183. Autumn Tidbits; Michelin Ignores The Midlands Again.

 

  Lucy The Labrador and I passed another 3 days in Birmingham city centre feeling rather comfortable and pleased with ourselves at The Grand Hotel where Lucy is something of an icon. Autumn had suddenly arrived with a vengeance, no more Indian summer but 36 hours of remorseless rain resulting in wet humans and soggy dogs. This was a midweek stay. The hotel was now busy with charmless businessmen, their time devoted to the making of money. I have long held that there are many in England who have a lot of money but are still as common as the Beckhams and Blairs. It appeared many of that ilk were staying at The Grand during our visit.

  Breakfast provided me with a shock. A buffet system has been introduced and while the products remain high quality one’s timing needs to be immaculate to ensure that the food is even mildly warm. The worst sight of the morning was an almost empty tray of dried out scrambled egg remnants, badly in need of replacing, but a rather vacant young man put in charge of it all did not seem to appreciate that such a need existed. He was more willing than able, it seemed. Matters, however, were soon put right when a senior person arranged for me to have freshly prepared plate of scrambled egg delivered to my table though even then things would have been better still if chef had recognised how much the addition of some salt enhances the flavour of scrambled egg.

  All around me, busy looking businessmen were playing with their mobile phones whilst shovelling great lumps of food, gannet-like, into their busy businessmen mouths. One charming individual, not far from me, thought it was a good idea to carry out a COVID-19 lateral flow test at the breakfast table. It was one of those occasions when one thinks, “Well now I’ve seen everything”. A charming member of the front of house staff picked up on my repugnance at this business-beast’s behaviour and asked if I would like her to speak to him but really this was not the fault of the hotel nor its staff and one hardly wishes to find them being put in an awkward position because of the disgusting behaviour of one of the guests. 

  I surveyed my fellow breakfasters around the room, mostly ‘busy businessmen’, all with a sense of self-entitlement bigger than Yorkshire, hardly any of them capable of eating food in a civilised manner but reduced to stone age shovellings of colossally-sized boulders of food into their gaping maws. England has very little to thank America for - and here’s another example - our restaurants serve unnecessarily huge amounts of food, à l’Americaine, and the English have learned to wolf down these vast piles of barely cut-up food using their forks like garden spades with no sense of just how disgusting they look. And now, why not blow your nose loudly over breakfast and then shove a stick up it for good measure to try to bring a crop of coronavirus into the outside world?

  The previous evening I had had a much pleasanter experience in the Madeleine Bar. Those who know (The Tatler) have ruled that while one may now use the word ‘toilet’ without being considered to be common (it has taken many decades to reach this point), the drinking of negronis is common. So obviously choosing a negroni was out (possibly one may still ask for a Boulevardier without committing a social indiscretion worthy of Posh Spice). Regardless, I opted for a Margarita and very good it was too (confirmed by a second glass of said pleasurable liquid) and suppered firstly on The Grand’s rather fine prawn cocktail and afterwards on the wondrous (and huge - too much for me but then I’m neither an American nor a busy businessman) The Grand’s charcuterie and cheese platter which was probably intended to be for sharing and would have been had dogs been allowed in the bar (Lucy would not be averse to a tidbit of robust flavoured venison salami). I rounded off supper with an impeccable Brandy Alexander which was flawlessly luxurious and simply the right drink at that time of night.

  After breakfast, Lucy and I set off for a walk around town and passed a sight worth mentioning when thinking about the city’s gastronomic history. Towards the furthermost end of Corporation Street, next door to the spectacular Victoria Law Courts Building, one comes across the Pitman Building which housed the Pitman Vegetarian Restaurant (see Blog 180) from the late 1880s to the 1930s and was famously visited by Mahatma Gandhi during his tour of England in 1931.There is a plaque fixed to the building which dates back to 1998 marking the Centenary of the opening in the building of the first ‘Health Food Store’

  

  Across the road from the Pitman Building is a building which once housed the Court Restaurant, presumably the place to which those who had business in the Law Courts would repair for lunch to prepare for the afternoon session. A building of its age, grandly decorated and barely noticed, surrounded as it is by other fine Victorian constructions, part of Birmingham’s gastronomic history. An photograph dating to 1961 found on the internet shows the Court Restaurant being used a first storey south Asian restaurant called The Light Of Asia located above a pharmacy and under a ‘Hair and scalp clinic’.

  It was the last Wednesday of the month which meant that the Michelin Guide was to release at midday the names of the latest restaurants to be added to the Guide. Given previous form it was not surprising to discover that absolutely no Midlands restaurants were included on this present list of nine; unsurprisingly two are located in Dublin which is the place that Michelin inspectors seem to be most in love with at present and there are also two in London inevitably, one in Belfast (33% of the list therefore located on the island of Ireland improbably), one in Scotland (genteel Edinburgh), two Up North (York and Manchester) and two Down South (Sussex and Reading).

  Not for the first time I am driven to wonder if Michelin inspectors ever pull off one of the northbound motorways to drop in on a Midlands county. Well occasionally but only, it seems, to visit places they have visited before. There is just one recent Michelin inspector Tweet from The Midlands to report - from Salt in Stratford upon Avon on 19 September. Perhaps they called in there on the way to Birmingham Airport to catch a flight to Dublin.