Folium is a very fine restaurant in Caroline Street off the picturesque St Paul’s Square in which the gorgeous eponymous Georgian church where my maternal grandparents were married exactly 100 years ago is situated. The only problem with location is the walk from the city centre to the Jewellery Quarter which means having to cross over Great Charles Street where the pedestrian bridge is vile and really needs someone in the council to sort out the ugly, filthy monstrosity.
Still when you get to smart, modern, bright Folium the horrors of the walk there are soon forgotten and an excellent welcome is extended to the diner. Chef Ben Tesh can be viewed creating his art in the open kitchen - quietly, methodically, precisely, productively. It was in August 2016 that I first experienced Tesh’s original, sometimes challenging, always tasty food with its overwhelmingly excellent and varied flavours. I still have the first menu and dream that one day I will visit Folium, perhaps for a ‘Greatest Hits’ menu, and eat again his extraordinary Potato porridge with coffee grinds and toasted yeast, a Marmite of a dish if ever there were one.
But let us travel forward to now - that is - June 2022. The dishes are as extraordinary and precisely prepared as ever. Firstly, gorgeous amuses gueles in the form of wonderfully tasty, pretty golden smoked cod roe sitting like little pebbles on larger stones with more yellow at the base in the form of a Mayan gold potato. Then supremely delicious lamb tartare with English wasabi and then more sturdy flavours in an appetiser mocking in a happy way the flavours of oyster. Already the meal had established itself as being about striving to entertain and please the palate in as many ways as possible and succeeding in that goal.
The first starter was a delightful savoury custard lifted further by roast chicken dashi and truffle, then char hitting home with raw vinegar and radish and then a very impressive asparagus with Exmoor caviar from the only establishment in this country, so I was told, that farms sturgeon
The fish course (not that fish hadn’t already made an appearance) was Cornish turbot cooked in beef fat served with baked potato butter. Alas this dish didn’t really chime with me, the texture of the fish was not quite to my taste and the baked potato flavour of the butter was so powerful and overwhelming that I could not pick up the flavour of the turbot which seems a great pity for such a luxury ingredient. As I wrote above, sometimes Ben Tesh’s dishes can be challenging.
I enjoyed the Guinea fowl which might be described as a piece of Guinea fowl sausage and the cep alioli was excellent. I forgot to photograph the dish but it was visually neat and pleasing.
The predessert of frozen horseradish with sorrel was delicious and it gave me so much pleasure I felt it should be a part of my normal daily diet. The dessert of sunflower cream with birch syrup was equally enjoyable - light and refreshing and generous with the flavours it imparted. The meal rounded off with some very happy petit fours - an utterly delightful tiny chocolate tart with cep caramel and a wonderful little bun with a whisky cream surmounted by little butterfly wings.
I hope Folium continues to prosper. These have been difficult years for various reasons almost since the restaurant opened. Tesh’s dishes are as adventurous and imaginative, though obviously not as flamboyant, as that to be found in the Jewellery Quarter’s other notable restaurant, Alex Claridge’s The Wilderness. Both are extremely talented and passionate chefs and both make enormous contributions to realising Birmingham’s gastronomic scene as a force to be reckoned with.
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