239. Excursion To Sheffield - Vero Gusto And Juke And Loe.

 

  Although Birmingham has always been my home, I worked in and had a little house in, Sheffield, across the border from northern Mercia in the dark lands of Yorkshire. I worked there from 1981 to 2004 and I can tell you far more about the dining scene there, what little there was of it at the time, during those important years of English gastronomic history from practical experience than I can of West Midlands food at that time. I still visit friends there sometimes and go out to dine to find out what’s hot there, so to speak, especially as Sheffield is presently on a crest of trendiness.

   And so, once more, Lucy The Labrador and I set out from Stratford upon Avon where I had sat through six hours of violence and murder at the RSC watching the second and third parts of Henry VI and was pleasantly surprised the plays had not been murdered too much by their director, Owen Horsley, as some of the other directors there might have been expected to do, and headed for the foreign territory across the border in South Yorkshire. This might have been problematical as I had been an ardent supporter of the Lancastrians in the plays but I thought I would not mention this partisanship to anyone I came across during my stay in this land of the Yorkists.

  On my first evening in Sheffield my dining companion had suggested we dine at Vero Gusto, a family-run local favourite Italian restaurant in town which was opened in 2006 and, though Italian cuisine does not rank too highly in my list of favourite dining categories, this seemed like a reasonable proposition to me. And there was much to be pleased about.

  Unfortunately we were dining there when men, in considerable numbers, who were attending the ongoing snooker competition at the Crucible Theatre, and who were more rowdy than Jack Cade’s mob who attempted to bring down Henry VI’s government, had occupied most of the restaurant and there was a veritable hubbub with the staff looking somewhat stressed. The welcome, I think in consequence of that, was brisk and not warm. We were also parked up a narrow section of the restaurant at an inadequately sized table close to a table of noisy snooker enthusiasists which was not a happy start.

  Still we coped with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and dug in for the evening. And how delighted we were that we did so.

  I chose a starter of splendidly cheesy and truffley ravioli stracchino and tartuffo nero. The pasta was fine and a scattering of chopped roasted peanuts gave added texture. An excellent start. My dining companion enjoyed his asparagus soup served with focaccia and bread sticks.

  Then I had a truly great dish of superbly cooked lamb loin with a gorgeous, slightly sweet sauce. The accompanying potato gratin might have had a little more flavour but the smoked aubergine cream added another element to the deliciousness of the dish. Nevertheless if I had been served a plate of nothing but the magnificent lamb and sauce then I would have been no less ecstatic about it. My dining companion chose the lasagne, and though not known for holding back on criticism, gave it “9 out of 10”. I think my lamb will be one of my stand out dishes of the year.

  For dessert I chose a gloriously amaretto-soaked affogato and had no reason to complain. 

  Towards the end the snooker enthusiasts had returned to The Crucible for the evening session, peace began to reign and the front of house staff seemed less tense and friendlier. I was thoroughly delighted with my meal and already resolving that an earlier rather than later trip back to Sheffield was indicated to eat again at Vero Gusto.

  The following day, a three course lunch at the Michelin-listed Juke and Loe, “Brothers Luke and Joe [Grayson] have come together to run this laid-back eatery in this bustling part of the city. Seasonal cooking mixes the traditional with the modern ad every dish is equally appealing; preparation is skilful and flavours big and bold.Start with a cocktail in the bar”. 

  I doubt that having the cheap lunch option is ever a good idea and I think that one rarely gets a genuine impression of what a chef is offering. Naturally ingredients are less luxurious and more often than not, less enjoyable. But, despite what I write, we opted for the £30 for 3 courses lunchtime menu and it is hard to complain that we did not have value for money.

  I enjoyed my starter of smoked trout with wasabi mayonnaise, pickled whelks and seaweed salad but was less enthusiastic about the main course of ray wing, which was just too insubstantial in texture for me, served with a tasty white bean stew made lively with delightful pieces of guinea fowl and bursts of heat from harissa butter. The dessert of carrot cake, vanilla cream, black olive caramel and carrot sorbet was very much to my liking.

To do this restaurant full justice I feel I must return for dinner where cod and hogget are on the menu at present. I note that the restaurant will close for a short period in the coming weeks and then reopen having moved its location and that may well be the time to return.

238. Pick Thai, Stratford Upon Avon..

   When going to the latest bowdlerised version of the Bard’s work being performed by the RSC’s dreary creative management’s choice of actors picked not for their acting abilities but for their ability to confuse an aging, already befuddled audience and to fit in with the management’s view of a fair society, I find it best to have lunch rather than a rushed pre-theatre dinner and certainly not a post-theatre experience at the only place still open in town at that time - the horrible south Asian restaurant on Sheep Street which I shall not name.

  But of course, getting one’s hands on a reasonably edible lunch early or midweek is problematical in itself as few chefs want to serve the midday meal except on days closer to the weekend. I pondered and then remembered that when the late, lamented No 9 Church Street had closed its oven doors for the last time it was replaced by a Thai specialty restaurant called, slightly inelegantly, Pick Thai, in which there may or may not be a pun on the Thai language or simply an imperative to choose some neckwear.

  The restaurant is little changed from the days of No. 9 apart from appropriate new wallpaper and the addition of some Thai-themed pictures and decorations on the walls. It all looks comfortable and pleasant and charming. The restaurant is family-run which sets it apart from the two other Thai restaurants I can think of in Stratford and the service is quiet and polite and efficient. A two course lunch can be had for the remarkable price of £9.99 which sounds like pretty good value to me.

  And so as starter I chose the ‘Chef’s Special’ which was made up of two nicely crispy spring rolls filled with pieces of pleasingly cooked duck with carrot, spring onion and celery served with a tangy hoisin sauce. Very edible.

  The only real problem was that the starter was served at the same time as the main course so, feeling anxious that my massaman beef curry with rice, would soon cool down I felt an urgency to polish off my starter which was a pity really. The massaman curry was served in a rustic fashion and was very pleasant, the beef was tender and tasty and the sauce carried with it the pleasant favour of the soothing coconut milk with star anise and cinnamon and there were cashews and fried shallots in the curry. The generously-portioned rice was cooked well and it all made for an enjoyable main course at a very reasonable price.

  My choice for dessert was banana fritters with ice cream. When served, these looked lovely on the plate and the breadcrumb coating was pleasantly crispy but the coating was too thick and there was no flavour of banana. This was a disappointing dish.

  Despite the unsuccessful dessert, a fairly rapid lunch at Pick Thai proved to be an overall enjoyable experience and it certainly it was good value. I will be pleased to revisit the pleasant little restaurant again to enjoy its food and to support one of Stratford’s little local businesses.

237. Sunday Lunch At Cheal’s Of Henley.

   As touched upon in Blog 236 the evening before I had endured a pretty rotten meal (or two thirds-meal as the dessert was never served to me) of roast beef with all the trimmings at a hotel which shall not be named on the outskirts of Stratford as part of one of those exercises in human endurance which we face in our lives - the university year reunion. It was a wonderful example of how, amid the bubbling hype surrounding our high grade restaurants, there is a rotting underbelly of British hospitality which can not cope, or does not want to cope, with providing well prepared food at a not totally savage price. It is a part of the industry that functions but serves without any love for its produce and its customers. Like the poor, I suppose, the hopeless part of hospitality will be with us always despite the daily tirades which find themselves published on the internet from barely literate Tripadvisers whose opinions are as useless as Lucy The Labrador’s (she’ll eat anything without complaint).

 But that was yesterday. Today I returned to the wonderful Cheal’s of Henley for Sunday lunch with much hope in my heart and great expectations. My hopes and expectations were not to be dashed.

  Firstly the price is ridiculous but I’m not complaining - £47.50 for olives, 2 amuses gueules (works of art in themselves), bread, three stupendous courses and a petit four - extraordinary good value for the quality of the dishes served. 

  I mentioned the wonderful amuses gueules and bread in Blog 223 so suffice it to say that these introductions to the meal were as delicious as they had been on my previous visit. My starter was a fine pea risotto with salty Windrush goat’s cheese, pea shoots and little pickled adding a sharp sweetness to really lift the dish. Very good.

  Then the roast. Spectacular. A plate of several slices of beautifully cooked 38 day aged beef rump cap with all the trimmings, each element beautifully served in little pans and pots. Everything was perfectly correct - the garden peas and hispi cabbage, fine slices of carrot, exquisitely crispy roast potatoes - they were an absolute picture, startlingly tasty cauliflower in a robust cheese sauce, root vegetable mash and a grade 1 Yorkshire pudding with a fabulously delicious gravy. Mustard and horseradish sauce were not forgotten. The plate of beef looked like a mother hen surrounded by her chicks.

  Cheal is the master of using ingredients which have long been known to work well together and to use them to produce something pleasingly comforting but vividly exciting. I almost fell off my chair in anticipation of my choice of dessert - a brilliantly alcoholic rum baba with everything that should go with it - little cubes of pineapple and mango and drops of passion fruit with coconut espuma and coconut sorbet. This was a lovely dessert, the sponge of the baba was light and the whole was pleasurable.

  Finally along came a delightful truffle as a petit four and my pleasure was complete.

   Cheal’s of Henley us at the top of its game - comfortably welcoming, immaculate service, a maestro of a restaurant manager and fine, delicious, really quite faultless food coming of a kitchen where the chef is exactly on the right track. It could well be the best restaurant in the West Midlands.

236. Shakespeare’s Birthday Lunch 2022.

   After 2 fallow years when the COVID-19 pandemic prevented the Council in Stratford from holding their otherwise annual Shakespeare’s Birthday celebrations, everything was on again - the parades, the church service and for me, the most anticipated of all - the Shakespeare Birthday lunch, held once more in giant tents in the grounds of the theatre gardens having been very comfortably housed previously for three consecutive years in a very agreeable hotel on the river bank. But of that, more later.

  Lucy The Labrador and I arrived on the eve of the big event and I was pleased to have managed to reserve a table at The Woodsman which is a pleasingly atmospheric place to lounge over a robust meal on a very comfortable spring Friday evening. The Woodsman is undoubtedly my favourite dining place in Stratford. I used to love No 9 Church Street and was very happy at No. 33 The Scullery but their numbers have all been counted up and there is little else in Stratford to match the pleasure of dining at The Woodsman now. I feel like a bad person for not admiring the Michelin-starred Salt as much as others do but there we go, it’s one of my little quirks. On the other hand I have recently developed a little place in my heart for Lamb’s of Sheep Street and there’s also a place in the same part of my anatomy for the really rather good Italian restaurant on Ely Street, Sorrento. So I am never short of anywhere to eat in Stratford on my visits there.

  And so to The Woodman. After a delicious daiquiri which had the rather unfortunate colour of a glass of meths and some very fine bread indeed (slices of ultra-fresh focaccia and soda bread with marmite butter and lovely cultured biputter), I thoroughly enjoyed my starter of house cured and smoked Chalk Farm sea trout served aptly with horseradish and buttermilk, nicely cooked beetroot and grilled turnip tops of just the right texture. A great dish.

  I ordered Grilled chop of Lavinton lamb as my main course and after a false start of an appealing plate of  wood-fired cod arriving at the table (which looked delicious and which I would have been delighted to eat) the dish which I had ordered arrived looking very alluring. The chop, exquisitely tender and pleasingly tasty was accompanied by a lovely lamb rissole on a stick as well as grilled asparagus, confit artichokes and grilled turnip tops and slices of pickled red onion and tiny game chips. There was nothing out of place and it was a course as good as I had hoped for.

  Finally for dessert, I chose Oat milk panna cotta with little juliennes of apple, a sweet and nicely cinnamon-spicy unctuous raisin sauce and a little crumble. This was tasty and very enjoyable.

  Apart from being served with the wrong main course, which didn’t bother me at all, there were a couple of irritations when my carafe of water was taken away three quarters of the way through the meal and was never to return and service gradually slowed to a glacial pace as the evening went by.

  And so, to bed. Perchance to dream.

  And then it was Shakespeare’s birthday. And St. George’s Day. The weather was very temperate, the celebratory procession through the town went very well and lunch was highly memorable. After two years of being denied the pleasure, and expense, of hosting the Shakespeare Birthday Lunch, local sponsors, the jewellers Pragnell, were pushing the boat out. The enormous marquee in the RSC gardens was decorated magnificently and right from the time of arrival it was impossible not to enter into the party spirit. Glitzy stars there were aplenty - Dame Judi Dench, Dame Joanna Lumley, Stephen Fry, Alexander Armstrong, Maureen Lipman, the author Howard Jacobson and possibly one or two others I may have forgotten and the Birmingham actor Adrian Lester was there to receive his Pragnell award for his contribution to the world of Shakespeare.

  With all the star spotting to be done the food itself may seem not all that important but it was very good and sensibly portioned which was good news as I was also due to go out to dinner in the evening, of which more later.

  The food was a pleasure and illustrated just how over the top some present trendy restaurants can be, Three simple but well executed courses which is a marvel as the kitchen was catering for 4-500 guests.

  Happily the starter was new season Vale of Evesham asparagus, grilled beautifully and served with fresh goat’s curd, crème fraiche, lemon dressing and charmingly locally foraged chive flowers.so simple and yet so enjoyable.

  Then the main course of rump of excellent, nicely flavoured Cotswolds lamb with sand carrot purée, grilled Calcot onion and wild garlic oil. The dish was cooked beautifully. There were little pieces of mint leaves but I should have liked the flavour of mint to have been a little more intrusive.

  

  Unfortunately, as I was busy photographing celebrities, I forgot to photograph the delightful dessert of pavlova with rhubarb, blood orange and grated chocolate but it was very good and pleasingly light and was an excellent end to a memorable meal

  And just who was at the lunch? Well, a few A list celebrities without a doubt - Dame Judi Dench, Dame Joanna Lumley, Stephen Fry, Howard Jacobson, Alexander Armstrong, Maureen Lipman, Adrian Lester and probably one or two others. Little wonder I forgot to photograph the dessert. The day before Judi Dench and Kenneth Branagh had been awarded the Freemanship of the town and so one may expect one day to see Dame Judi driving her flock of sheep down, er, Sheep Street I assume.

  In the evening I went to a reunion of elderly doctors at some overpriced hotel on the outskirts of Stratford. While it was entertaining to try to guess who were these much changed people I had known in my youth the meal was a perfect illustration of just how awful English catering can still be. After a promising starter of smoked salmon (which the kitchen would have had little chance to maul to death) a vile main course of gruesome beef accompanied by an Aunt Bettie’s Yorkshire pudding, claggy mashed potato which had an air of inauthenticity about it, a barely-cooked carrot and mildly unpleasant green beans closed my meal as I was denied my preordered panna cotta dessert because I had visited “the facilities” while it was being served. I was offered a sticky toffee pudding which was the last thing I wanted after a day of dining out and as I declined that option the waiter in charge moved on unapologetically and unconcerned. Sometimes, away from our high flying restaurants, it is quite easy to relive the gastronomic and service horrors of the 1950s and 60s. And at a rather higher price than those horrors cost back then.