I have expressed in previous Blogs my lack of excitement when faced with the threat of having to consume Street Food. I have had one or two overpriced stinkers in my time and all eaten uncomfortably seated on some stray street bench somewhere or the other with a gale whipping around me, drizzle in the air and the dog looking utterly miserable.
Digbeth Dining Club made consuming street food in Birmingham somewhat more comfortable and, more importantly, cool, (or whatever word is now used to denote cool) and eventually sent out little satellites on a regular basis so that street food was not just confined to the inner city (by which I mean Digbeth and, lattetly, the Jewellery Quarter) but also suburban neighbourhoods and notably distant, near-rural Longbridge.
On 19 November 2021 St Modwen, the company which redeveloped Longbridge, with Digbeth Dining Club, opened Herbert’s Yard, named after Herbert Austin who founded the Longbridge motor factory, to house diners buying street food from stalls set up by regular stall holders of Digbeth Dining Club. There are dozens of tables which from the first day attracted hundreds of people local to south west Birmingham and northern Worcestershire - families, the young, the old and … their dogs. At last - street food at Longbridge in dry, spacious, wind-free surroundings (and Longbridge can be so wondrously windy that any denizen of Digbeth would believe that they had been transported to another planet by gastronomic aliens).
South west Birmingham has no restaurant to thrill the gourmand and so Friday, Saturday and Sunday at Herbert’s Yard is an opportunity not to be missed with approximately six Digbeth Dining Club stall holders turning up every week to sell their wares; the vendors changing every week. On the opening day I ate Taiwanese style with a delicious spicy jackfruit bao and in contrast then turned my attention to a hot dog but the size of the ‘jumbo’ sausage’ was far too excessive for my taste and Lucy The Labrador came to my aid and polished it off. The accompanying crispy onions were also no substitute for sweet gently fried onions which are traditional accompaniments with hot dog - sometimes change is not always for the better.
I was unable to revisit Herbert’s Yard for a couple of weeks being away in Ludlow and Lichfield dining very well as previously reported. However on a return visit I was delighted to find that there was a stall there named Chakanita, run by those behind the Michelin-plated Chakana Peruvian-style restaurant situated in Moseley (and which was recently gushingly reviewed by Jay Rayner in a swooning ecstasy after visiting Chakana). There was no competition for my interest this week. It had to be Chakanita. It had to be Peruvian. After all, how often can you eat food prepared by a Michelin-listed establishment in these distant outer reaches of the city?
We must remember that this was street food, prepared on relatively primitive cooking devices in a wooden shack. Not a smart Michelin-listed, food critic-pleasing, restaurant in a wealthy, Champagne- socialist, inner suburb of the city. I had long viewed Chakana as a restaurant I really must visit but I have an aversion to Moseley which I find hard to overcome and I still had not summoned up the moral fortitude to head to Moseley to enable me to eat at Chakana. But here was Chakana, or its smaller wayward sibling at least, plying its trade in modest Longbridge.
I chose a chicken tomale with an excellent, fresh spicy salsa which proved to be very edible indeed. The chicken was nicely cooked and the slickness was perfect. The pork in a blue corn bun - not a lot to say about it except that it gave a lot of pleasure.
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