191. Qavali

 

  Still in the middle of its soft opening which means half price food and drink for the punters, I had dinner at Qavali in Broad Street/Brinkley Place. This must be the most gorgeous restaurant in Birmingham - an extremely spacious, beautifully, lavishly and in places, quirkily, decorated dining area with two bars, open kitchen and very comfortable seating which serves Persian and Central Asian food with a touch of South Asian cuisine to boot. It must have cost a packet to get it looking so beautiful. The staff are immaculate - welcoming, efficient, pleasingly informal but polite and well informed. All this and the place has not even opened properly yet. Even if the restaurant did not serve good food it would be a thrilling place just to sit back and relax.

  I started with an excellent Champagne lassi and sought advice on what to order (Persian cuisine is not my strong point). For a starter the waitress and I settled on the Chef’s special which, if I had read the ingredients properly and put two and two together, would have lead to the diagnosis that the Chef’s Special was a quite spicy chaat (spicy enough to set the front of my tongue a-tingling and make my face rather warmer than it should have been). I am not a lover of chaat but this was a tasty dish and ate the larger part of the generously-sized dish.

  Following the waitress’ advice I had an extremely generously proportioned Qajari koobideh, a supremely tender and delicious minced lamb kebab, cooked to utter perfection so that it was about as succulent as anything any chef has ever cooked before. This was served with a minimal amount of salad and a tomato sauce swirled on the board containing the kebab and there was too little of both to make one feel that they were there doing something useful. I had a bowl, a rather large one, of fragrant saffron rice but found the saffron to be too strong a flavour to enable me to make much of an impact on the generous helping I had been served. I think I should have had some bread with the kebab rather than the rice which would only really have worked if there had been some sauce with the dish. But the kebab was memorable for its deliciousness and itself made the trip to Qavali worthwhile. Complimentary Turkish tea was served with the meal and was a perfect accompanying beverage with the dish.

  I finished with a dish of nothing more complicated than a mango sorbet which suited me fine and rounded off a memorable meal. A good cup of Turkish coffee was served with a welcome cube of Turkish delight, both in delightfully decorative pots with little lids on them.

  Some may say that the music, a sort of disco version of traditional Middle Eastern music, is too intrusive (after The Widerness and 670 Grams I’m prepared for anything) but I rather liked it though it may make conversations problematical and others may say that the lighting is a little dimmer than it might be but the atmosphere is startlingly exciting even with just a third to a half of the tables occupied in this preopening stage. It looks to me that Qavali is going to be like Dishoom - another must-do Birmingham eating-out experience.

  

Having seemingly had the last rites read out to it (see Blog 154), The Good Food Guide is to be revived.

  Some months after Waitrose announced that it did not intend to publish any further editions of The Guide for the foreseeable future, it was announced on 29 October 2021 that the publication had been bought by Adam Hyman and that a 2022 edition would be published both on paper and digitally with the present editor, Elizabeth Carter, still at the helm. As related in Blog 154, the Good Food Guide was first published in 1951 by its editor Raymond Postgate and so it is to be revived in its 70th year with Elizabeth Carter having been its editor for the last 14 years. We will have to see if the Guide finally recognises that Alex Claridge’s The Wilderness does indeed serve up ‘good food’ and whether Simpsons continues to seem worth mentioning.

190. Michelin Latest - West Midlands Remains A Culinary Desert.

 

  It’s the time of the month. 

  The last Wednesday to be exact. The Michelin Guide has now published its latest list of new entries to the Guide (this is the third such list) and while twelve new restaurants are featured absolutely none of them are located in the West Midlands. Nor is there a mention for the East Midlands, Apart from East Anglia and the East Midlands every other region has a mention - 2 in Scotland, one in Northern Ireland, one in Ireland (of course), two in London (of course) and one each in the West Country, the South, the South-east, the Home Counties, the North-west plus and the North-east/Yorkshire. The West Midlands is the only region not to have been included in any of these updates. For the Michelin inspectors at least, it seems, the West Midlands remains a culinary desert though it may just be that they represent the sneering metropolitan elite, similar to those who work for the BBC, and really just can not be bothered to come here though no doubt one of them will turn up in a picturesque Cotswold or Shropshire village eventually. They do like to visit the Cotswolds.

  Meanwhile, here in Birmingham:-

  I am pleased to say I have a reservation to try out this rather special-looking restaurant in the next few days though my knowledge of Persian food is practically non-existent.Culinary desert - really?

189. Lunar Society Meets Niall Keating, Fine Dining Soon In Stoke On Trent.

 

Meeting of The Lunar Society at Heathfield, home of James Watt

  Reports in The Caterer as well as in the local press in North Staffordshire inform us that Stoke On Trent is soon to have a fine dining establishment to be overseen by Niall Keating, Head Chef at the two Michelin-starred Whateley Manor in Wiltshire and former winner of The Great British Menu Central region heats. Keating, brought up in Stoke, is partnering with The Great British Experience events company to establish the new restaurant at the World of Wedgwood visitor attraction at Barlaston near Stoke and the restaurant will be named Lunar to recall the 18th century Birmingham-based Lunar Society (named because it always met on a full moon) of which the Stoke potter, Josiah Wedgwood was a member. The Lunar Society was a supper club for the Midlands enlightenment movement and included scientists, inventors and businessmen such as Wedgwood.

  The new 120 cover restaurant kitchen will be run by Head Chef Craig Lunn who worked as sous chef under Keating at Whateley Manor and also as chef de partie at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay. The restaurant is due to open on 26 November.

  Stoke On Trent has not previously been known to be a place of gastronomic excellence. It does not get a mention in the 2021 Michelin Guide. Perhaps it is just about to benefit from a bit of gastronomic ‘levelling up’ and some Lunar Club-style enlightenment (of the gastronomic kind).

Niall Keating and Craig Lunn

  Bristol, it has to be said, is not in the West Midlands. It sits at the tail end of Gloucestershire but, while the regional status of most of Gloucestershire county is a matter of debate  - a Midlands county? a West Country county? (look at the map, it’s definitely in the middle) - Bristol has had its own county created for it to make its region indisputable - South Gloucestershire which is decidedly in the West Country. But it is only just across the border in its mini-county and I am there from time to time so I am not too unhappy about recording a visit to one of its respected restaurants.

  Bristol is a fine city though swamped now with a middle class, socialist elite since the Blairs saw a money-making opportunity in buying property there, that makes it like a vastly larger version of Moseley though in no way as ugly as that Birmingham suburb and of course it is not only a handsome city but it has the quay areas and the river which add to the city’s draw. Unfortunately since my last visit before the first lockdown, the self-regarding middle class denizens have gone mad and there is a great risk of being run over by dim-looking youths on electric scooters and green middle-aged people pedalling away on their bicycles and cars have been expelled to make way for this even more dangerous form of traffic shooting along the pavements. A warning as to what Birmingham will be like in the near future as the environmental fascists establish their new republic of bullying and sneering. Of course these well-heeled inhabitants can afford to eat in style once they’ve pedalled their way around the streets doing their best to kill old blokes with their ageing labradors visiting the city and so the city now has an array of Michelin-listed, -plated and -starred dining establishments.

  Not far from my hotel, on the waterfront, looking across the river at a vast, monstrous Art Deco building that looks like Mussolini put it up, on the upper floor of a collection of shops, cafes and restaurants housed by no means inaptly in shipping containers,  one finds the Michelin-listed Gambas which the Inspector’s report sums up as, “Set in a lovely first floor location in the bustling Wapping Wharf, Gambas comes with a terrace on two sides and lovely river views. The concise menu of small plates showcases great quality produce and has a seafood slant; dishes arrive as they are ready from an open kitchen”. Well, as I say, “lovely river views” is slightly debatable but being English the precise nature of the view does not really matter as we all like to sit by water, don’t we? and will do so in any weather come rain or shine.

“Lovely river views” (Michelin inspector)

  

  The welcome to the internally rustic-looking restaurant was warm and service was relaxed, informative and pleasing. I chose four dishes from the regular menu and the menu of today’s specials. From the former I picked the pan con alioli which was excellent with the bread being as delicious as any I had had in restaurants with greater pretensions - finely judged saltiness and excellent flavour - and precisely judged alioli with robust amounts of garlic but no bolder than than it should have been. Then came the absolutely delightful tortita de camerones - two delicate, thin and golden, extravagantly crispy, deep-fried sheets speckled with shockingly tasty, sweet little prawns. It was a great pleasure just to sit and admire their visual beauty, look at them so delicate, before purring with the happiness of tasting their flavour and experiencing their texture. I would go back to Gambas just for the pleasure of reliving the tortitas.

  The next arrival at my table were some supremely excellent patatas bravas with great swirls of even more alioli and then, from the specials menu, a perfectly cooked (and sized) meaty piece of glimmering hake with mojo verde and the sweetest and happiest little piquillo peppers. This was a very fine and enjoyable meal crowned with an excellent crema Catalan. The chefs in this kitchen really know their stuff. Fine but comforting, the Michelin inspector was right on this one.

“

188. Upstairs By Tom Shepherd.

 Tom Shepherd, who grew up in Birmingham and was Head Chef at Adam’s from 2017 to 2019 (see Blog 165), recently opened his first restaurant, Upstairs, in Lichfield. The name derives from the restaurant’s location which precisely is on the first floor above his father’s  jewellery shop. As well as working previously at Adam’s, Shepherd had in the past worked in the kitchens of Restaurant Sat Bains, in far-off Nottingham, with Michael Wignall as Senior sous chef at the two-starred Latymer restaurant in Pennyhill Park Hotel in Bagshot in Surrey and as sous chef at the Samling Hotel in Windermere. He is therefore a man who is not without credentials.

  His new restaurant is relatively small with 28 covers but it is planned that a roof terrace will be opened in 2022.

  In between his departure from Adam’s and the opening of Upstairs, Shepherd had been running Dine At Home which involved the delivery of a three course meal kit to customers’s homes with the contents of the kit changing on a weekly basis.

  And so, naturally, off to Lichfield I went.

  After days of black skies and almost incessant rain this was a fine, sunny, chill,  blue skyed sort of autumn day. Lichfield could not look finer. The three spired cathedral beside the river could not have looked more magnificent. Dr Johnson rested on his plinth and at a respectful distance Boswell looked out over the market place. In their time neither of them could have heard of Michelin stars but there were enough old inns in the town to have kept them comfortably satiated. 

    I found Shepherd’s father’s jewellery shop and the entrance - a flight of stairs of course - up to the restaurant. A clean, modern, fresh, bright, tasteful, pleasing dining room, a piece of work by the same designers who had provided the decor for Craft Dining Rooms, with an open kitchen. And that was not the only connection - Craft’s manager had moved jobs to work in Lichfield and an excellent job she was doing.

  I was tempted by the excellently priced lunchtime menu, not least because it included an alluring-sounding roast plaice but I felt I must not miss the opportunity to try as much as I could without overwhelming my elderly digestive system and so I chose to eat the dishes on the five course menu.

 

 After two pleasing amuse bouches which included an admirable red cabbage gazpacho aptly accompanied by a mild horseradish ice cream, it was down to business with a first course of a splendid and beautifully cooked scallop, as accurately prepared as we might expect from the former Head Chef of Adam’s, served on a bed of celeriac with dashi and little cubes of apple. The flavour of the scallop itself had me purring with pleasure.

  Then to my least favourite dish, not because it was not well executed but entirely because I dislike poached egg, Arlington White hen’s egg served with beetroot. The main course was made up of excellent quality aged sirloin - full of a wonderful flavour and cooked to perfection - accompanied by Sand carrots and thin slices of sweetly pickled carrot with a Sauce Robert (a brown mustard sauce). I grew a little tired as I ate the course of eating nothing but beef and carrot, as delicious as they may have been and would have like another element to the dish apart from the sauces to break up the monotony of carrot-beef-carrot-beef-ad inf. But it was a fine dish beyond doubt.

  

  Next the menu signalled Transition offering “Thai green curry” which I found to be a highly memorable dish for all the right reasons. Anything with lovely creamy rice pudding and mango is bound to score highly with me. It one of those things, like Purnell’s 10-10-10 egg surprise, that you always want to see on the menu. The dessert proper was a fine piece of patisserie, an excellent Paris Brest, which either needed a little more pear to counter the caramel or perhaps just less caramel.

  Given Tom Shepherd’s background perhaps it is not surprising that I thought that Upstairs was like An acorn of Adam’s’ falling a little way from the tree - Upstairs may have fewer covers and a smaller area but the decor is as smart, the service is pretty well perfect (happily a little more relaxed than Adam’s but pretty spot on with everyone dressed immaculately) and the fine dishes are accurate and well thought out. The place was full for lunch and everything seemed to be running as smoothly as any long established restaurant can manage. A great start. Could Lichfield be the new Ludlow?

  Meanwhile there have been developments in the kitchen at Adam’s. Kieron Stevens (see Blog 165), who took over from Tom Shepherd as Head Chef there in 2019, left the post on September 2021 to work as Executive Chef at the JM Socials restaurant group in Cheltenham. On 28 September 2021 it was announced that James Goodyear had been appointed to the post of Head Chef at Adam’s. Goodyear had previously been Head Chef at the Michelin-starred Hide restaurant in London and was a Young National Chef of the Year finalist in 2014. Goodyear described his style of cooking as “European modern fine dining” and has expressed the opinion that the new post gave him the opportunity to return to his roots.

187. 1988.

 

  I have just obtained a decent copy of the 1988 Michelin Guide Great Britain and Ireland which was one of the three editions of the guide which was not in my collection of the book’s modern day version which dates back to 1974.

  Not surprisingly, given even today’s Michelin Guide’s attitude to the region, The West Midlands did not have many restaurants which the then Guide inspectors felt worthy of inclusion in the book in that year. The United Kingdom as a whole was home to just two three star restaurants - the Waterside Inn at Bray and Le Gavroche in London. There were just 4 two starred establishments - La Manoir Aux Quatr’ Saisons in Oxfordshire, The Terrace, La Tante Claire and Simply Nico all of course in London.

  The Guide included 21 one starred restaurants in the whole of The United Kingdom, ten of which were in London, and only two of which - Croque-en-Bouche in Great Malvern (see Blog 94) and Mallory Court in Leamington were in the West Midlands. The Guide also included a ‘red M’ category which was explained thus, “Whilst appreciating the quality of the cooking in restaurants with a star, you may, however, wish to find some serving a perhaps less elaborate but nonetheless always carefully prepared meal. Certain restaurants seem to us to answer this requirement. We bring them to your attention by marking them with a red ‘M’ in the text of the guide”.  In the whole of The United Kingdom there were 68 restaurants in this red M category (just 8 in London) with the following West Midlands restaurants being featured:- Henry Wong and Henry’s (Birmingham), Buckland Manor  (Broadway),  Redmond’s (Cheltenham), Hope End Country House (Ledbury), Westgate Arms (Warwick) and Brown’s (Worcester) - a total of seven.

  The Birmingham restaurants mentioned in The Guide apart from the two red M restaurants were:- Ploungh And Harrow, Jonathan’s, Sloans, Rajdoot, Dynasty, Lorenzo, Maharajah and Pinocchio’s plus Le Bon Viveur (Sutton Coldfield) and Franzl’s (Smethwick) (see Blog 94).

  It’s interesting that unlike now, Coventry had 3 restaurants named in The Guide - Herbs, Simla and nearby Nailcote Hall. It has been a long time since Coventry has made an appearance in the Michelin Guide, perhaps the planned opening of Glynn Purnell’s restaurant there will act as a spur to the Michelin inspectors to visit the city and reestablish it as a destination for food lovers. 

  Meanwhile Wolverhampton made no appearance in the 1988 Guide; there was no mention for any Ludlow restaurant; in Cheltenham there was just the above mentioned Redmond’s plus Twelve; Shrewsbury had Antonio’s and the Old Police House with Albright Hussey at Albrighton and Country Friends in Dorrington. In Stourbridge Berkley’s (Piano Room) received a mention as did Severn Tandoori in Stourport-On-Severn, Hussain’s (still there but very much trapped in 1988!) in Stratford-Upon-Avon and The Chase Country House in Ettington. Stafford had no restaurant mentioned with just Effy’s in Hereford, Thrales in Lichfield and there were no restaurants mentioned in Stoke-on-Trent. In addition to the above mentioned Westgate Arms there were Randolph’s and Aylesford in Warwick, Hunt House in Rugby, the above mentioned Brown’s plus Kings in Worcester, Rose Tree in Bourton-On-The-Water, College Green in Gloucester, Old Colonial and Haywain at Bridgnorth, Brookhouse Inn at Burton-Upon-Trent, Le Filbert Cottage in Henley-In-Arden, Grafton Manor in Bromsgrove, Lambs at Moreton-In-Marsh while at Kenilworth there was a goodly list of mentioned restaurants - Diment, Bosquet, Portofino and Ana’s Bistro. In Tewkesbury there was Corse Lawn House, in Tetbury there was Gibbons, in Chipping Camden there was Caminetto and in Solihull there was Liaison.

  This list is clearly not exhaustive but it occurs to me that restaurants are featured in the 1988 Guide in rather more towns and communities than is the case today. In 1988 the Michelin inspectors were loitering in Bearwood or driving down country roads to Tewkesbury or Stourport-on-Severn. The Guide’s representation of the West Midlands, though having more named restaurants now, seems to have spread its listing around the smaller places in the area. Of course the current Guide richly features the Cotswolds area and Cheltenham but elsewhere across the region a number of significant smaller towns do not make an appearance. Perhaps it is because they just do not genuinely have anywhere worth eating in or perhaps it is because standards for inclusion in The Guide have been raised to unrealistic levels. Perhaps those with their London-centric gastronomic brains and bellies who plan the Guide should look a little more at the bye-ways towns of the West Midlands than seems to be the case at present.

  Perhaps we may see some new West Midlands mentioned in The Guide as my Michelin Guide Twitter watch reveals just where the Michelin inspectors have been in the West Midlands recently:-

1 October - Simpsons “A verdant oasis in the heart of the city of Birmingham” (really, that’s a bit overblown isn’t it? and since when was Edgbaston “in the heart of the city”?).

11 October - La Dolce Vita, Shrewsbury -  not mentioned before by

16 October - Henne, Moreton-In-Marsh - not mentioned before by Michelin.

  Myself, I have had a very pleasant week of dining in Birmingham with a repeat visit to Kray Tredwell’s 670 Grams,  tasting some dishes I have had before as well as some new ones. It’s certainly a different dining experience, novel, often exciting, even thrilling. Tredwell offers a true tasting menu - not a collection of dishes but small plates with items that send the diner travelling through the world of food - a single langoustine with a tiny pot of Thai green sauce, a vegetable course highlighting celeriac, his now familiar crispy chicken served with a garish red sauce in a dish shaped like a skull with its top sawn off, a course of excellent halibut (more accurately cooked on this second visit) and so on.

 

 Then, the following evening to Purnell’s to join a small number of old university friends for our annual reunion. Those who had not had the pleasure of dining at Purnell’s before were astonished at the excellence of the dishes - there were the usual ‘gifts from the kitchen’, the totally delicious pain de campagne, the classic but a little revised, I think, emotions of soixante-dix (the modern day twist on cheese and pineapple which only Glynn Purnell could come up with): ‘Mom Purnell’s remix’ of the smoked haddock, cornflakes and egg yolk classic, a surprisingly chewy and overcooked Cornish monkfish dish with roast butternut which brought the evening down a bit only for it to be salvaged by a fabulous dish of divinely cooked Ramsbury Estate fallow deer artfully served with a little pat of duck liver parfait with thin little slices of beetroot and a cameo by some sorrel, an Autumn version of 10/10/10 burnt egg custard surprise with blackberries plus the usual tarragon and honeycomb and then the ‘Mint choccy chip’ which as usual rounded everything off to the delight of my fellow diners. Needless to say, it was a happy reunion.

 

 I might just mention that a final treat was shared by the aged reunioneers - a splendid vanilla and strawberry jam sponge bought from the excellent cake maker, Mary Ashman of Kiss Me Cupcakes located in West Heath, here decorated in line with the former professions of the diners:- 

 The week had not completely come to an end. The day following the reunion I was off to Bennett’s Hill to lunch in at the newly opened fish and chip restaurant and takeaway - Fillet Of Soul.

 

 There are a good number of options to chose from but it seems ridiculous to go to a fish and chip shop and not have fish and chips. I chose the excellently-priced cod and chips and as a side dish a black pudding fritter. I had forgotten that the restaurant cooks in either beef dripping or rape seed oil and when my perfectly sized plate of fish and chips arrived I realised I should have asked for the oil-cooked version. Beef dripping-cooked fish always leaves me with a slightly claggy sensation on my tongue and the flavour is not quite to my liking. That aside it was an excellent piece of cod, cooked admirably with perfect batter and as fish and chip shop chips go those on my plate were pretty good. The black pudding fritters were a revelation; apart from being far too big a helping for my appetite, they were cooked perfectly - so many hotels who offer black pudding as part of a cooked breakfast overcook it so that it is dried out to the point of unpleasantness. I was surprised how very edible they were with the fish and chips. So Fillet Of Soul proved to be an excellent option as a meal alternative in the city centre, offering fine fish and chips at a reasonable price. What a joy it is to find a good fish and chip establishment.