215. Great British Menu 2022 Central Heats (1).

 

  The first part of the Central heats of the 2022 Great British Menu  was screened on BBC2 on 1 February. Self-indulgently and self-referentially the theme of this year’s series is the Centenary of the BBC itself.

   As in previous years the region was represented by only two chefs who actually work in the Central area and two who have little to do with the region and work in London. This enables BBC producers to ensure that the only part of the country it’s truly interested in - London - which is overwhelmed with restaurants and overpopulated by chefs can see more of its restaurants represented on the programme. We may also find that to be the case with BBC producers’ second favourite city - Manchester - as many BBC luvvies now live in the area because of the BBC production facilities in Salford.

  As revealed in a previous Blog the two Midlands-based competitors this year were Harvey Pertiola who was Head Chef at Maribel in Brindley Place before the pandemic (see Blog 86) and Liam Dillon whose Michelin Plated restaurant, the Boat Inn in Lichfield, I visited a couple of months ago (see Blog 199) and came away from having had a very pleasurable meal there.

  The two London-based chefs who were featured were Sally Abé who was born in Mansfield but has never worked in the Midlands and Ben Orpwood, originally from East Anglia and now one of Gordon Ramsay’s disciples. The guest Chef Judge at least manifested himself as someone intensely interested in Midlands cuisine in the person of Aktar Islam, chef patron of Opheem, who is rapidly becoming a darling of the BBC.

  Islam appeared in the kitchen and his first act was to judge the amuses bouches, as BBC script writers like to call them, prepared prior to his appearance by the chefs. Liam Dillon had prepared a cheese bonbon with pickled shallots and Pertiola had prepared a tiny tart containing mature cheese custard, pickled onion gel and a crumb of toasted yeast and parmesan. Islam unfortunately chose Liam Dillon’s appetiser as his least favourite - he felt he could not detect the flavour of cheese in the bonbon; he placed Pertiola’s cheese tartlet second expecting, he said, more flavour from the cheese. Sally Abé’s chicken liver parfait tartlet was placed first.

  And so to the starters and the BBC programme-themed dishes kicked in except that Orpwood managed to produce a homage to an ITV programme, Blockbusters; still it looked pretty. Of the two Midlands chefs,  Dillon stayed safely with the BBC with a quail-based dish called Don’t tell him Pike which recalled the sublime comedy Dad’s Army and Pertiola presented Aktar Islam with a lamb sweetbread dish titled By Order of the Peaky Blinders, a homage to the excruciatingly exciting but shockingly violent tale of Post World War I Birmingham gangsters who unlike the generally good-natured and pleasant real inhabitants of the city are just about the most miserable bunch of villains ever met who are not yet known to have cracked a smile on screen and speak with grim accents rather than the genuine lighter and cheerful tones we hear when real Brummies such as Glynn Purnell appear on screen. Still, the dish gave the other chefs an opportunity to don their Peaky Blinders flat caps, hopefully without razor blades sewed into the peaks.

  Unfortunately the cooking of the starters by the Midlands chefs did not go down well with Aktar and he scored them both 6 out of 10 while awarding 7 points to Orpwood and 8 points to Abé. But all was not lost with the fish to come.

 

  Dillon’s fish course paid tribute to the programme Blue Planet hosted by one of the BBC’s greatest luvvies, David Attenborough, and was a brill-based dish served with salsify that also had an environmental note to it about the problem of plastic in the oceans. Pertiola presented a dish, Monkfish like Mobeen, centred on a local Birmingham comedy. Abé’s dish celebrated the comedy Absolutely Fabulous and Orpwood presented an impressive-looking dish Fanny’s Haddock which celebrated the TV chef from years ago, the remarkable Fanny Craddock, and her love of presenting remarkable soufflés to her audience. It has to be said that Orpwood’s dish was indeed a remarkable haddock soufflé presented immaculately.

  The upshot of it all was that Harvey Pertiola was awarded 7 points, Liam Dillon 8 points while the London chefs received 8 points (Abé) and 9 points ((Orpwood) and this led to the Pertiola’s elimination from the rest of the competition and only Liam Dillon left to represent the West Midlands in the main and dessert course heat to come. Which I expect is just the way BBC producers would have hoped things would turn out.