269. Good Food Guide Rates Birmingham As Most Exciting Food Destination.

It seems to me that the relevance of the Michelin Guide to high quality dining out in England is declining exponentially. Its inspectors visit London and Home Counties restaurants which are convenient for them and elsewhere they go to nice places in the Cotswolds, or Lake District or, latterly, even the Peak District. But the conclusions they reach from their visits are arcane and repetitive and most of all … questionably outdated and unambitious. But still chefs are whipped up into pre-Award announcement frenzies. They shouldn’t be. Michelin doesn’t even bother to publish a book now and the ‘reviews’ on their websites are vague and often unhelpful, text being sacrificed for a glossy photograph.

The Good Food Guide, on the other hand has had, and is still undergoing, a reboot which brings it firmly into the post-COVID 2020s. It was slow to get reviews on its internet pages but the number of listed restaurants is now snowballing and making the Guide a very useful tool when deciding where to go for a really good meal. Its inspectors are out and about in areas which the Michelin inspectors have not imagined in their worst nightmares but where real people live and where they to wish to dine well without driving out into the middle of a fairytale forest on a moonlit night in late autumn or, even worse, where they have to pay £300 to stay the night if they wish to drink alcohol because there are no local taxis operating late evening.

For historical reasons, and because of snob appeal and the indoctrination of chefs, the Michelin Guide will remain of interest for the foreseeable future but The Good Food Guide now seems to be the reliable place to go for useful, clearly defined advice on where to eat in England (and here in the West Midlands).

As of 17 October 2022, The Good Food Guide now lists the following West Midlands restaurants -

Grading (the symbols are my little intrusion to make the post more colourful)

Exceptional - 🍗🍗🍗

Very good - 🍗🍗

Good - 🍗

West Midlands County -

The Wilderness - Birmingham 🍗🍗🍗

Grace And Savour - Hampton In Arden 🍗🍗🍗

Carter’s Of Moseley - Moseley, Birmingham - 🍗🍗🍗

Harborne Kitchen - Harborne, Birmingham - 🍗🍗🍗

Purnell’s - Birmingham - 🍗🍗

Adam’s - Birmingham - 🍗🍗

Folium - Birmingham - 🍗🍗

Opheem - Birmingham - 🍗🍗

Peel’s - Hampton in Arden - 🍗🍗

Smoke - Hampton in Arden - 🍗🍗

Yikouchi At Chancer’s Cafe - Stirchley, Birmingham - 🍗🍗

670 Grams - Digbeth, Birmingham - 🍗

Chakana - Moseley, Birmingham - 🍗

Chapter - Harborne, Birmingham - 🍗

Dishoom - Birmingham - 🍗

Land - Birmingham - 🍗

Tierra - Jewellery Quarter, Birmingham - 🍗

Tropea - Harborne, Birmingham - 🍗

The Oyster Club - Birmingham - 🍗

Eat Vietnam - Stirchley, Birmingham - 🍗

Yip in Bashu - Coventry - 🍗

Warwickshire -

Cheal’s Of Henley - Henley in Arden - 🍗🍗

The Cross At Kenilworth - Kenilworth - 🍗🍗

Salt - Stratford upon Avon - 🍗

Tailors - Warwick - 🍗

The Royal Oak - Whatcote - 🍗

Staffordshire -

Upstairs By Tom Shepherd - Lichfield - 🍗🍗🍗

The Boat - Lichfield - 🍗

Shropshire -

The Walrus - Shrewsbury - 🍗🍗

Forelles At Fishmore Hall - Ludlow - 🍗

Mortimers - Ludlow - 🍗

Old Downton Lodge - Ludlow - 🍗

Charlton Arms - Ludlow - 🍗

Sebastians - Oswestry - 🍗

Worcestershire -

Russell’s of Broadway - Broadway - 🍗

Herefordshire -

33 The Homend - Ledbury - 🍗

The Cider Barn - Penbridge - 🍗

The Kilpeck Inn - Kilpeck - 🍗

The Riverside Inn at Aymestrey - Aymestrey - 🍗

Gloucestershire -

Le Champignon Sauvage - Cheltenham - 🍗🍗

The Bell at Selsey - Selsey - 🍗

The Butcher’s Arms - Eldersfield - 🍗

The Woolpack Inn - Stroud - 🍗

The West Midlands now has 43 listed restaurants with 17 located in Birmingham. There are a number of glaring omissions still - no Simpsons nor About 8 - and no visit yet to Whitchurch nor to Lunar in Stoke on Trent. No listing yet for The Woodsman in Stratford upon Avon and I would have thought a call in at Lamb’s Of Sheep Street might be considered worthwhile while in that town. In Worcestershire, there’s no mention of Pensons, and Solihull and Barnt Green now both have excellent restaurants to be visited. The Guide remains a work in progress in some ways but is catching up rapidly.

Regardless, on the evening of 17 October, The Guide held its ceremony to announce Britain’s Top Twenty Restaurants for 2022 at the Groucho Club in Soho. I was delighted to have been invited to the event and before plunging into the remarkably noisy hubbub of a lot of food people closely packed and reaching out for generous amounts of free drinks and delicious canapés - including a fabulous sausage roll and a sea bream ceviche - I took a walk around Soho wandering down the streets which had been, and still were in some cases, home to some legendary restaurants.

Once in the Groucho Club and having eventually deduced precisely which part of it the event was located in, I was delighted to see the familiar face of Alex Claridge and with him his partner and later, the legendary Sonal Clare and head chef Marius Gedminas - so obviously The Wilderness was to feature on the list of Twenty Most Exciting Restaurants - a very real achievement for a dining establishment which had not previously featured in the book’s listings.

The place was buzzing - here was Richard Corrigan, there was the larger than life figure of Gareth Ward. Eventually upstepped the diminutive figure of the Guide’s Chief Editor, Elizabeth Carter, quietly spoken to announce who had won what.

Firstly came the announcement of the year’s Most Exciting Dining Destination. Birmingham. The young chefs have made the place. And the city has benefitted from their genius, their hard work, their inventiveness, their dedication. Well done indeed. But less us not forget that the city’s shining dining scene was established fifteen to twenty years ago, in evolving stages, by the generation of the city’s great chefs and restaurateurs that has preceded those whom The Good Food Guide is highlighting in 2022.

And so to the announcement of just which restaurants are deemed by the editors of the Good Food Guide to be “the most exciting in Britain”. Birmingham and the West Midlands got off to a great start with Carter’s of Moseley being placed at number 18, followed shortly afterwards by Grace And Savour. But where was The Wilderness? The countdown continued to number 11. So The Wilderness was in the top ten. And that was its placing - an immensely impressive number 10 - with those placed higher all already established in the gastronomic firmament. The winner was the three Michelin-starred L’Enclume and just behind it at number two was the acclaimed Ynyshir, so the as yet unstarred The Wilderness had scored a notable achievement to be in such gastronomic company.

The announcements were over. The achievers, some locked in comradely embraces were ready to party and it was time to leave. What an astonishing evening for dining out in the West Midlands and in Birmingham. The Good Food Guide editors see this, I think, as a gradual changing of the guard as the blisteringly good young chefs begin to become the centre of attention as their seniors start to fade. What it means is that when the established chefs do call it a day, Birmingham will still have a mesmerising dining scene recognised by the experts who advise people where to eat.