218. The Wilderness.

  I visited The Wilderness, down that mysterious alley off Warstone Lane in the Jewellery Quarter, only very recently for lunch (see Blog 208) but it is rather good and the friend who was to accompany me that day did have to cancel because he was undergoing root canal surgery and so on the basis that you really can not have too much of a good thing and also that a man who has had root canal surgery deserves to be cheered up, I was highly delighted to be returning to eat there again so soon after my previous visit.

 

    This again was a meal of great pleasure. Previously the meal had started with three canapés - the exhilaratingly delicious shrimp doughnut and the fine celeriac mini-tart were both there but the excellent wagyu beef tartare had gravitated off the menu to reposition itself on the £125 menu. Weep not, we had ordered the wagyu special at an extra price so that little pleasure was yet to come. 

  The only disappointment was the dish of crab mousse on a bed of Yukon Gold. The crab seemed lacking in flavour particularly in comparison with the remembered dish served on my previous visit and the potato was dry and dull. 

  The cod with Iberico with an XO sauce was as grand as before and “The Carrot” 2022 looked and tasted as good as it had when we first encountered each other.

    Then came the A5 wagyu with truffled yolk and kampot pepper (photograph at head of this blog). Sublime. Such flavour. Few dishes I eat this year will be able to approach it for the gustatory delight it brought. An exceptionally fine dish.

  On my previous visit to The Wilderness the menu was quite heavy in fish but now meat was back with a vengeance. The first was ‘Lamb Caesar’ - loin, beautifully cooked, and tasty belly with an artichoke purée, a fine lamb sauce and baby gem. And then a dish with which I was happily familiar - tasty venison and an even tastier little faggot with a pomme purée and barbecued brassica. After that came ch-ch-changes, the not-a-real-banana pre-dessert, the immensely pleasurable ‘milk and honey’, as dainty and pretty as before (illustrated in Blog 208) and finally a pair ‘Hot lips’, redder than Rudolph’s nose. 

  More pleasure, then, at The Wilderness. Prices have risen significantly, swept along by the post-Pandemic effects on commodity costs, but the excellence of the food served at the restaurant can not be disputed. We must see what the French tyre people think about it all next week, not that there’s ever any logical explanation to whatever they think. On the subject of which ….

Michelin news.

  The French tyre manufacturing organisation which employs people who claim to be experts on dining out or perhaps, more accurately, ‘eating food in dining establishments’ (since it claims absurdly that judgements are made only on the quality of the food and are nothing to do with the other qualities of the restaurant), is drawing out its 2022 annual awards announcements to an extraordinary length so that it receives continuing publicity for a whole week. Not even the Oscars has come up with that idea. But the world of Michelin is very strange.

  On 11 February it announced its 2022 Bib Gourmand awards which are for those chefs who have more modest ambitions for their food but nevertheless achieve a certain excellence, the nature of which is, hopefully, more clearly defined in the minds of the Michelin Guide inspectors who descend on the dining establishment to pass judgement on it.

  In all there were 16 new Bib awards with NONE being awarded to Midlands restaurants let alone West Midlands restaurants. Naturally the rest were almost all awarded to London (5) or south east England (3) (plus 2 in East Anglia, 1 in the south-west, 2 in Scotland and 3 in Ireland) establishments. Why does anyone take these awards even vaguely seriously?

 Meanwhile the most recent Michelin inspector tweets from the West Midlands, as usual, have not been numerous and indeed only one has been posted (6 February) - not on the subject of food - which features the so-called Black Sabbath canal bridge on Broad Street in Birmingham. This of course reveals that said inspector must have been paying a visit to Andrew Sheridan’s Craft or About 8 in the nearby International Conference Centre. Sheridan, I expect, quite justifiably, is waiting with intense anticipation the announcement next week of which Birmingham and West Midlands restaurants will be receiving one of the French tyre people’s macarons. Though if the number of West Midlands Bibs awarded this year is anything to go by, I shouldn’t hold my breath.