Some people have a foolish way of not minding, or pretending not to mind, what they eat. For my part, I mind my belly very studiously and very carefully: for I look upon it, that he who does not mind his belly will hardly mind anything else. Dr Samuel Johnson, born in Lichfield 1709.
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| Dr Johnson scrutinising an excessively long menu? |
Lucy The Labrador and I were in Lichfield so that I could visit three restaurants, two currently mentioned in the Michelin Guide and the third featuring a pop-up of a Michelin Star-awarded chef planning to open his own restaurant next spring. Coupled with the recent opening of the superb Upstairs by Tom Shepherd (see Blogs 188 and 194) Lichfield is gastronomically hot at the moment.
On my first evening I dined with a companion at Larder. It was a Wednesday evening and therefore we were dining from the restaurant’s ‘Grill Night’menu. It is a comfortable restaurant with an upstairs dining room but we were seated in the downstairs area with a bar which contributed to the restaurant reminding me very much of 1980s Italian restaurant style but minus giant pepper grinders.
Service was satisfactory, friendly but not excessively so and efficient without being overbearing. After memorable brioche bread with a delicious, almost gooey surface, served with a wonderful beetroot and chive butter, I chose a very fine starter of crab and wasabi with cucumber for texture. This was excellent - the taste of the crab shone through and little prickles in the mouth from the wasabi punctuated the flavour but always complemented it and never overwhelmed it. The cucumber both cooled and crunched and the accompanying crisp added to the pleasure of it all. It looked clean and appetising. All thought of ‘1980s Italian’ was dispelled by the time I’d finished the course. My companion also derived great pleasure from his scallop starter.
As it was grill night it would have been foolish not to have a grill as the main course. The lobster sounded alluring but needed to be preordered and I had failed to do so and therefore the obvious action was to order the generously proportioned fillet steak which was cooked perfectly according to our tastes and served with some very passable chips, the sweetest of sweet shallots, a delicious garlic coated mushroom and some crème fraîche. My friend chose an accompanying pepper sauce but I was happy to bask in the flavours, which were excellent with perfect seasoning, of the piece of meat in its nude state. Perhaps the only disappointment was an uninteresting green salad which we had as an additional accompaniment.
A light dessert was all that was needed and we both chose the warm boozy cherries with soft meringue, caramel and the crunch of delicious hazel nuts. Two pleasing little petits fours were served at the end including a happy fudge.
Larder is very enjoyable, relaxing, unpretentious but fine. The Michelin Guide quotes the restaurant’s tag line “All flavour, no pomp” and concludes “and that’s exactly what you’ll get … Attractively presented modern dishes are sure to satisfy”. A great start to my three nights in Lichfield.
After an enjoyable day in the fine and interesting city of Lichfield it was off to The Boat Inn at nearby Muckley Corner. Like Larder, The Boat Inn is Michelin-plated and of course its Chef Patron, Liam Dillon, appeared in the 2021 The Great British Menu (see Blog 136 and137) and gave a very creditable demonstration of his culinary skills and vision. The Michelin inspector in the on-line 2021 edition of the Guide states, “…..Shelves burst with goodies which are showcased in refined modern dishes and the tasting menu lists some luxurious ingredients”.
The restaurant is bright and very spacious and on a cold evening, warm and comfortable with welcoming, pleasant, highly efficient and informed front-of-house staff. The meal started off with two delicious snacks, including a full-flavoured cheesy croquette looking like a head with Parmesan hair. Then some tasty beer soaked spelt loaf with two butters; the chicken butter was tasty but I loved the cultured butter in particular and the accompanying root vegetable pickle was fun and not out of place.
On to the starter. This was goats cheese agnolotti, rectangles of perfectly textured roast squash, a fennel sauce and truffles. This was the least successful course. It was markedly saltier than I would have wished, the agnolloti were unexciting and although the accompanying wine was chosen to match the fennel sauce the flavour of fennel was undetectable. The dish looked lovely but the flavours said “salt” and not “fennel”. Then to an admirably cooked fish course of roast Gigha halibut fillet, a wonderfully complementary crispy chicken skin with shallots, sea herbs including rock samphire and salty fingers and a beautiful caviar sauce. I wondered if this course too was a little saltier than it should have been but I enjoyed it and derived great pleasure from the splended fish.
The main course was a beautiful dish of sweetly pink loin of Primrose Farm hogget with a lamb mousse nestled on top of it, delicious artichoke and an artichoke mousse with a herb emulsion, all enriched by an excellent Bordelaise sauce. I will not forget to mention the more-than-garnish of surprisingly tasty and apt ox-eye daisy leaves which added a very interesting and decorative greenness to the dish. A grand course indeed.
My enthusiasm for chocolate desserts is limited but the lovely final course served at The Boat proved to be a great antidote to my usual chocolate dessert antipathy. This was a delicately flavoured chocolate parfait of perfect texture with lovely malty Horlicks ice cream, milk crisp and puffed rice. This was just what I need in a dessert - lightness, sweetness and a little luxuriousness.
Unfortunately I did not have time for coffee but I received two enjoyable petits fours, one of which was a splendid twist on the little jellies that one is offered almost everywhere now - a brilliant strongly flavoured rum jelly. Great stuff! and clever!
It was good to see Chef there leading from the front up there at the pass. Liam Dillon’s restaurant is an excellent, beautifully located fine spot to dine on modern British food. My joyous return is an inevitability.
Finally to Thyme Kitchen. The Head Chef at the restaurant is Susie Mandelberg who was born and grew up in Alrewas near Lichfield and after working in London returned to her home city to work as Head Chef at Thyme Kitchen. During the closing months of 2021, end of week dinners at Thyme Kitchen however are being devised and cooked in ‘pop-up’ sessions by Rob Palmer who was Head Chef at Peel’s Restaurant at Hampton Manor from the latter part of 2015 until 2021, leading the restaurant to the achievement of a Michelin Star on 3 October 2016. He is planning to open his own restaurant in Solihull in spring 2022. So the West Midlands gastronomic scene continues to evolve. The visit to Thyme Kitchen gave me an opportunity to see just what to expect at Solihull’s upcoming and badly needed new restaurant - from the point of view of fine dining the town has been wholly ignored up until now, surprising given the large number of very wealthy potential diners who live in the area.
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| Susie Mandelberg |
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| Rob Palmer |
Thyme Kitchen is a lovely bright restaurant in as a quiet a rural setting as you might want. It was cosy and welcoming and the front of house staff are excellent. Everything was cheering and festive decked out with Christmas decorations and an appropriate amount of lighting.
And so to the food. It’s almost the end of the year. I’ve visited a lot of good quality West Midlands restaurants this year and had a lot of fine meals. This was the best. It’s little wonder that Peel’s Restaurant was awarded a Michelin star with Rob Palmer working as its Head Chef. Each course was immaculate. I had nothing to grumble about and many reasons for which to purr with pleasure. This was a very fine meal.
I chose the 5 course menu. I could have had an additional main course (roast monkfish) but I knew that would have been a little too much for me. The physical menu itself was excellent - how nice to have each course detailed more fully than those three word jobs - ‘porpoise - plantain - beetroot’ - which tell you nothing except that the Chef doesn’t want to reveal the full extent of his jiggerypokery and also to have detailed the accompanying wines with an explanation of what to think of them. Thoroughly satisfied and nothing had yet been put in my mouth.
There was a more-than-pleasing little ‘snack’ of a delightfully crispy cracker with the flavours of sweet onions and Berkswell cheese. This was another restaurant where I thought that a meal made up of nothing more than the amuse gueule(s) would more than delight me. This was followed by some delicious crusty bread with an exceedingly generous and much appreciated portion of excellent butter and then along came possibly the best starter of the year.
This was gorgeous - diced, roasted and dehydrated beetroot marinated in pear juice with goats cheese ice cream, pickled pear, sourdough crumb and red veined sorrel. A silky, thick, unctuous beetroot juice was poured over it to make it glisten and give a polished sheen. Faultless and fabulous.
I’m not a fan of the now almost ubiquitous carrot dish but if it must appear on a menu then Rob Palmer is the man to deliver it to you. This dish was made up of confit carrot cooked in beef fat (and very tasty it was too), green sauce, carrot purée with little stud-like pieces of thyme decorating it, a highly memorable beer and pickled onion gel and enjoyably salty mini scratchings.
Then to a delicious ceviche of salmon cured in lime with pickled maitake mushrooms, the texture of crispy wild rice rounding it all off. A great dish. Then the main course, my choice being roast duck, perfectly cooked, with charred hispi cabbage as well as some rolled and stuffed with mildly flavoured cabbage and duck offal, a delicious hazelnut emulsion and a gorgeous port and red wine sauce. The duck may have been rested for a little longer as there was a little of blood on one part of the plate but it was cooked beautifully. Close to faultless.
By now I had enjoyed a Monkey 47 and tonic and 4 glasses of wine, beautifully described on the menu and also finely matched with the food and this resulted in me failing to photograph the somewhat different but excellent dessert - apple and raisins poached in brandy with a butter ice cream and compressed Granny Smith apple and cinnamon biscuit. Just up my street.
As stated above, this was probably the finest meal I have had this year in any restaurant. I was able to have a couple of words with Chef and asked him the planned date for the opening of his restaurant in Solihull and he told me it was to be March 2022. If the meal at Thyme Kitchen was anything to go by then that date in March just has to be the most anticipated page on the calendar right now.
Even though Rob Palmer will soon be lost to Lichfield the city really has a lot to attract the lover of West Midlands food and a gastronomic mini-break in the city, as I have just had, is well worth considering. I have raised the question before - is Lichfield the new Ludlow?
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