262. Cork And Tile Portuguese, Stratford-Upon-Avon.

 

  Cork & Tile Portuguese opened in the Fred Winter Centre in the Guild Street back street area of Stratford-Upon-Avon in the spring of 2022. It’s somewhere different to try out when in Stratford as a rest from the lookalike Sheep Street bistros and its attraction is, or should be, that it’s offering a new cuisine for the town - Portuguese.

  The restaurateurs have done their best to give it a Mediterranean feel - pleasing bright decor with sunny yellows, colourful Portuguese ceramics on the walls and authentic Portuguese background music. The place is spacious but the building itself makes it impossible to suspend one’s belief that one is in Stratford and not in a cosy Algarve restaurant, sea breezes wafting around one and the squeal of seabirds eyeing up your grilled sardines. The outside looks like a sports centre and the ceiling of the restaurant - all pipes and tubes - burdens the attempt to bring the Mediterranean to Stratford with an overwhelming industrial feel to it. It’s a shame. The owners have done their best but it’s the wrong building in the wrong location to enable one to really enter into the spirit of what is intended; perhaps if they had been able to acquire a more traditional location on Waterfront looking out towards the Avon then it really would have been quite thrilling to visit. That said they’ve clearly done their best with the location available.

  Good service and a good explanation of what was on offer left one only to wait for one’s choice of dishes from the menu. But there was a second problem. The restaurant has no alcohol license and while one is invited to bring one’s own bottle it would be really rather nice if the restaurant were offering a choice of wines, particularly Portuguese or Iberian, to help conjure up the Lusitanian atmosphere which the building itself denies the diner. In all events, it’s an interesting menu and as starter I chose Gambas com Alho (translated as Garlic prawns with croutons). This was undoubtedly a robust start to the meal; the magnificent prawns were well cooked and tasty and the herb and garlic sauce very enjoyable. The croutons were terrifyingly hard and anyone biting into them without soaking them in the sauce first would be running a serious risk to their dentition. Nevertheless a fine and enjoyable dish.

  For the main course I chose Alheira com Batata a Murro e Grelos (“A classic bread sausage of wild boar and deer meat with crushed new potatoes and turnip greens”). This turned up looking about as rustic as any dish could do, with the vast, slightly unnerving, splendidly phallic bread sausage tied up in an ‘O’ shape and the turnip greens sitting comfortably on 4 or 5 very well cooked but uncrushed new potatoes.

  The ‘classic bread sausage’ is not particularly any more appealing on the inside than it is on the outside. It seems to be largely bread, as described on the menu, with little pieces of chopped protein inside it. It’s rather mushy and while it no doubt does appeal to Portuguese tastes it’s not a sausage that I feel I shall be revisiting. Still interesting to try and I have no complaints to make to the chef on the preparation of the dish.

  I had room for dessert (my proton pump inhibitor is working splendidly). I chose Bolo de Coco e Ananàs) pineapple and coconut cake) served with vanilla ice cream. This was thoroughly satisfying and the cake had a nice texture though the flavour of pineapple was less in evidence than that which came from the coconut. The helping of ice cream was generous though the ice cream was fairly unremarkable and I didn’t really need the strawberry sauce poured on it.

  This restaurant makes a pleasing alternative venue if one is looking for somewhere to eat in Stratford. I shall be interested to see how the restaurant develops in the coming months. It is the second branch of Cork And Tile Portuguese, the original shop being opened in Exeter in July 2019. The chef in Stratford is Ana Natalia. Rating - 🌜🌜

  Stratford is the sort of town where one would expect to find a good number of restaurants which might find their way into the Good Food Guide or the Michelin Guide. The Good Food Guide is very much in flux at the moment and at the moment does not list a single Stratford restaurant in its short list of Midlands restaurants. The nearest restaurant mentioned in the Good Food Guide is the immaculate Cheal’s of Henley. Michelin meanwhile lists three - the single starred Salt, Lambs of Sheep Street and The Woodsman. 

Here is a list of all the Stratford upon Avon restaurants mentioned in the Michelin Guide during its existence as hard copy which is the period 1974 - 2020 and then the subsequent years as an online tool.The years in which each restaurant featured in the Guide are indicated:-

(Da) Giovanni 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83

Marianne 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82

Buccaneer 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81

Bankside 75 76 77

Le Provençal 77 78 79 80 81 82

Christophi’s 77 78 79 80 81

Piper At The Gates of Dawn (floating restaurant) 78 79

The Chase (Ettington) 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 

Marlowe’s Elizabethan Rooms 85

Hill’s 85

Rumours 87

Hussains 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 00 01

Sir Toby’s 90 91 92 93 94 95

Liaison 96

The Boathouse 98 99 00

Desport’s 99 00 01 02 03

Lamb’s 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

Restaurant Margaux 02 03 04 05

Hamilton’s Brasserie 05

Malbec (Petit Bistro) 06 07 08 09 10 11

Church Street Townhouse 12 13 14 15 16

Oak Room (Ettingham Park Hotel) 12 13

Waterside Brasserie 12 13 14 15 16 17

Rooftop (Royal Shakespeare Theatre) 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

No 9 Church St 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Baraset Barn (Alveston) 12 13 14 15 16

Woodsman 20 21 22 

Salt 18 19* 20* 21* 22*

  As can be seen, Lamb’s has had by far the longest run on the pages of the Guide (2000-22), followed by Hussain’s which still exists though it has not been listed since 2001. I have visited it twice though several years ago when I found it to be a fairly run-of-the-mill, old fashioned south Asian-style restaurant. However it would be interesting to visit it again now to see if it remains a time capsule or is more grounded now in the 21st century.

261. Indus at Park Regis Hotel.

  

 Waterstones is an irritating shop. The Birmingham multi-storey branch has, of course, a very good range of books to choose from and to peruse reasonably peacefully but every time I visit it seems to be becoming more of a coffee house as the area devoted to displaying books is gradually subsumed by chairs and tables where nice middle class socialists can sit and get a free read and generally muck up a book I might want to buy while lingering  over the single mug of capuccino they purchased two and half hours ago. 

  The coffee emporium component of the shop has now spread out to render the food book section, where I like to search out editions telling the story of eating out, an isolated island which to get to one has to clamber over bearded senescent Corbyn-lookalikes reading opportunistically an available free newspaper or grim professional mothers from Moseley or Harborne letting their three or four accompanying children run riot while occasionally trying to answer the kids’ precocious questions on gender fluidity, the classification of flying dinosaurs or what was really involved in hanging, drawing and quartering.

  But let us not sink too far into reflections on the usefulness of the modern English middle-class, well-educated but not necessarily any good at anything, and instead reflect that per ardua ad altem I did indeed manage to negotiate the barriers of Waterstones coffee area and find my way to the Food section bookshelves. For once there were a few items that took my fancy, including a couple of wafer-thin volumes, one possibly ‘signed by the author’, by that supremely middle class socialist useful for nothing more than writing fine restaurant reviews (and apparently also making music) which would have ensured that he would have been aboard the fourth and final spaceship carrying the remains of mankind abandoning a doomed earth in the final part of Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.

  So it was that I got my hands on My Dining Hell, such an attractively thin tome that I was unable to resist beginning to read it immediately, and hence, halting only for quite frequent guffaws, I plunged on through the book reading about Rayner’s very worst dining experiences usually in a London dining establishments which, given the prices asked in restaurants there, should have been a lot better.

  It isn’t a good idea to be a restaurant to be visited by someone who likes and is expecting good food on the day that the diner has read My Dining Hell if you are not going to live up to expectations and the Indus in the Park Regis Hotel, at the far end of Broad Street near Five Ways was the dining establishment fated to fall foul of such a diner empowered by the little pink book which rendered to the reader the Thoughts of Jay.

  The Park Regis Hotel itself is an exquisitely confusingly designed building with the reception being located on the fourth floor and the restaurant seeming to occupy the same space as that area in which hotel guests seem likely to be breakfasting - in short, a flawlessly off-putting cafeteria. When I had finally worked out how to access the ‘restaurant’ I presented myself to a woman who seemed surprised to see me even though I had arrived on time in the early evening, one and half hours after the restaurant’s advertised opening time. There were no other diners though it was admittedly quite early in the evening, albeit a Friday. After some conferring with the manager I was directed to a table with comfortable enough chairs and was able to look around at this soulless area little different from an airport cafeteria on a the day of a long advertised airport workers’ strike.

  However the front of house staff were moderately pleasant, a cocktail - a quite reasonable pina colada - was ordered and the menu, slightly grubby and dog-eared and mildly greasy, or was it just waxy?, was presented. An extraordinary document, the likes of which have probably not been seen in a south Asian restaurant before. There was a choice of a fair number of starters which on the look of it seemed surprisingly expensive but the choice of mains was bizarrely inadequate - one seafood, one chicken, one lamb with no choice of sauces plus some vegetarian dishes. This was not looking promising.

  I could not bring myself to order any of the starters purely on the basis of their price - if I had thought they were going to be worth it I might have dipped my toe in the water - but I did order poppadoms and pickles which were not modestly priced - £4. I was served a number of poppadom shards and three little pots of the ‘pickles’ - a really unpleasant mint and coriander yogurt dip, a microscopic quantity of really horrible tomato and onion pickle (what a relief the amount served had not been greater) and a more generous helping of ‘home-made’ reasonable-tasting mango chutney (though the menu did not identify in whose ‘home’ the chutney had been made but of course we must assume this all to be true even though the chutney seemed to have no qualities to distinguish it from something which had originated in a supermarket).

  My main dish made a fairly rapid appearance on the scene. I had a chosen shahi qasbaar murgh (£16) to be consumed with tandoori butter naan (a robust £4). The glistening, reddish-brown curry looked perfectly reasonable in its metal bowl, the tandoori chicken was very nicely cooked - perfectly moist and tasty - though the sauce did not really better many of the sauces on offer at neighbourhood south Asian establishments sold at a fraction of the price. The naan was a good consistency and would have been very enjoyable had there not been a little more burning on it than was tolerable - I really don’t enjoy the flavour of charcoal. I had indicated that I rather fancied a mango lassi after I had finished my cocktail but no-one came to ask me about it when my glass was drained so the restaurant lost that small amount of business. No-one asked me if I wanted any water but some was delivered to the table when I asked about it and it came nicely chilled.

  I thought a sweet dessert might help to cleanse my mouth of the flavour of charcoal. The thing which winged its way to the table was a calamity. I had chosen pistachio ice cream with pecan nut brittle and other random elements including a caramel sauce. This was a real mess and almost entirely inedible. The ice cream was spread out across the middle of the dish centring itself on two inelegant misshapen mounds and was made up of ice cream stuffed with crushed pistachio bits which really had a very unhappy texture and an even worse flavour. The nut brittle was rock hard and far too threatening to the continuing existence of my teeth for me to have more than a tentative first nibble before abandoning the whole as a lost cause. The dessert did however have four sweet small half-strawberries lying on the plate with the rest of it and they were very pleasing though it was a pity that the stuff that shared the plate with them was truly awful.

  By the time this nightmare was over two or three couples had sat down to dine in this depressing, characterless dining room. One couple had ordered the immense ‘Indus non-vegetarian platter for two’ of starters priced at £35 and this actually looked rather good and they polished it off and did not seem displeased with it so it is possible that there is something at Indus in which it is worth indulging.

  For me however, the bill coming to over £46 (1 drink, 1 main, 1 naan, 1 dessert) this was one of the worst meals I have had and stumped up good money for, in a long time. The hotel’s management has opened a restaurant advertised as a dining establishment of quality but its pretensions are far in advance of what it delivers - the atmosphere is awful and the food does not live up to the prices chance. I fear that I shall not visit the banks of this particular Indus again at any time in the future.

Rating - 0.

260. Le Petit Bois

 

  After two lunches at le petit bois travelling restaurant at Herbert’s Yard a couple of weeks (I finally girded up my loins and, at a beautifully sunny English summer lunchtime headed for Moseley, to actually dine at the pretty Gallicly blue le petit bois (the lower case seems to be correct).

  A relaxed, perfectly judged welcome and I was seated in the extremely comfortable chairs at the very adequately sized table in the charming, bright, nicely sized restaurant and making my choices from the sensibly sized but highly interesting menu which included a clever ‘scallop of the day’ option.

   

  And indeed the scallop of the day option was too powerful a temptation to resist and by choosing it I was rewarded with a lovely plate of nicely cooked coquilles with a crispy bacon, a minty pea purée and much accompanying esteval joy. I had already been primed for pleasure by having been served a fine small baton with delicious chicken skin butter and a delightfully cooling, Bourbon and Cuantro-based brise d’été cocktail.

  The main course of hake with peas and wild mushroom macaroni reinforced the metaphorical breeze of summer wafting through the restaurant - quite, quite delicious - few chefs can serve their fish as perfectly as was this piece of hake with the most triumphantly crispy skin I have been served on a piece of fish for years.

  And to finish, a dessert created by the Devil himself - French Colonel - two gorgeous quenelles of light, refreshing lime sorbet made thoroughly wicked by having French vodka poured over them. What a dessert!

  Light and easy and alcoholic just as I like a dessert to be. Perhaps there should have been a biscuit or something with texture to accompany it but frankly I liked the Colonel just as he was 

  For those who wish to indulge themselves to the highest degree, a magnificent fruits de mer platter is available for a minimum of two people (£120 and by the looks of it worth every penny). A pair of ladies celebrating a birthday gave me an opportunity to witness the platter in the flesh (or perhaps, the shell) and I am glad to say they made short  measure of it and thoroughly enjoyed themselves.

  The restaurant, owned by Ben Taylor, the Head Chef, and front of house manager, Zsofia Kisgergely, is the successor to their previous Moseley restaurant, Little Blackwood, which they opened in 2018 but which, like other dining establishments, was severely affected by the lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic to the extent that it was not financially viable to keep the restaurant open with it shutting in March 2022.. Much of the problem underlying the restaurant’s closure had been related to a dispute with the landlord of the property and after a resolution of the issues Taylor and Kisgergely were able to take possession of the location once more.

  The restaurant’s website says that, “Le Petit Bois is your French country kitchen, in the heart of Moseley” and Taylor and Kisgergely appear to have been very successful in creating this atmosphere in this charming bistro.

Rating:- 🌞🌞

259. Suns and Moons.

 

  I am happy to say that in the last year or so I have travelled around the West Midlands - Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Shropshire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire, Worcestershire and West Midlands - and dined at many of the region’s great restaurants, though not yet all of them, and of course there are some that have yet to be discovered. 

  Since the pandemic a couple of trends seem to be emerging - 

  Firstly, the Guidebooks are in a terrible mess. Well, to start, there are no guide books, just on-line listings with the odd three-lined comment, often nothing to do with the food, thrown in. Michelin has ended its forty-six year-long series of real paper books and replaced it with internet updates usually of restaurants in London or places Michelin inspectors like to visit and are generally often easy to get to,  such as Ireland, the Lake District, Oxfordshire, the Peak District, North Yorkshire, the Cotswolds, rural Shropshire, Kent, Suffolk, Cornwall and the West Country and the nicer parts of Scotland and Wales. Their tweeted messages are more likely to tell you about the smart places to eat in Reykjavik, Singapore, Copenhagen or Tokyo than they are about where to eat in Birmingham, Gloucester, Stafford, Hereford or Stoke. 

Michelin Guides 1974-2020, never any more for the bookshelf?

  In Michelin is largely unhelpful then The Good Food Guide is presently in a real mess. Again in this post-pandemic dining age, the editors of the publication chose to dump paper and go virtual. After a few days trial where the site featured just 300 UK restaurants it then began to charge subscribers about £30 p.a. for access to its list of recommended dining establishments with the promise that it would soon add many more restaurants to the list.

   In fact progress has been very slow and relies on its inspectors getting around the country and visiting likely places where they might track down good food. Instead of carrying forward all the names in the previous editions the editor seems to have started afresh and therefore many significant restaurants in Birmingham and the region in general are not yet listed so that if one consults the online Guide as to where to eat in Birmingham the current list will suggest just Dishoom, Tropea, Land, The Oyster Club and Tierra and then goes on to recommend Cheal’s of Henley, Tailors (Warwick), The Boat Inn and Upstairs by Tom Shepherd (both in Lichfield), Russell’s of Broadway, 33 The Homeend Ledbury, The Royal Oak (Warwickshire), Forelles, Old Downton Lodge and Charlton Arms (at Ludlow) and then the recommendations spread out into Derbyshire and Leicestershire. 

  I assume the full Birmingham listing will have to wait until the unfortunate over-stuffed inspectors have visited the five Birmingham Michelin-starred restaurants and all the others besides which seems ridiculous given that subscribers are currently paying a fair sum for a wholly inadequate list though presumably the list needed the subscriptions to come in before inspectors’ expenses could be paid. In all events it is a wholly inadequate listing at present and for any visitor to Birmingham whose knowledge of the city is very limited its advice is close to worthless presently.

  The latest list of 30 restaurants which was e mailed to me as I wrote this piece emphasises what a long way The Good Food Guide has to go with just two West Midlands restaurants featuring on it, both in Lichfield, the others generally in the areas I suggested the Guide inspectors might prefer going to.

  The second notable local trend is the rise of the out-of-town restaurant. There are a number of reasons why Birmingham has seen few fine restaurants opening in the city centre in the post-pandemic era - access to the city is by unreliable and, in the evenings, infrequent public transport and yet the left-wing socialist administration in the city with its Council Cabinet Transport member (a silly, twee cyclist previously from Oxfordshire who represents a ward full of silly, preening, well-off, pointless, middle-class socialists) is determined to freeze out the motorist and this coupled with rents that are far too high for independent hospitality businesses to afford but easily affordable to humdrum, mediocre chain restaurants. It is therefore not surprising that exceptional chefs have begun to open restaurants without the city walls (following Matt Cheal who opened Cheal’s of Henley several years ago) - Rob Palmer in Solihull, Tom Shepherd in Lichfield, Andrew Sheridan in Barnt Green, even Didier Philpott in Stourbridge and Glynn Purnell’s opening of his pub, The Mount, in Henley, and for the promising young chefs who want to stay in the city, very small establishments may be the only option - Kray Tredwell in 670 Grams, for instance, or venturing out to the suburbs where the cool young, well-off middle class abound, such as Opus’s departure from Cornwall Street and successful arrival in Harborne.

  So important changes are happening - central Birmingham is losing out to the suburbs and the surrounding more rural communities- and at the same time national food guides are not keeping abreast of events.

  Therefore to pick out those restaurants worth dining at in Birmingham and the West Midlands region I shall do what I have never done before and give those which I feel worth listing, a rating and quite a detailed one, that does not take into account the standards which a ridiculously wealthy Kensington dweller visiting Singapore might expect for his several hundred pounds off expenses but what an experienced, fine food-loving Mercian diner might hope for in our region. 

Stars being already claimed by the French tyre makers, I shall retain a celestial theme for my ratings but use a sun and moon theme so that - 

4 suns 🌞🌞🌞🌞  Exciting original faultless food, exemplary service, perfect atmosphere and setting

3 suns 🌞🌞🌞       Exciting, original, precise dishes throughout, very good service, pleasing setting

2 suns 🌞🌞.            Finely cooked, interesting food in the main, very good service, pleasing setting

1 sun 🌞                    Finely prepared and served food, attractive setting, good atmosphere

4 moons 🌛🌛🌛🌛 Food is well prepared and tasty, good service, pleasant environment

3 moons 🌛🌛🌛    Solidly prepared pleasing dishes in the main, service may have a fault or two

2 moons🌛🌛          Good cooking resulting in pleasing food served satisfactorily 

1 moon 🌛.               Mostly enjoyable food, service generally unproblematical, comfortable setting

So looking at restaurant visits over previous months how do the restaurants in which I have eaten rate?

The Walrus   Shrewsbury 🌞🌞

Forelles    Ludlow 🌞

Fishmore Hall Bistro    Ludlow 🌛🌛🌛

Opheem   Birmingham 🌞🌞🌞 

670 Grams   Birmingham 🌞🌞

Tropea   Harborne Birmingham  🌛🌛

Café de Paris by Didier    Stourbridge  🌛🌛🌛

Upstairs By Tom Shepherd    Lichfield  🌞🌞

Purnell’s    Birmingham  🌞🌞🌞

Adam’s   Birmingham   🌞🌞🌞

Black And Green   Barnt Green  🌞🌞🌞

Folium    Birmingham  🌞🌞

Isaac’s The Grand Hotel    Birmingham    🌛🌛🌛🌛

Simpsons    Birmingham    🌞🌞🌞

The Wilderness    Birmingham    🌞🌞🌞

Pulperia    Birmingham    🌞

The French Pantry   Ludlow    🌞

Lulu Wild  Birmingham    🌞🌞

Pick Thai  Stratford upon Avon    🌛🌛 

Cheal’s of Henley   Henley in Arden     🌞🌞🌞🌞

The Mount   Henley in Arden   🌛

Oyster Club   Birmingham     🌛🌛

Sabai Sabai   Stratford upon Avon 🌛

Lambs of Sheep Street   Stratford upon Avon 🌞

Toffs by Rob Palmer    Solihull  🌞🌞

Butchers Social  Aldridge 🌞🌞

Grace and Savour at Hampton Manor   Hampton in Arden  🌞

The Woodsman   Stratford upon Avon   🌛🌛🌛

Peel’s Restaurant at Hampton Manor    Hampton in Arden  🌞🌞🌞

Rajdoot   Birmingham    🌛

Lunar   Stoke on Trent     🌞🌞🌞

Harborne Kitchen   Harborne Birmingham  🌞🌞

Carter’s of Moseley   Moseley Birmingham   🌞🌞🌞

Chakana     Moseley Birmingham   🌞

Craft   Birmingham    🌞🌞

Larder    Lichfield     🌛🌛🌛🌛

Boat Inn   Lichfield     🌞🌞

Land    Birmingham      🌛🌛🌛🌛

Smoke at Hampton Manor    Hampton in Arden    🌞🌞🌞

Qavali    Birmingham     🌛🌛🌛🌛

Charlton Arms     Ludlow   🌞

Dishoom    Birmingham   🌛

Docket No. 33    Whitchurch    🌞🌞

Asha’s    Birmingham    0

About 8    Birmingham    🌞🌞🌞

Salt    Stratford upon Avon      🌞🌞

Russell’s of Broadway     Broadway     🌞

The Lygon Arms    Broadway    🌛🌛🌛

Le Champignon Sauvage     Cheltenham     🌞🌞🌞🌞

Mortimer’s    Ludlow   🌞

The Bookshop     Hereford     🌛🌛🌛🌛

The Cross    Kenilworth     not visited recently

Chapter    Harborne Birmingham     not yet visited

Le Petit Bois    Kings Heath Birmingham     not yet visited but on my way there later in the week. See Blog 260.

Wild Shropshire    Whitchurch      not yet visited

Lumière     Cheltenham   not yet visited 

Penson’s   Tenbury Wells    not yet visited

Haughmond     Upton Magna     not yet visited

Tailors    Warwick       not yet visited

  Of immense significance in the history of modern English gastronomy and therefore of how we eat here in the West Midlands now, Chef Alastair Little, who died on 3 August 2022 in Australia, should be mentioned here. He first worked as a waiter and then moved to work as a chef at the notable London restaurant L’Escargot in 1981 at a time when English gastronomy was really on the move. In 1983 he cheffed at the restaurant 192 in Notting Hill and then in 1985 opened his own restaurant, Alastair Little, in Frith Street in Soho where the kitchen opened out on to the dining room, the tables had no table clothes and had paper napkins and the menu changed twice daily - years before these became regular features of restaurants as we know them today.

  The cooking  under chef and Head Chef Juliet Peston was immaculate and strove to remove itself for once and for all from the French cuisine which had dominated fine English restaurants since the days of Escoffier and earlier. Little brought to English restaurants the cuisine of simplicity and subtraction in which he investigated what could be removed from a dish to enable the remaining ingredients to be even more effective. He opened a second restaurant, also called Alastair Little, at Ladbroke Grove in 1995 and his two openings 1985 and 1995 bookended the appearance of other landmark London restaurants which all pointed English cuisine in the direction in which it should travel - St John, The French House and The Blueprint Cafe. Little ended his work as an active restauranteur in 2002 having stamped his mark on English cuisine as notable as the contributions of Marco Pierre White and Gordon Ramsay but far less flashy.

258.The Walrus.

 

  Back in Ludlow, it seemed a good idea to venture forth elsewhere in Shropshire to eat somewhere I have been intending to visit for a long time - The Walrus in Shrewsbury. It’s always an adventure putting one’s trust in Transport for Wales-run trains which makes a very good argument for governments, particularly the Welsh one, never being allowed to run public transport, especially when their hegemony extends itself over the border into the Marches and England. At least with privately-run West Midlands Trains we can rely on them being hopelessly unreliable and not have any false hopes that the train will arrive on time or even that it will turn up at all.

  Still, I did indeed put my trust in TFW and it did indeed manage to convey me relatively uneventfully, the half hour journey from Ludlow to Shrewsbury, through empty green countryside and looming hills, dotted with sheep or cattle, past the towns of Craven Arms and Church Stretton. What a pleasure it is to visit Shrewsbury with its links with Charles Darwin and how exciting to be visiting a much loved dining establishment to discover how high-end food had evolved in this part of Shropshire and The Midlands

  I was pleased with my welcome at the restaurant, which had opened in October 2018 and is listed by Michelin, and happy to be seated downstairs in full view of the kitchen where Chefs Ben Hall and his partner Carla were going about their work quietly and efficiently. I was also impressed that, apart from Hall himself the restaurant appeared to be run by an excellent all-woman crew. There were obvious problems with the restaurant itself in that the toilets are located up steep stairs making them inaccessible to some customers and in particular anyone in a wheelchair. I liked the soothing grey and blue decor with the portrait of a walrus looking down on the lower dining room. Which begged the question of how the restaurant got its name. On enquiring I was told it had been named after the Beatles’ record, “I am the walrus”, an apparent favourite of Chef’s which sent me running (metaphorically) to the internet to look the song up and I was fascinated to find that the lyrics have a number of allusions to food items which may or may not have some relevance to Chef’s interest in the song.

  And so to the menu. On Friday evenings only a six course tasting menu is available - at the very reasonable price of £60  (though a wine flight will add another £90 to the bill). To start, three pleasing amuses gueules were delivered to the table - all with crispy textures in them - one a fine cheesy mousse another with bresaola and the other with artichoke crisps on an excellent potato salad base that worked very well for me. A flying start.

  The first starter was delicious - an oblong of delightful, subtly flavoured smoked eel with sweetly pickled cucumber and slices of carrot, the mild heat of thinly sliced radish, Exmoor caviar and hints of horseradish.  It was an excellent summery dish and the next course was, if anything even better - drapes of very thin slices of very tasty Lancashire porchetta, the flavours heightened by Shropshire truffle and gooseberries. For me the dish was unimpeachable.

  On to fried spinach pasta dumplings with crispy kale, Parmesan and onion. Delightfully cheesy and the crispy kale brought with it the pleasures of Chinese-restaurant-style ‘crispy seaweed’. Then the meat course - Goosenagh duck cooked perfectly to my tastes and accompanied by a fabulous little square of brilliantly conceived duck leg and squash lasagne which raised a fine plate of duck breast to a legendary status - eternally memorable and complemented by glazed plum, an excellent sauce, mushroom purée and cabbage - none of these ingredients were out of place.

  Oh wow! That lasagne.

  There were two desserts. The first was very pleasing - slices of macerated cherries, buttermilk semi-fredo, shards of meringue and cherry sorbet - everything had its place and helped the dish along. I very much enjoyed too, the second dessert of aerated dark chocolate (the aeration was that little touch which raised the dish above what some chefs often produce) and miso caramel mousse, both paired very happily with delicious coconut ice cream. It was all such a pleasure.

   I had the feeling that this had been a meal of items which Chef himself really enjoyed and perhaps that’s something other chefs should do - prepare the meal as though they were going to pay £60, £70, £80 and so on for it so that they could sit back with relish and indulge themselves with it and emerge from it content and happy they had something not only that little bit special but also just plain fun and pleasurable.

  

 

  I thoroughly enjoyed my trip to The Walrus and thought it a restaurant well worth making a special journey to eat in. I note that the restaurant will close at the end of this month and will be relocated elsewhere in Shrewsbury. In some ways this is sad - it is a lovely  restaurant but clearly the single upstairs lavatory is a real practical problem and may be one of those non-food issues that causes the Michelin inspectors to hold back from awarding The Walrus a Michelin star.

  I look forward to visiting the new Walrus and eating Ben Hall and Carla’s cooking again.