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.
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| Farewell, for now, Chef Wayne Thomson |
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