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?