I was mildly amused when reading between the lines, as a great between the lines reader, and also not being averse to occasional schadenfreude, to read a recent Blog of a middle aged Birmingham food blogger, termed in these modern times - an influencer - with an apparent self image of being a sophisticated 17 year-old who takes pride in being invited to notable restaurants whilst being generally inebriated, that the writer seemed not to have been invited to an opening of a new hotel restaurant here in Birmingham. Rather bitterly he wrote that he was, “curious to try it” but that a friend had already informed him that what was served was “just a curry….”.
I look forward to our influencer’s own impression of the recently opened Indus restaurant at the Park Regis hotel. The Influencer refers cynically to the restaurant’s by-line, “inspired by a love of India” and makes a comment about the way chefs who are brought to the UK from abroad are employed to produce dishes of little significance which hardly reflect any love of anywhere. Which may or may not be the case. However I do feel an inclination to visit this new restaurant out of curiosity and also with the history of dining in the city in mind.
In the latter part of the 19th century and first decades of the twentieth the smart restaurants in which to eat were located in hotels. In earlier times those who ate away from home dined in religious institutions, then inns, taverns, coffee houses and clubs. Even before the French Revolution, as we know, Mathurin Roze de Chantoiseau opened the first modern restaurant in Paris around 1765 or 1766, Le Grand Véfour was opened by Antoine Aubertot as the Café de Chartres in the Palais Royale in 1784 and as French aristocrats were dispossessed or even done away with by the revolutionaries, their domestic staff, including their talented cooks, needed new employment and the development of restaurants grew as these workers took up jobs in them. In 1786 the Provost of Paris issued a decree giving restaurants official status and in the same year Antoine Beauvilliers opened the magnificently luxurious La Grande Taverne de Londres in Paris.
In 1815 Marie-Antonin Câreme, whose career started in pâtisserie, came to London to work as chef to the Prince Regent. There he published the first of his books which would lead to the domination of English dining by French grande cuisine as the culinary style served in dining establishments of quality in England throughout the rest of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
By the end of the nineteenth century Nathaniel Newnham-Davis, an early English food critic (see Blog 151), was regularly referring to dinners eaten in the fine restaurants located in London’s notable hotels and firstly at the Savoy and then at the Ritz, L’Escoffier was entrenching French cuisine as the mainstay of English dining out for decades to come.
In provincial Birmingham, restaurants located in the city’s smarter hotels were often the places of choice to dine out in style. Even when English dining out had moved on through the period of rationing during the Second World War and socialist austerity which followed it, the era of the post-rationing culinary nadir and the rise of Mediterranean and then south Asian cuisine, good quality hotel restaurants often provided the most likely places to find good British food. Thus in the first red Michelin Guide Great Britain And Ireland Guidebook published in 1974, three of the seven listed Birmingham area restaurants were located in hotels most notable of which was the Burlington Hotel near New Street Station. The Burlington was listed by Michelin from 1974 until 1979.
The Plough And Harrow’s restaurant had a Michelin listing from 1987 to 1990 and at the time many would have said it was the best place to dine in the city. Not surprisingly perhaps the Head Chef between 1987 and 1990 was none other than Andreas Antona who went on to open the Michelin-starred Simpsons in Kenilworth, moving it later to Edgbaston where it retained its Michelin star (see Blog 249). Chef Andy Waters also worked at The Plough and Harrow before going on to work with Antona at Simpsons. The pictures below depict the hotel itself and a visit from the then distinguished Lord Mayor of Birmingham, Randal Brew, in 2007.
Perhaps the most successful of all was the restaurant of the Swallow Hotel, (now The Marriott), called Sir Edward Elgar which was probably as close as it possibly could have been to being Birmingham’s first Michelin-starred restaurant. This restaurant was listed by Michelin from 1991 to 2002 and during that time in May 1998, its Chef de Cuisine, Jonathan Harrison, was given the role of preparing the menu for the world leaders attending the G8 Summit when it was held in Birmingham. The meal was served in the Pavilion of the Botanical Gardens. Harrison left his job at The Swallow in 1999 but during his time there, in 1993, he was awarded the Roux Diners Scholarship. Prior to that, his predecessor, Idris Caldora, had been runner-up in the National Chef of the Year awards. Sir Edward Elgar restaurant was listed by The Good Food Guide rather late in the 2001 edition and in doing so added to Birmingham’s then total of 7 restaurants mentioned by the Guide as one of the two highest scorers, the other being another hotel restaurant - Number 282 At The Hyatt which received a Michelin listing for just one year only in 2001. It’s worth noting that there was also a second restaurant at The Swallow, more relaxed, cheaper and smaller, bistro called Langtry’s.
More recent photographs of Jonathan Harrison and Idris Caldora -
It may be said therefore that Birmingham’s hotels played an important role in providing sites for good quality dining for many decades up until the beginning of the 21st century when dining out began to change dramatically as chefs and restaurateurs chose to open their own restaurants without ties to a hotel (though in London of course the great hotels are still homes to highly regarded restaurants). As the most talented chefs began to work in dedicated restaurants so they were not available to work in and maintain the highest standards in hotel restaurants and so hotels became far less important as places to dine out unless they served as convenient in-house places to eat for resident guests.
The steady decline of the provision of food in hotels in Birmingham in the last twenty years is sad in many ways. Looking at some of the previous great names it seems that food is now just an afterthought to be provided for the peckish resident rather than the lover of gastronomy. The now Best Western Plough and Harrow gives this advice - “For lunch and dinner guests can order from Deliveroo and consume it on the premises in one of the lounges, bars, guest room or al fresco! Hotel will provide crockery, cutlery & condiments upon request” How the mighty have fallen.
The once towering (literally and metaphorically) Swallow (Marriott) offers a range of burgers, nachos, ‘chips n’ dips’, fish and chips, steak and so on. I don’t expect that the Chef from there will be organising the food for the banquet the next time the G8 drop in on Birmingham.
I dined at Isaac’s in The Grand Hotel yesterday evening. The dishes were reasonable with pleasing choices and the atmosphere and setting make dining there a worthwhile experience. I enjoyed myself but I still think that The Grand needs a grand restaurant with fine dishes rather than, or perhaps as well as, the fries and steaks and burgers of Isaac’s.
My starter was spicy and enjoyable - Florida cocktail with meaty chunks of lobster and crayfish and shocks of heat and citrus and the bitterness of chicory. Very good and quite clever.
Then very pleasingly baked halibut - again meaty, tasty and well seasoned. This was served with cheering little clams, caviar and saffron sauce with Provençale vegetables which again were well cooked but I should have liked some pervading garlic and more powerful tomato flavours running through them.
In place of a formal dessert I thoroughly enjoyed a ‘shake’ (milkshake) peanut butter ice cream with lots of honeyed peanuts in it. Great fun and very tasty.
It was a very enjoyable meal and Isaac’s is now an important part of The Grand and there’s some excellent cooking going on there but I’d love to eat something in a room which recalls the hotel’s Victorian origins both in decor, atmosphere and cuisine.
As for the Influencer’s thoughts, at the head of this piece, on a new hotel restaurant, Indus, which may or may not have some quality, the knowledge that it exists tells me that I should at least give it a try.
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