the lockdown and its significance was clearly not lost on diners and hospitality staff. This was therefore a memorable weekend for those determined to make the most of it and a milestone in the history of dining out in Birmingham. 

  I have detailed happy visits to Opheem (where we dined on the Friday evening) and Purnell’s (Saturday evening) on several occasions before and will not therefore go into great detail but present the menus as once did our old friend Nathaniel Newnham-Davis and throw in little comments as necessary.

  The starter snacks as always were a great pleasure and when we entered the dining room proper we were suitably impressed by the newly redesigned cooking area. Black and multidimensional - very chic. I am a great fan of the grilled sweet corn course. The heritage tomatoes were a refreshing interval and the tandoori trout with mouli was thoroughly edible. The menu does become a little confused as the tasty aloo tuk marches in to be followed by the excellent halibut accompanied, and what pleasure it is to see it finding its way into one of the dishes at this time of year, by asparagus from the Wye Valley, though perhaps the full joy of the asparagus was lost to the flavour of the fish. Then came the milk loaf - it seems to be slowly sliding down the menu - and though it is fine bread it really seems too late in the meal to making it worthwhile or even necessary given that a certain degree of gastrointestinal fullness is beginning to set in. Then to the lamb - a fine dish, enjoyed by all fellow diners - and then the two desserts (one would be enough for me) but they were both delicious and if I really must have a chocolate dessert then this is one that I am happy to have. 

  This number of courses to be consumed by six people takes a long time to get through and by the time we left the restaurant, all very contented with the meal, the witching hour had struck. Before retiring to bed the dog needed to be walked so it was turned two before I eased myself into the enormously comfortable Grand Hotel bed in which I was to pass the four short hours before the new day began and the dog once more needed to be exercised and my actual birthday was underway. 

  It was a day of activity and time passed rapidly before the six of us once more met up for cocktails in The Grand’s atmospheric Madeleine Bar. And then we were off to Purnell’s. The manager, Jarek Samborski, splendidly attired in a devastatingly loud checked grey suited established that we were very welcome and led us to our enclosed dining area. The air was full of the spirit of excitement I mentioned above, not least among the staff; Chef himself was out and about mingling with his Saturday night diners; the sparkling wine was flowing and we were off on a journey which brought us Purnell’s greatest hits. Even the curmudgeon among us found the meal faultless - an unprecedented event and not explained by any befuddlement of judgement due to overconsumption of the grape as he touches not a drop. And this is what we had as the evening passed:-

  The Gifts from the kitchen we’re of course the brilliant black potatoes with chorizo dip, edible charcoal  and a new version of Purnell’s chip - all a delight and wondrous to those who had not eaten them before. Purnell’s inventiveness and ingenuity build up points and still at the start line. The super-light pain de campagne, surely one of the world’s most delicious breads served with salted butter brought sighs of pleasure and then a new souped-up version of emotions of soixante Dix, Purnell’s tribute to the cheese and pineapple on a stick nibble dating back to er, 1969, one assumes - always excellent, this version was the most fabulous yet - deeply tasty, the cheese flavour sweeping over the tongue like the Red Sea over the Egyptian army chasing the Israelites.

  The beetroot mousse paired classically with horseradish and wasabi in the form of a crumble delighted even our beetroot-hater and our curmudgeon by then was feeling somewhat exasperated that there was nothing to carp about and praise to be given instead. Another Purnell classic, the smoked haddock with egg, perfectly pouched, curry oil and cornflakes was presented as Ma Purnell’s remix and earned the group’s praise for its flavour.

  Along next came one of Chef’s fine, fine dishes - Cornish crab with a salad of Granny Smith apple, celery and dill along with a bisque cream. The stuff that dreams are made of. There was of course, in this parade of classic dishes,  unimpeachable Brixton cod Masala and then a new delight - a perfectly cooked piece of Herefordshire beef, oozing flavour, served with a fine asparagus from the Wye Valley just when one should be eating it and all nicely complemented by a white onion sauce and timely wild garlic. What joy.

  How else to end this parade of classics from over the years but with the greatly loved Burnt English custard surprise and the Mint choccy chip, Purnell’s witty nod to after dinner mints, served amidst swirling clouds of liquid carbon dioxide. For a finale Chef kindly sent out a pretty little dish containing an additional dessert with the words “Happy Birthday” piped on to it and, for good measure, out came the beautiful Labrador iced birthday cake I had brought with me from Kiss Me Cupcakes, a lovely vanilla sponge with butter cream and jam. The wine had flowed throughout and Chef came to speak to us which was a good idea because there was general enthusiasm for the fabulous banquet and it was only right that he and his staff should know after the hard months that had preceded it. My finest birthday dinner ever I think.