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.