249. Black Cod.

 

  After a second visit to Lulu Wild in Brindley Place it’s hard not to conclude that this is one of my favourite restaurants in the city. Lunching with a companion, we were very rapidly made comfortable and at ease in this splendidly exciting modern East Asian restaurant with impeccable front of house service. I had previously visited the restaurant by myself and enjoyed enormously a range of dim sum and we therefore chose the Wild platter, eight different pieces of dim sum, randomly picking four pieces each and both of us enthusing about every mouthful.

  My companion was delighted with his delicious-looking prawn stir fry but I was overwhelmed by my astonishingly superbly cooked miso marinated black cod which was devised by the chef, Nobu Matsuhisa - it was not a second over or under - and thoroughly delicious. A luxurious pairing with accurately cooked asparagus made this one of my favourite, probably the favourite, fish dish of the year so far. We also enjoyed sharing a bowl of egg fried rice.

  For dessert I chose matcha and passion fruit sponge - an excellent light and tasty piece of pleasure - sitting on lime infused vanilla crumble and served with honey and raspberry compote and vanilla sorbet. It was a pleasing end to the meal especially consumed as it was with a paired Yozushu Kodakara (a liquor made with yuzu from Kodakara prefecture) with soda which was pleasingly refreshing.

  Lulu Wild is a fine restaurant based on my two visits there. Both the food and the service appear to be consistently excellent. It is currently on my list of favourite Birmingham restaurants. The Executive Chef is Malaysian-born Derrick Chen who worked previously at the Michelin-starred Hakkasan in London.

  Elsewhere in Brindley Place, it seems that the site of the former Michelin-listed Edmund’s where first Andy Waters and then Didier Philpott were head chefs and afterwards Maribel where Richard Turner was Head Chef for twelve months, and which has been closed since the start of the first lockdown is to become  an establishment called The Gorilla Cafe, “the place for lunch, brunch and bicycle repair”. I give it six months.

  Finally, after a visit to Birmingham  a few weeks ago by a Hollywood actor, Tom Cruise, who stayed at The Grand Hotel and famously had his terrifyingly expensive motor car pinched whilst it was parked outside the hotel and also visited Asha’s where, it is claimed, he thought the curry was so good he ordered, like Oliver Twist, a second helping, a second Hollywood film star, Johnny Depp, fresh from winning a £9 million court case against his former wife, stayed in the Grand on the same night as Lucy The Labrador and myself were there. Again, like Cruise, his hosts thought it appropriate to entertain him with ‘a curry’ and, it is reported, a restaurant on Broad Street, Varanasi, hosted him and his entourage at a cost of £50,000 with him leaving staff “a large tip”. Birmingham is certainly beginning to be the place to be seen.

  The staff at The Grand were very discreet about Depp’s presence at the hotel but I became aware of the hotel’s celebrity guest when we were leaving the building only to be greeted by a large group of Depp enthusiasts, mainly young women, waiting for anyone coming out of the building just in case it was their hero. The group told me for whom they were waiting and patted and fussed the dog. Previously I had thoroughly enjoyed my Full English Breakfast served in Isaac’s restaurant which is once again brought out fresh from the kitchen rather than being left for the customer to serve themself from a buffet. Each item on the plate was delicious except that the homemade ketchup was too acidic for my taste. The scrambled egg was particularly fine and the bacon and sausage were, er, grand.