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.
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