274.Yikouchi At Chancer’s Cafe

 

  The Good Food Guide has gone a little potty this year since it cast aside paper and embraced digital publishing. I’m not entirely sure what its aims are. Is it to identify good food per se or is it to identify the very best of dining experiences? - the two are not precisely the same thing. Has the Guide even defined which of those goals it wishes to achieve? You might say it is titled ‘The Good Food Guide” so in fact you would think that food is what it’s all about but if that’s the case then I demand a spot in the book since I believe that my chilli con carne is “good food’ and people should know about it but whether or not anyone landing on my doorstep would want more such as atmosphere, comfort, choice, spot-on service, opportunity to relax and so on if they were paying more than, say, £20 to eat the food, is a good question.

  To be fair, the editors of the GFG have gone further than ‘food’ in defining their rating of restaurants - they additionally take into account ‘uniqueness’ and ‘welcome’ which are clearly words that embrace more than they initially suggest. Myself, I’m a little anxious about the ‘uniqueness’ element - I don’t really strive to find a ‘unique’ restaurant though I might very well welcome a restaurant wherein the chef has original thoughts on the dishes he prepares. It’s not particularly pleasing to visit restaurants which are clone-like - thoughts of the string of bistros on Sheep Street in Stratford upon Avon spring to mind - but ‘uniqueness’ is a little odd as one of three criteria when rating a restaurant; for instance I could come up with the concept of a restaurant inspired by Dante’s Seventh Circle of Hell - that would be pretty unique I think - should be rated ‘outstanding’ in the uniqueness category - but any steaks cooked there would necessarily be well done and food admirers might not view that outcome as optimal.

  I take a lot of notice of the Good Food Guide these days. The editors and inspectors are doing their best to level up (gastronomically) - they’re here in the West Midlands visiting previously unheard of neighbourhood dining establishments and covering a wide range of cuisines and restaurant styles. Good for them. But are the new places they mention really worth the mention? This is a national guide, not a local publication listing reasonable places to eat if you live there or are perhaps visiting there. Has the Good Food Guide gone too far?

  This appears to be the age of the hipster influencer when it comes to dining out. There are a number of the creatures here in Birmingham, denizens of Harborne or Stirchley (with Moseley falling out of fashion with them as places to live) (see Blog 272)  and it seems that these are the people who are luring food critics and guide inspectors alike to drop in on these suburbs of not immoderate affluence where they themselves have their homes. The question is - are the critics and inspectors right to do so? Well, they have certainly been very positive about some of these suburban dining establishments and so the question now changes to - is this a matter of The Emperor’s new clothes?

  One such restaurant which is rated ‘Very Good’ by GFG which makes it, improbably, one of the 11 best restaurants in Birmingham is Yikouchi at Chancer’s Cafe which is a tiny establishment on a section of the Pershore Road running through scruffy Stirchley (the locals call it ‘the High Street’ which takes pretension to levels only the comfortably off middle class would aspire to - t’was ever so). It isn’t unfair to say that the restaurant doesn’t really look very inviting. But stepping through the door, a rather pleasant and unfussy interior reveals itself and I was certainly made to feel welcome immediately. As was my dog (you can have dog-friendly pubs but dog-friendly restaurants are rare) who sensed the relaxed atmosphere of the place immediately and settled down on the floor beside me and was ready to make the most of things).

  The Good Food Guide and other sources tell us that the chef-patron, James Kirk-Gould, was brought up in Coventry and worked for 6 years teaching English in Beijing with his partner Cassie before working in London and eventually becoming head chef at the Duck and Waffle in Bishopgate in London, the capital’s highest restaurant, in the clouds with prices also in the clouds (well it is London) which makes us appreciate just how lucky we are to be West Midlands diners and not denizens of The Smoke (lobster roll £17 - £12 at the Grand Hotel in Birmingham, roasted scallops £27 - just hand over your bank account, a side dish of carrots £7 and roast potato £8, sea bass £50, I won’t go on). Kirk-Gould, a pleasant-faced, smiling man with a red beard and Cassie who works front of house moved to Birmingham looking for affordable housing and opened the converse of where he has previously worked - a tiny restaurant, definitely on the ground, serving food with which Kirk-Gould had become familiar during his time in China, at prices a tiny fraction of those at the London restaurant at which he had worked. 

  A visit from a real food critic, Jay Rayner of The Guardian, suggested by one of the Birmingham influencers mentioned above, brought the restaurant to national attention and various gourmands and inspectors and critics made their way there and, lo and behold, Yikouchi was getting an impressive rating from the Good Food Guide. 

 Clearly the denizens of Stirchley, in their hipster clothing, barely any male beardless, loved the place too because within a few minutes of my and Lucy the Labrador’s arrival, the place was bulging at the seams. We were nicely settled in and the local hipsters took their places while giving the dog plenty of space to lounge. 

  Meanwhile I spent a couple of seconds perusing the menu (there were two choices, one dish which could be either chicken or cabbage, or both, or a second chicken dish, fried chicken in house chilli oil, which I chose after some discussion with Cassie and instead of having rice with it I settled on the only other available accompaniment of smacked cucumber which was made up of generous-sized cucumber  pieces with chilli oil.

 The fried chicken was stupendous. The batter was perfectly crispy and the chicken inside was as perfectly cooked as one might hope. The house chilli oil had a precise degree of heat, the Szechuan pepper corns had their own heat and flavour and the pleasure increased the further down the bowl I reached as I worked  my way through the pieces of chicken to those that had the most oil on them, A very memorable dish nicely complemented by the cucumber.

  The only dessert available was the fun of a Mr Whippy-style vanilla ice cream with fudge sauce and honeycomb. Really rather enjoyable but hardly contributing to a rating of “Very good”.

  

  I enjoyed sitting at the counter in the window looking out at the goings on outside. For a second or two I thought Stirchley was mimicking perfectly a socialist republic that its residents so aspire to as a long queue formed outside a bread shop with Oxfam shop-clothed residents waiting their turn to be admitted to get their hands on a loaf just as happened in communist states pre-1991 but what I needed to remember that this was Stirchley and that was an artisan bakery and this was the more middling of the Birmingham middle class showing what good taste they have in buying the sort of basic food items items which the working hoi poloi would never appreciate.

  I very much enjoyed my meal at Yikouchi. It was, beyond doubt, quite delicious. But quite how one compares this restaurant on equal terms with those which present multiple complex dishes to their diners, is not clear to me, the Good Food Guide is correct to judge the food very good, the ‘welcome’ is very pleasing and the ‘uniqueness’ is obvious. As I write I am thinking of a date to revisit the restaurant very soon to eat again what this accomplished chef has to offer. But I do feel I want more on my dining out package than this neat little restaurant can give me.

  The restaurant has the air of  a ‘pop-up’ in many ways. I should like to see this excellent food - I say “excellent” admittedly on the experience of one meal alone - being served in grander, more comfortable and more spacious surroundings so that it can be more fully appreciated. I shall be interested to follow how this chef’s story develops over the coming few years.

Rating:- 🌛🌛🌛🌛