213. Purnell’s.

 

 The thing about Purnell’s is that it really is excellent. The dishes are so tasty with lots of little bursts of unexpected flavours hidden away waiting for their turn to cause pleasure. The restaurant is just so very very good. The food looks good, usually beautiful, and the flavours and textures excite and please. 

  The atmosphere is just right, the front of house staff are just right, the food is so memorable. I just couldn’t find anything about my five course lunch (a remarkable bargain at £55) that wasn’t right. This is very fine cooking. I have been visiting Purnell’s now for 13 years and I still feel happy to sit down and eat there. I have had some of the dishes more than once (some a good many more times than that!) but there’s always a little tweak or a little difference that makes each visit as fresh as dining there for the first time. I love the place.

  On my latest lunchtime visit I was able to congratulate Adrien Garnier on his just officially announced  appointment as Restaurant Manager and pleased to be greeted by the excellent staff including Lanka Janakova, a now very familiar face. The menu was similar to that I had before Christmas with a few tweaks so I will not repeat what was written in the previous Blog but just write down a few observations.

  

  It would be hard to live if I thought I would never be allowed ever again to have Purnell’s ‘Gifts from the kitchen’ - the black potato, the edible charcoal, the little soupçon of liquid apple and celeriac and the profoundly delicious, gloriously orange-coloured chorizo dip. And that also goes for my very very favourite bread in the whole world - Purnell’s pain de campagne. I can imagine going out on a summers day to the fields near where I live with a little picnic of these treats and having a very nice afternoon (oh alright, I’d probably track down somewhere a nice peppery pork pie to accompany Purnell’s pleasures but what a picnic that would be).

  The first starter, a hymn to the humble cauliflower (‘Butter roasted cauliflower, caramelised cauliflower purée, caper, raisin, sesame’) was delicious. It’s butteriness was gorgeous and mingled with the uniqueness of the cauliflower’s flavour this was a vegetable course worth having and purring about. And it looked beautiful all deeply golden with pretty little blobs of purée and scattered green herbs.

 

Purnell’s chicken liver parfait is another of the restaurant’s most fabulous flavours coupled with a red wonderful wine jelly, toasted grains, a pain de campagne Melba toast and sorrel. There was also poached pear, as there usually is, and this time perhaps it was a little undercooked for me though others might have disagreed. But this is another sublimely beautiful dish and it’s always such a pleasure to see it featured on the menu.

  Next the Fish de jour - today it was accurately cooked cod, shiningly translucent as though it was being transfigured, and served with the plumpest and sweetest of mussels from St Austell, pickled kohlrabi perfect in flavour and texture, salty caviar and a verdant mildly metallic parsley sauce which raised the cod to new heights. Look at the picture and you see a visual work of art which you can not help but know is also a work of the art of producing flavour.

  The meat course was sublime - no, really, it was. ‘Devizes pork belly, roasted January king cabbage, Alsace bacon and tarragon butter sauce”. Pork belly is so run-of-the-mill sometimes, chefs serve it, it’s alright but you’ve had it before, quite a lot of times actually. But this pork belly was fabulous, flavour perfect, texture ideal and it rested nicely next to the delicious roast cabbage itself under a little pile of julienned apple (pork always needs apple, no chef should ignore that golden rule) and the tarragon butter sauce was a nectar poured over it. Doesn’t it look gorgeous? It was.

Dessert. A rectangular tart made from fine crispy pastry with strips of deep pink, perfectly cooked rhubarb on a blood orange cream paired with white chocolate ice cream, orange curd and pieces of lemon balm. A real dessert this. Few restaurants go to the trouble of serving up pastry as part of the menu and this was a very happy pastry. This dessert alone tells everyone why Purnell’s has a Michelin star. 

  Two petits fours - including the joyous, powerfully flavoured blackcurrant jelly which has given me such pleasure over the years and the new-to-me white chocolate biscuit topped by three rather exotic whirls.

  It is fifteen years this year since Glynn Purnell opened this restaurant that means so much to many Birmingham people. I read somewhere that the restaurant’s lease comes to an end this year. Let’s hope it is renewed. Birmingham has lost a lot in the past few years. The loss of its flagship restaurant would be a great sadness.

212. Michelin Star Revelation In February.

 

 

 This evening multiple chefs’ and restaurant owners’ hearts are pumping away a little more briskly than they were after they got up this morning with the news tweeted this afternoon that the Michelin Guide Great Britain And Ireland will announce its ‘Star revelation’ in a few days time. The 2022 Bibs Gourmands will be revealed on 11 February, the ‘Special awards’ will be disclosed on 15 February and the new stars on 16 February. Michelin certainly is milking the publicity for every drop it can get by spreading what used to be a simple announcement into a 5 day extravaganza.

  Here in the West Midlands we might be looking out to see if The Wilderness finally achieves a star, to see if Lichfield’s Upstairs by Tom Shepherd is also awarded a star so soon after it opened, to see if Birmingham’s star total is also added to by Kray Tredwell’s 670 Grams and if it is just possible that Opheem will become Birmingham’s first two star restaurant. Will Simpsons lose its star? (probably not) and which restaurants will find their places for the first time on the list of Michelin recommendations? - a quick new entry for Stoke on Trent’s Lunar perhaps (I shall be visiting there next week).

  Pure theatre and clever marketing.

  More recent tweets confirm that Glynn Purnell is soon to open his new pub in Henley In Arden - The Mount - in the premises previously occupied by the Butcher’s Social Club (see previous Blog) and another confirming that Adrien Garnier, presently the restaurant’s sommelier, has been appointed Purnell’s’ Restaurant manager as was expected.

    Finally, social media also revealed that Dan Lee, recent winner of the BBC’s 2021 Masterchef The Professionals competition, is to team up for a one-day event with former Masterchef champion Stuart Deeley of Smoke. Sounds interesting. Busy, busy, busy.

211. Harborne Kitchen.

 

  Having girded up my loins recently to visit Moseley with the extremely pleasing result that I had my first meal at Carter’s Of Moseley for an excessively long time, it was time, I decided, to finally head in the opposite direction to Harborne and set out for Harborne Kitchen. Both districts are home to the well-heeled and therefore, along with Edgbaston, the most likely suburban locations (though none of them are really all that far from the city centre) to be able to support expensive, highly rated restaurants (Harborne was formerly home to Turner’s - see Blogs 13 and 18) which is a description aptly applied to Harborne Kitchen and Carter’s Of Moseley.

  Harborne Kitchen was opened in November 2016 by its Chef Patron, Jamie Desogus, who said at the time that the restaurant would be focusing on “precise modern British cooking”. He said that he had the inspiration for opening the restaurant while dining at The Clove Club in 2013, later awarded a Michelin star, which offered a “new style of unpretentious fine dining to foodies”. Desogus, who was born in Kidderminster, himself in the past had worked in the kitchens of Michelin-starred restaurants including Gordon Ramsay’s Petrus. Prior to opening Harborne Kitchen, Desogus was cofounder of the ‘pop-up’ restaurant in Harborne, the Butchers Social, which centred itself on serving chicken wings and The Harborne Kitchen was then opened in the old Walter Smith butcher’s shop (once so widespread in Birmingham) which had been the home of the Butchers Social. He had also previously worked in Turner’s for a period (how well I remember Richard Turner’s scowling face looking around at the diners in that restaurant as he stood on the dining room side of the door to the kitchen).

  As a footnote to be returned to in the future, the Butcher’s Social under Chef Director Mike Bullard moved to Henley in Arden (in a building across the road from Cheal’s of Henley) in 2018 and reopened in 2021 at The Forest Hotel in Dorridge (the building in Henley in Arden now being taken over by Glynn Purnell for his new pub restaurant - The Mount - which is soon to open. The West Midlands culinary scene - forever evolving.

  But back to The Harborne Kitchen. It was awarded a Michelin Plate in 2018 in the 2019 edition of the Michelin Guide when the restaurant was described as, “Modern British - Neighbourhood. This neighbourhood restaurant is surprisingly spacious - long and narrow, with an open kitchen at its heart; the tiles depicting a bull harking back to its butcher’s shop days. Modern dishes have a Scandic feel and feature some unusual combinations. The seats at the counter are a popular choice”. Now the present online guide summaries the restaurant as, “Deservedly loved by local diners, this contemporary neighbourhood restaurant serves a set menu of interesting modern dishes prepared using excellent ingredients. At its hub is an open kitchen, where you can watch the passionate team at work: the tiles bull is a throwback to its butcher’s shop days”. The tiles bull, a Hereford I think, is one of those sights worth seeing for a Birmingham diner - meaningful, historic art which few other Birmingham restaurants can lay a claim to having as part of their decor. The bull itself gives a visit to the restaurant a sense of occasion. In its way it’s as noteworthy and historic as the twee painting of the street urchin in Roux’s Le Gavroche in London.

  But let’s launch into the food. After a pleasing welcome and a thoroughly delicious gingerbread-flavoured cocktail the amuse gueules came flying to the table one after another, “One, two, three, down the hatch, yum yum” to paraphrase Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited (but he was talking about Alexander cocktails not the fabulous little nibbles which were presented to me). From the word go it was obvious that the theme of the evening would be intense flavour. The first two little nibbles came mounted on crisps, first shockingly delicious Devonshire crab looking a little lost sitting in a scallop shell balanced on top of a large bowl of large pebbles (are pebbles, hay, edible soil  and so on all getting to be a little passé now?, I wonder). Still I get the point, there’s the crab scrabbling over some seaside rocks. 

  Much easier to spot was a wondrous nibble of chicken parfait with glorious sweet incursions of white chocolate, a delight indeed. And then the final nibble, a fine little tartlet of River Wye smoked eel with the flavours of heritage tomato and subtle hints of horseradish. Sometimes I dream of a restaurant which serves a meal just made up of numerous amuses gueules and that it is located in the building next door to where I live. Perhaps such an entity exists in Paradise and these three appetisers are there on its menu.

  Excellent bread, tasty and with perfectly crispy crusts, accompanied by an unusual and successful smoked yeast butter

  Then pasta, Sicilian pasta to be exact in the form of a thoroughly enjoyable dish of malloreddus, mini-armadillos in a creamy, cheesy sauce with a fine covering of 60 month parmesan and truffle and looking like an old man’s beard and fabulously flavoured. And then a truly great dish, the Roscoff onion, a crispy onion-flavoured tuile sitting on a bed of deliciously puréed salt baked potato with blue cheese and all with a little moat of stupendous miso. 

    More intense flavour presented itself in the form of sweet seasoned shrimp and kohlrabi tartare with nasturtium leaves. This dish could not be improved on, it’s flavour again makes it a classic. Next, to a dish of beautifully cooked brill - what a noble fish it is with its lovely moist white flesh and a pleasant respite from the ubiquitous halibut - served with sea aster leaves which made a real contribution, and soy and ginger. I wondered at first, was it a little too salt-flavoured? and then decided it was not and that it was the mild ginger flavour that had given me my early doubt. 

  The meat course - a fine piece of venison, cooked exactly how I like it, on a bed of tasty Savoy cabbage enhanced classically with the flavour of bacon and served with roast sliced celeriac and a celeriac purée with a sprinkling of chocolate which made sense but really did not seem to do all that much for me. I did have reservations about this dish - the celeriac two ways. Both of the celeriac offerings were tasty, the purée intensely so, but I could have done with just one of them - perhaps the purée and the roast sliced celeriac substituted by earthy potato instead.

  My least favourite dish was Baron Bigod, which showcases the Suffolk-produced unpasteurised soft Brie-like cheese of that name. My paternal ancestors lived in Suffolk from some time in the 6th century up until the late 19th century and among my ancestors are the Bigods, the original in England being the first Earl of Norfolk, one of William The Bastard’s most loyal henchmen who came across with him from Normandy in 1066. So Baron Bigod cheese, the first batches of which were produced by Jonathan and Dulcie Crickmore in 2013, has a special place in my gourmand heart.

  I do not usually have the (normally optional extra) cheese course with tasting menus - an old bloke’s stomach can only cope with so much - though I am a great cheese lover (it must be the sliver of Norman French in my genes) and it’s good to see a chef attempting to make the cheese course more interesting and using the intensely flavoured Baron Bigod as its centre piece. But the dish looked extremely inelegant and the presence of quince and amaranth though charmingly harking back to an older cuisine was not such a great success as one might have hoped. I think on the whole that the cheese course, if one is to have it,  should mainly keep to its traditional format but perhaps a second visit to Harborne Kitchen and a second indulgence in Baron Bigod may convince me otherwise.

  Then, great happiness. The ice cream trolley was wheeled up to the table in a great piece of restaurant theatre (perhaps not quite as dramatic as Birmingham-born Monsieur Joseph’s carving of the pressed duck at the Savoy - see Blog 146 - but great fun) and the pre-dessert was served - a delightful pairing of soothing bay leaf ice cream and scintillating mandarin sorbet served on a bed of crumbled polenta cake and with toasted almond. Another little gem. 

  I have no idea why it is (cocktails, wine perhaps?) but I frequently forget to photograph the final dessert and so the excruciatingly memorable “70% chocolate, coffee, Jerusalem artichoke” is visually unrecorded here. But no matter, its  memorability is not really visual but its remarkably unpudding-like flavour and squidgy nature of the artichoke and the hyper-crunchy toffee tuile which actually all did come together to make an unusual and enjoyable dessert. Great stuff! A pair of miso caramel-filled sparkly lips rounded off an excellent meal which made me sure that though this was my first visit to The Harborne Kitchen since it opened six years ago, my next visit would be considerably sooner. 

  

    So, I had finally visited the complete 2021 list of Michelin-rated restaurants in Birmingham in the space of the past twelve months. All, admittedly, except Opus which of course has not been open in the past twelve months thanks to the depredations of COVID-19 and Birmingham City Council and its unending roadworks. What a great city Birmingham is, despite its Council, when it comes to dining out and gastronomy. 

  One final thought; I took the opportunity of my Harborne excursion to amble down the High Street to take a look at what had happened at the location of the previous Michelin star-awarded restaurant, the eponymous Turner’s to once more relive in my mind being scowled at by Richard Turner as he surveyed his contented diners from the door to the kitchen. There now is a pleasant looking Asian restaurant, Tiffin.  I don’t expect I will ever get around to eating there, but who knows where the Michelin inspectors will visit and what idiosyncratic conclusions they will reach?

210. Great British Menu Central Region Heats Will Feature Two London Chefs.

 

  

  

The prospect of the return of the BBC’s programme The Great British Menu on 1 February 2022 is not a happy one given that the great combination of judges Oliver Peyton and Matthew Fort has been swept away and replaced by BBC luvvies who look ready for a Halloween party and not for really what ought to be a quite serious event given that the reputations of 32 British chefs will be on the line depending on how they fare in what looks like being a circus. The presence of the supercilious and self-regarding Ed Gamble could bring the programme down to an even lower level than it achieved two years ago when it was hosted by a Scottish comedienne whose name I have forgotten mercifully and I only hope that the other judges do not descend to his level.

  Worst still is the news that, as has happened in years past, only two of the four chefs who are competing in the Central Region heats actually work in the Midlands while, as you would expect, the other 50% work in …. London. True, the chefs all have connections with the Midlands or East Anglia but once more sneering BBC producers choose to offer little exposure to Midlands restaurants preferring instead to feature dining establishments in London, where they feel comfortable no doubt. 

  Only one of the chefs currently works in the West Midlands - Liam Dillon of the excellent Michelin-plated The Boat Inn in Lichfield (see Blog 199) and there is also Harvey Perttola who took over from Richard Turner as Head Chef at Maribel in Brindley Place and did a cracking good job there until the always unfortunately located restaurant closed during the first Lockdown, never to reopen (see Blog 86). BBC publicity for the Central heat reports that Perttola is now Head Chef at Trent Bridge Cricket Ground in Nottingham.

The West Midland’s own Liam Dillon of The Boat Inn.

Harvey Perttola, formerly of Maribel

  The other two ‘Central Region heat’ competitors are Sally Abé who qualifies by virtue of having been born in Mansfield but who has never worked in the Midlands and the sole East Anglian chef, Ben Orpwood, who is the Executive Chef at Gordon Ramsay’s The Lucky Cat in London. Abé competed in the Central heats in 2020 and works at the Conrad St James Hotel in, where else?, London. Orpwood was apprenticed as a chef at Kings College in Cambridge and has subsequently worked in London, Dubai, Sydney and, er, Leeds but does not seem to have worked in the Central region since his apprenticeship.

  This year’s theme will naturally be self-referential to commemorate the BBC’s centenary so we may expect to see lots of BBC luvvies and executives, snouts in the trough, enjoying themselves at this year’s  banquet at the licence payers’ expense, as though they were at a Downing Street party. The feast is to be held at Alexandra Palace which of course is in London.

  The first part of the Central heats will screen on 1 February.

209. Carter’s Of Moseley.

 

   I was pleased to get a reservation for lunch at Carter’s Of Moseley at fairly short notice presumably because of the COVID-19 pandemic. I have dined there only once before as I have never been keen on Moseley where it is situated though my heart was softened towards the suburb when I girded up my loins about a month ago to have a very enjoyable lunch at Chakana (see Blog 204).

  My previous lunch at Carter’s Of Moseley, some time ago, had not been quite as wonderful an experience as all the reviews by greater experts than I suggested it should be - I had not enjoyed a starter which was made up entirely of a large bowl of bloating mashed Mayan Gold potato (see Blog 5) and I was mildly startled when Chef emerged from the kitchen to deliver to me a tiny unadorned rabbit’s heart skewered on a small stick as a treat for me though it really wasn’t.

 Still that was 2016 and this was now. I expected that things had moved on since then. Lunch, like dinner, is marketed as an Experience and at £100 I was expecting that it would indeed be a pleasant one. The restaurant’s website states that menus are developed by “following the natural rhythms of the British season”. Additionally “The mission is to innovate by replacing foreign ingredients with native alternatives” which sounds rather like a culinary Brexit manifesto. 

  But I was soon to discover that this was a very heart-felt mission and that Brad Carter and his staff would go to extraordinary lengths to achieve their goal which is admirable though I thought not always quite successful. At least, I was to discover, he was not offering ants as a substitute for a slice of lemon which is what I was offered in the early days of Alex Claridge’s The Wilderness - the thought that the young waiter there who suggested it really had the vision of wood ants floating around in a gin and tonic and thought it a good idea is one of the more bizarre memories of Birmingham cuisine that is lodged permanently in my memory.

  I was delighted to be greeted by a charming member of Holly Jackson’s front of house staff who had been working at Kray Tredwell’s 670 Grams and who very cleverly remembered me from my visits there last year. And comfortably seated in the blackness which brought to mind last week’s trip to The Wilderness (is this the trend now in restaurant decor?) I embarked on a house cocktail and three spectacular amuse gueules. The first to appear was a powerfully, robustly, attractively bitter flavoured helping of monkfish liver parfait on a crisp folded like a product of origami topped with a little blob of salty Exmoor caviar. A hit, a palpable hit! I was told that Chef advised trying to eat the little gem in one bite but my mouth could only manage to allow its passage in three bites but I was perfectly pleased to think that that meant I actually had three times the gustatory pleasure.

  Then a delicious oyster soupçon which slid easily and delightfully down the hatch and then twice fried chicken oyster and chicken jelly to dip it in. A little peak of pleasure.

 

  And so to the starter proper -  prettily decorated pieces of robustly flavoured mackeral with beetroot in a little pool of beetroot miso broth and a faux wasabi which I did not really get the taste of. Then bread. There’s no doubt that bread has come into its own in recent months moving from something to nibble while one is waiting for the starter to be brought out to a somewhat scattered course in its own right which may appear wherever it likes in the menu. I admired the bread, which in its preparation had undergone an extraordinarily large number of processes and working, but I’m genuinely dubious about bread’s shifting place in the menus of 2022.

   Then a visually remarkable dish of Birmingham soup which recalls the dish served in Purnell’s in 2014 which was titled 1796 Birmingham soup which itself recalled Matthew Boulton’s dish created in the late 18th century to provide cheap nutritious food for the poor of Birmingham. This dish raised Purnell’s predecessor, slow-cooked daube of beef in a fine consommé,  and Boulton’s original, to greater heights and is probably one of the great local modern dishes - a tartare of deeply flavoured ox heart in an equally profoundly tasty beef consommé with utterly apt mounds of celeriac and a salty little potato crisp tuile patterned like the Central Library in Centenary Square, all of it glimmering under the restaurant lights. A dish of exceptional pleasure.

  Then, alas, the least satisfactory dish of the meal - trout with sea buckthorn and a faux kosho (a local substitute having been found to provide citrus instead of yuzu which could not be used as it is not grown round these parts, according to the restaurant philosophy). Again this was a pretty dish and pleasingly tasty but the texture of the trout was not to my taste, being too soft. Nevertheless the flavour still made it a dish worth eating.

  The climax was reached with the serving of a fine, profoundly tasty piece of beef from an 8 year old animal served with a bone marrow sauce, beautifully cooked hen of the woods and a fabulous truffle purée alongside a bowl of spectacular truffle foam on faux rice. Truffle, truffle, truffle and beef - gorgeous. However, the kitchen team, in preparing this dish attempted to deal with the fact that rice is really rather difficult to grow in Britain and so to follow the goal they had set themselves of serving food of British origin had devised a way of preparing oats that would mimic rice. I don’t think it really worked as well as they had hoped - yes, it could have been rice if I hadn’t been told otherwise but I would have judged it to be undercooked rice, a little too al dente for me to be truly pleasurable. Perhaps pasta could have been used instead to mimic the rice or why not just serve an alternative such as potato if you’re really determined not to use ingredients of foreign origin? Still, it doesn’t hurt to experiment and perhaps the grain ‘rice’ may yet make the grade.

  And so to a fine and enjoyable dessert with a pleasing lightness to it - cherry blossom cake - flat-topped pyramids of cherry blossom-flavoured ice cream on a thin sponge with cherry jam. The cherry flavour might have been a little too subtle I thought but the dessert gave me much pleasure. 

  With the dying embers  of the winter afternoon came a final act - a spectacularly funky bar of white chocolate in the colours of the tiles of the Queensway in town and a postcard depicting the tiles to accompany it. I also photographed the pleasantly mild cup of Nicaraguan coffee I was served to remind me of the splendid ceramics the various dishes were served in during the course of the meal which were all supplied by the studio of Birmingham ceramicist Sîan Tonkin - some great pieces and very much in demand.

  Carter’s Of Moseley deserves its towering position in the hierarchy of restaurants in the West Midlands. And it’s quite correct to call a meal there an Experience and a highly enjoyable one too. So much attention has been put into every aspect of the customer experience. Of course it’s wise for every restaurant to have a unique selling point and to pursue sustainability in these yet-to-get-roaring twenties. I am just a little concerned that the target of ‘nothing foreign’ puts the restaurant’s ability to achieve absolute perfection at risk since it may just be possible that there really are no perfect substitutes for a few important ingredients which just won’t grow in Britain

Oh! I nearly forgot - the most recent Michelin inspector tweet (6 January 2022) preempted my visit - “Postmodern Birmingham clearly reflected in Carter’s eye-catching cooking”. Hmmm… what message is that conveying?