253. Upstairs.

 

  After my last visit to Upstairs by Tom Shepherd, happily sited in old and lovely Lichfield, (Blogs 188 and 194), I wrote the above. 

  And so it came to pass, Michelin did award the restaurant a star only a few months after it opened. To be fair it wasn’t all that difficult to predict but I did not miss the opportunity to make the prediction. And then of course the inevitable happened and the bookings poured in and it became impossible to make a reservation for months ahead. They tell me they’re now fully booked until Christmas. Nevertheless there I was out to dinner at Upstairs having previously had lunch twice there in October and November. 

  The welcome and service by the front of house staff was, as before, immaculate. 

  And so to the food. The amuses gueules - the little tart and stupendous red cabbage gazpacho with horseradish ice cream - appeared at the table like dear old friends revisited. 

  Then the first starter of finely cooked Orkney scallops with peanut satay, very enjoyable but was a contrast to the sweet scallops needed in place of the sweet peanut flavour? Food for thought. Then, after a wonderful, freshly baked brioche-like Parker House roll was served with herb and Marmite butters, there came a beautiful slice of cod, cooked sous-vide and then finished in the pan with an excellent crust, a dreamy champagne velouté with mussels, samphire, caviar and celeriac tagliatelle. An unimpeachable dish if ever there were one.

  The next dish was veal sweetbreads well-cooked with goat curd and various pea elements. Peas can be so exhausting to eat in anything like a polite manner and this was my least favourite dish though it was finely executed and presented as prettily as sweetbreads could be. 

  The main course of Herdwick hogget with lamb neck and morel and turnip purée brought deeply tasty meat to the table. The neck meat, served in a little bowl exuded a pleasingly powerful flavour. Again the cooking was immaculate but I found the overall flavour to be profoundly earthy, almost autumnal, and without a contrasting element in it to really bring it to life. Not for nothing has sheep meat been served with mint for many years.

  There was an excellent predessert where mango was the main element (the signature ‘Thai green curry’) and then the dessert proper where white chocolate parfait was paired with strawberry, an unnecessary and flavourless tuile, and slivers of marigold leaf. A pleasant and highly seasonal ending to the meal though not a top rank dessert I think.

  Tom Shepherd has established his restaurant as a place to seek out fine food and he is not unwilling to challenge his diners with classic combinations with 2020s twists. All tables were full which is quite an achievement considering, as I walked back to Lichfield station, I passed several restaurants at about 9.45PM, not one of which had a single diner in them. I fear a restaurant cataclysm is drawing close as the day to day challenges of pandemic, post-pandemic, manpower and Ukraine war-related economic factors weigh increasingly heavily and many diners feel unable or unwilling to go out to dine. The comfortably well off, like the poor, will be with us always and they will sustain high quality restaurants such as Upstairs through these economic calamities but many others may well be lost. In many ways the highly upmarket restaurant probably represents the genre most likely to survive and even flourish in these upcoming times but  the restaurant has to be in sited in the right place, has to be prepared to serve luxury ingredients with flair and charge high but not ridiculous prices (we’re not London) and has to have a great chef. And Birmingham city centre which the city’s council is making a determined effort to ruin is no longer the place to locate such a restaurant - better to wander a little distance across the borders to the surrounding towns and countryside. The flight from Birmingham centre could well be the next stage in the history of Birmingham food.

252. Sazerac. Adam’s. Michelin. Good Food Guide.

 

 

 I was going to dinner at Adam’s a short walk, as anyone would know, from The Grand Hotel where Lucy The Labrador and I were staying. It was too good an opportunity not to have a Harvey Wallbanger in Madeleine bar before heading off to Waterloo Street and Rich the barman there does a very good HW. He was telling me he previously worked at Fazenda and mentioned what he judged to be his own favourite classic cocktail, the Sazerac, of which I was previously ignorant which was a gap in my knowledge which should not have existed. The sazerac, said to have originated in antebellum New Orleans (pre-Civil War) though possibly more fin de siècle, is claimed to be the oldest known American cocktail.  It is named from the Sazerac de Forge et Fils brand of cognac which was combined with absinthe, Peychaud’s Bitters and sugar. There was nothing to do but try one of Rich’s sazeracs. Golden amber, clear, stately, adorned with an appropriately restrained tiny slice of orange peel - as refined and mature a drink as can be found on this earth and crafted by a master of his trade - the antithesis of the drink - the negroni - of vulgar, self-regarding hipsters. The negroni is fine but in the hands of Rich at least, perfected I should think by much practising and experimenting, the sazerac is the final word in cocktails for people of style and good taste. Will there be a sazerac revolution? Time will tell though perhaps it’s something that would lose its position at the head of the elite cocktails if the secret gets out.. And so to Adam’s.

  Adam’s. As serene as a sazerac. Calm, precise, formal but comfortable. I was planning to choose to eat from the tasting menu but was lured away by the à la carte with the thought that I might add the extra dish - crab with yuzu - to what looked like excellent dishes.

  First an array of fine appetisers including the tiny but memorable beetroot meringue and a speck of mackeral tartare. Next excellent sourdough with two types of butter and then take off with an excellent starter of scallop with grilled pea purée plus other pea variants, cuttle fish and chamomile. Fine food.

  Next came the extra dish of crab with yuzu. It looked very pretty but for me, the yuzu was far too powerful and the flavour of crab was all but lost. For me a disappointment and a dish that the chef really needs to reflect on.

  

  

  But rough seas were soon calm again with a main course of stupendously delicious aged beef served with smoked curds, bone marrow sauce and somewhere marigold though I am not sure I would recognise its flavour as marigold is not exactly a regular ingredient I have with my beef. The meat was, as it should be, the star of the course, tender, full of flavour, nicely seasoned.

    There followed a delightful predessert of blood orange granita with frozen yogurt and olive oil and then a very fine raspberry soufflé as dessert. This was a soufflé about which no complaints could be raised, light and tasty, pleasingly memorable. The petit fours included a charming miniature Paris Brest to lift the soul. 

  This was a Wednesday evening, for restaurants now the start of the working week. That day the country was being tortured by having its public transport assaulted by a rail strike courtesy of an unpleasant trade union leader who sees himself as a new Arthur Scargill and inflation is roaring away shooting up the price of food, basic commodities and one expects, soon, demands for big wage increases. The hospitality business has had a nightmare two half years - floods in some parts of the West Midlands, then repeated lockdowns and restrictions necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic and now the fragile economic situation and all this seems to be having an effect endangering our recently burgeoning restaurant industry. There were only  ten people dining at Adam’s the evening I ate there - only about half the tables were in use in the main dining area. I suspect that that did not reflect the usual state of affairs even on Wednesday evenings. On social media various restaurants are having to publicise last minute availability where cancellations have occurred in an effort to fill their restaurants - even Adam’s see below).

  One hopes that our excellent restaurants are not going to go under now having survived the protracted period of the pandemic. Still there is some good news - indeed a historic moment - the Michelin Guide has finally included a West Midlands restaurant in one of its monthly listings - in the most recent it has featured Solihull’s Toffs by Rob Palmer (see Blog 231). A well-deserved recognition.

  Meanwhile The Good Food Guide has now gone live on the internet charging almost £30 for access to it and its recommendations. This is quite a lot more than the price of the last printed edition (it is no longer sponsored by Waitrose) and presently there are only about 300 recommended restaurants featured on it with many notable restaurants to be added. However in many ways it is much improved and now has an excellent rating system. So I have paid my fee and have the access to the Guide which I want but to give value for money the editor really needs to get moving with adding many more restaurants.

The West Midlands restaurants listed so far are:-

  Tropea (Harborne Birmingham) Good

  Dishoom (Birmingham) Good

  Tierra (Birmingham) Good

  Oyster Club by Adam Stokes (Birmingham ) Good

  Land (Birmingham) Good

  Cheal’s of Henley (Henley-in-Arden, Warwickshire) Very Good

  Tailor’s (Warwick, Warwickshire) Good

  The Royal Oak (Whatcote, Warwickshire) Good

  Russell’s of Broadway (Broadway, Worcestershire) Good

  The Homend Ledbury (Ledbury Herefordshire) Good

  The Cider Barn (Penbridge Herefordshire) Good

  The Kilpeck Inn (Kilpeck Herefordshire) Good

  The Bell at Selsley (Selsley Gloucestershire) Good

  The Woolpack Inn (Stroud Gloucestershire) Good

  Forelles at Fishmore Hall (Ludlow Shropshire) Good

  Old Downton Lodge (Ludlow Shropshire) Good

  Charlton Arms (Ludlow Shropshire) Good

  There does indeed seem a long way to go with this project at present. 

  The scores so far are:-

  Gloucestershire - 2 Good

  Herefordshire- 3 Good

  Shropshire - 3 Good

  Staffordshire - nil

  Warwickshire - 1 Very Good

    

                           2  Good

 West Midlands - 5  Good (all Birmingham)

  Worcestershire - 1 Good.

  The problem currently is that with only 17 restaurants listed so far in The West Midlands the reader is paying for a completely useless list (unless the visitor is planning to dine in Ludlow and even there omissions are obvious). The list will need to be expanded almost exponentially to make it of any real use to the diner who has paid a lot of money to have access to it.

 

    

    

251. Take Three Chefs.

 

  A one off. Purnell’s hosting a rather promising evening of three courses (each cooked by a celebrity chef - Tom Kerridge (starter), Michel Roux Jr (main) and Glynn Purnell himself (dessert) with a range of ‘snacks’ to start provided by all three chefs. Actually it was not really a one off as a similar evening took place last year (Kerridge, Angela Hartnett and Purnell) and doubtless, from the clamour for a ticket and the adoring approval at the end, more will take place in the future.

  It was very soothing sitting amongst a group of really rather nice people all united by their love of, and knowledge of, fine food. It was rather like being a member of a secret society, exclusive of the gastronomically unwashed, all of us admittedly rather self-satisfied and mildly smug but when spending £250 on a three course meal such gratifying self-appreciation is very understandable and perhaps acceptable. “Good company maketh a meal” (Old Bloke, 2022).

  The cost included a Purnell’s original cocktail - a pleasing Rhubarb cocktail (rhubarb vodka) and some excellent wines, selected by Purnell’s’ sommelier, Adrien Garnier. Purnell’s’ triumphant pain de campagne always With the snacks came a very quaffable rare champagne (2008). The snacks were a delight - along with Glynn Purnell’s own faux black canary potatoes (presumably inspired by a temporally distant holiday in Tenerife) and his black charcoal, which is more puzzling to the uninitiated than the riddle of the Sphinx, there was Michel Roux’s exceptional tarte pissaladière (which even though I have what I believe to be a rather good French accent I find to be a single word tongue twister which despite hours of practice I have failed to conquer) and the ferociously delicious contribution by Tom Kerridge of black truffle sausage roll which is luxurious and comforting both at the same time.

 And Kerridge scored again with his starter of red mullet with deeply flavoured bouillabaisse glowing with saffron and tickled up with a mustard aïoli and a herb cracker which just maybe I might not have needed.

  And Roux lived up to his heritage by bringing to Birmingham his skills which brought to the table a generously portioned, fabulously tender and flavoured piece of Wagyu, cooked - as we might expect - to perfection and precisely, almost painfully perfectly, seasoned along with a delicious, crispy pomme Anna and a gorgeous Béarnaise sauce. 

  Meantime, the sommelier had been doing his work uncompromisingly satisfactorily- with the fish he had served Cloudy Bay 2020 and the pleasing Lirac 2016 with the beef course which it matched with very happily.

    Purnell served up a very fine dessert of chocolate parfait covered by a layer of passion fruit jelly served alongside a dark chocolate and cardamom sorbet with a cocoa meringue and a brightly shining mango coulée glowing like an egg yoke on the plate. The dish found a good companion in a glass of South African sweet red wine.

  Afterwards it was Question and Answer time when the three wise chefs faced their adoring audience and told anecdotes and quipped hilariously as we might have expected them to do with Glynn Purnell as the ringleader of this merry band. Roux was more serious but joined in with the air of general merriment. A good time was had by all.

  And so to bed at The Grand Hotel, a couple of minutes’ walk away from Purnell’s. I had been kindly upgraded to a suite on the special occasion of the dog’s 11th birthday. The hotel staff had all signed a birthday card for her and gifts in the form of packets of chews and a toy were awaiting her when we arrived in our bedroom. As I wrote, a good time was had by all.

 

  Apart from the luxury of it all, I naturally enjoyed the view looking down on the cathedral and St Phillip’s Square but I also derived pleasure from the little pieces of art in the room including a clever little collage depicting a view at Gas Street Basin and another showing The Floozie out of her jacuzzi and luxuriating instead in an old bubble-filled tin bath which is pleasingly ironic given how disastrous it was given that just in the last week or two a joker emptied detergent into the real ‘jacuzzi’ outside the Council House and wrecked at great expense the mechanism which allows the water to flow in the fountain. The Council called it ‘vandalism’ though it is no worse than what they have just allowed to be done to the nearby statue of Queen Victoria by some ‘artist’ they’ve found somewhere or the other who wants to harp on again about the evil British Empire. It was all I could do to stop my gastronomic dog who also has delicate artistic sensibilities from cocking her keg and micturating on it. Birmingham - more than great restaurants.

250. Black And Green, Barnt Green.

  Barnt Green, a quiet little village just over the city border from Rednal on the way to Bromsgrove in north Worcestershire, home to some seriously well-off people, “it’s where the footballers live” (I’m not sure precisely which footballers), and now home to chef Andrew Sheridan’s latest culinary business venture, Black And Green, which serves a five or six course tasting menu.

  This sounds like a clever move. Southwest Birmingham and northWorcestershire can seem a long way from the city centre of Birmingham, especially if public transport is used (as we are all told to do) when contemplating eating out, especially in the evening, and Barnt Green seems the place to take the plunge. 

  Longbridge too, though sitting at the edge of the ‘deprived’ constituency of Northfield, might pay dividends for any food entrepreneur willing to take a risk on opening an upmarket restaurant in the new ‘town centre’, risen like a phoenix from the flames of Herbert Austin’s motor car industry, as comfortably off middle class socialist hipsters (a 2020s version of Champagne socialists),  start moving (they already have) to the ward of Longbridge West Heath where property can be bought at a fraction of the price they might have to pay in their natural nesting grounds of Moseley, Kings Heath and, latterly, the ultra-cool Stirchley. Longbridge town centre, with its fresh air blowing off the Lickeys, and its ever increasing facilities such as Herbert’s Yard, home to a working class suburban version of Digbeth Dining Club, might yet be home to a sort of Carters of Longbridge.

  But back to Barnt Green. Andrew Sheridan opened his new restaurant on 9 June 2022 to run in parallel with his triptych of Craft, About 8 and Divide all in the International Conference Centre in town. It has been said that the aim is to serve “more accessible” food than that at 8 which, in honesty, I find to be thoroughly accessible if perhaps rather more rich than my elderly digestive system can cope with. Having said that, now I am on regular proton pump inhibitors it’s possible than the glorious dishes served at 8 are no longer too rich and I should return soon to investigate the wonders of modern medicine and the glories of Craft dining. In the meantime, the food served at Black and Green was available to remind me of Sheridan’s culinary expertise.

   The mission of B & G’s seasonal tasting menu is to offer “a modern interpretation of British flavours, centred around local ingredients of the highest quality from micro-suppliers and neighbours”. So did B & G fulfil its brief?

  I rather think it did. The restaurant is modern with the usual chic decor using a palette of rather dark colours as we have come to expect. It is small and the claustrophobic may not like it but there are some clever touches such as little spots at the edge of the table from which a jacket may be hung and the lighting is quite satisfactory. The tables are small, a necessity I suspect because of the restaurant’s size, and the seating could be a little more comfortable but on the whole the restaurant was well designed though I was somewhat mystified as to why my place setting was laid so that I was looking away from the  open kitchen and hence I could not watch the proceedings. Then again the restaurant has only been open a week so perhaps subtleties such as this had not yet occurred to the front of house staff.

  Service was very efficient and friendly if a little fussy with the items on the table being rearranged several times more, I thought, for a rather obsessional neatness than for practical reasons (perhaps entities such as Michelin demand such behaviour). But the food is all.

  The amuses gueules were cleverly conceived. No fussiness here just good down-to-earth indulgences - a delightful little cheesy tart and a delicious oyster (chef, you are spoiling us) and some very edible olives. Along with these came excellent soda bread with my favourite ampersand butter. A Hendricks and tonic and a glass of English sparkling wine, the first indulgence of the flight, and I was happily submerged in the pleasure of the meal.  

  This was a true ‘tasting’ menu with the quantities on the plates being adequate to inform the diner of the chef’s abilities without being overwhelming though now I think about it, a little more pork might have been enjoyable. On to the gorgeous slice of A5 wagyu beef beautifully matched by what was described on the menu as a root tarter (I’m not sure if this was a rather obscure play on words or a spelling error but there was a very fine tartare under the slice of meat).

 

  One of the highlights was a scallop ceviche which looked particularly pretty and was delicious with the flavour of coconut soothingly and refreshingly matched up with the scallop and accompanying caviar and texture of pickled cucumber. A great dish. Next pleasing pork loin and rib - very tasty - with a delightful parsley and broccoli purée. The dessert had the admirable flavour of kalamansi, a citrus fruit said to be half way between orange and lime, though for me more orange than anything. This was paired so well with a chocolate mousse that I feel it is time for Terry’s to start producing a Chocolate kalamansi to rival its Chocolate orange.

  The final course was a good straightforward selection of three tasty cheeses served with a little chunk of fruit bread which was not quite adequate in amount for the amount of cheese.

  Andrew Sheridan, who came out to deliver the dishes to, and to speak to, the little select group of diners gathered in his new enterprise, has brought a promisingly fine restaurant to an area sorely in need of somewhere special to eat, which the people of southwest Birmingham and north Worcestershire have long been awaiting. Good move.

 Though perhaps not served in great quantities per plate, there were luxury ingredients in the meal - scallops, wagyu, caviar - which made it all seem rather special and very sensibly priced. Another good move.

  And finally, in case the reader is wondering, on a personal note, my proton pump inhibitor is working 100% efficiently.

    There are many restaurant awards in The United Kingdom every year now. It is pleasing for the Chefs and restaurants which are recognised by them. But it seems that some chefs are now more likely to be found at an awards ceremony than in their own kitchens. True, the latest Awards extravaganza, the grandiosely-named Estrella Restaurant of the Year, was held on a Monday evening when most restaurants are closed but it is beginning to look as though chefs are following in the footsteps of university academics who spend all their time at various national or international (which they prefer obviously) conferences lecturing to the same audiences on the same subjects but just in different places, the more exotic the better.

  The outcome of these awards is all very predictable with London restaurants and chefs being awarded the lion’s share of the plaudits with our own excellent West Midlands restaurants being poorly represented. Thus in the top 100, only two West Midlands restaurants are featured - congratulations to Brad Carter’s Carters of Moseley at number 80 and Aktar Islam’s Opheem at number 88 - while 59 London restaurants appear in the top 100 list, seven of the top ten being located in London. What nonsense.