297. Purnell’s In 2023; Sonal Clare - A Legend In His Own Lifetime.

 

  Think of Food Personalities/Celebrities in Birmingham, well, anywhere really, and you think of chefs and chefs and chefs - here we have Glynn Purnell obviously but there’s also Brad Carter, Alex Claridge, Kray Tredwell and others - they have all appeared on popular television programmes at some time or the other and each has there own distinctive personality. 

  But the restaurant business also has another side to it - apart from the kitchen where stars are born and emerge to prominence, there is also front of house. One hundred and twenty years ago or so, Birmingham could boast of its own celebrity Maître D’Hotel (Maître d’/restaurant manager in modern terms) - M Joseph, born in Birmingham of French parents in the 1860s but mostly brought up in France where his skills as Maître d’ were so admired that he was approached by Richard D’Oyley Carte in 1898 to restore the fortunes of the Savoy in the wake of the fraud scandal involving Escoffier, Ritz and Echenard. As recounted in Blog 146, M. Joseph did indeed take up D’Oyle Carte’s offer of employment and for a short time was the main draw for the hotel to customers choosing to dine there but he became homesick for France whither he returned after a relatively short time at The Savoy and died shortly afterwards.

  The popular media in general, and television in particular, especially the BBC, may centre its interest on the celebrity chefs but behind many a notable chef including those here in Birmingham there has to be an accomplished restaurant manager. Most stay in the background but know how to deal with their diners in ways professional but friendly and welcoming and chat to their customers with the appropriate and welcome degree of schmoozing which their diners will appreciate. Then there are some who are personalities in their own right though the media has largely not recognised this yet. One of Birmingham’s outstanding Maître d’s is Sonal Clare who works with Alex Claridge at The Wilderness where he employs his particular sommelier expertise which he sharpened up during his time as restaurant manager at Purnell’s. I will return to Mr Clare shortly, but on the subject of Purnell’s, I was delighted, a couple of days ago, to lunch at Birmingham’s doyen restaurant.

  While all the attention is on the brilliant new or newish West Midlands restaurants of the new high achievers such as David Taylor, Dan Lee and  Alex Claridge, Purnell’s is there continuing to serve up very fine food beautifully and artistically presented. This is food as art. True, sometimes one feels that there are rather more longtime dishes being served still after all these years even if they are presented in new formats and still with a great degree of wit but it is hard to find dishes there which have not been skilfully and artfully prepared. 

  Thus there was a new twist on the long-established cheese and pineapple amuse gueule otherwise known in a previous life as Emotions of Soixante dix as part of the Gifts From the Kitchen - as well as a glass of cheese and pineapple steaming with liquid carbon dioxide this time additionally there was a very pleasing gougère alongside cubes of grilled pineapple on sticks. This new version of an old favourite proved that Purnell, who sometimes does rather make a parody of himself, can still put a broad smile on his customers’ faces.

  The starter of ruby beetroot with grains, orange gel and leaves was excellent, served as it was with a little spiced brioche. Then came a thoroughly enjoyable dish of Cornish crab served on a bed of crushed almond and invigorated by sweetly pickled sea vegetables, mainly samphire, three happy little piles of caviar and a rather delicious lobster bisque which could only be bettered by having more of it. I liked this dish very much.

  How pleasing to see that the lunch menu was serving up poached cod rather than the skate that was being served on the very much more expensive tasting menu. The fish was exalted by the pickled hispi cabbage it was sitting on and the accompanying smoked eel Velouté was delicious punctuated by caviar and trout roe which made the dish very pretty.

  Fine too was the slow cooked daube, extremely tasty and tender, embellished with a duxelle, parsley gel and crispy shallots - winter confronted and put to flight by this very enjoyable dish. The meal closed with a thin slice of Gypsy tart, a malt-flavoured custard on extremely thin pastry which might have been a little crispier though it was such a pleasure to have real patisserie than yet more crumble scattered across the plate which is often the fashion elsewhere. A lesson to head chefs - if you’ve got a good pastry chef, hold on to them at all costs. The tart, by the way, was nicely balanced by frozen yogurt and date.

  Purnell’s continues to keep the punters coming with perfectly judged service and consistently admirable food. Soon to have notched up its sixteenth year Purnell’s continues to pass the test of time.

Rating:- 🌞🌞

  And so back to its former Maître d’, Sonal Clare. With Robert Wood away for a short time from his specialist Atelier cocktail establishment, Sonal used the time and space wisely by enjoyably holding several Sonal’s House Parties at Atelier which gave him an opportunity to get out his turntable and play some music, pleasingly unobtrusively, while his paying guests sat back in the comfortable chairs or at the serving counter, and quaffed in the most relaxed way, five wines of his choosing which were eclectic and pleasing.

  I went along in the evening after the lunch at Purnell’s earlier that day as recounted above. It was an excellent example of what Birmingham has to offer to those prepared to take up those offers presented to them by some of the city’s great culinary and drinks experts. Of course the experience was also enhanced by the best of hosts circulating around his guests and talking to them, without any oppressive or desperately intense gravity, about his choice of wines which he was presenting to them. It seemed quite apt that he rounded off the evening with a bottle of wine from Georgia, where wine in Europe began. 

296. Chung Ying Cantonese Restaurant.

 

I’m always a little suspicious of dining out at banquets with large numbers of people because usually I don’t get any choice in what I eat or by whom I sit and normally I can’t bear the level of noise. But somehow, Cantonese food, especially around the time of the lunar new year, seems to be more appropriate than most other cuisines for participation in a mass consumption event.

 Thus it was I found myself dining at the hoary, even venerable, old Birmingham restaurant, Chung Ying Cantonese, in the exotically named Chinatown district of the city centre (though how many people of East Asian heritage actually live there is a moot point) with a rather larger group of people than I would normally choose to do so. Chung Ying was first opened in 1981 by the married couple, Siu Chung and Yuk Ying Wong, and the running of it was taken over by their son, James Wong, in 2010. A sister restaurant, Chung Ying Central, was opened in Colmore Row but has since closed.

  It’s true to say that the restaurant has probably seen better days. Entrance to it is through a rather unlikely  small and uninviting door and the inside place looks very much as though the decor is desperately in need of complete refreshment and perhaps a little more needs to be spent on the lighting bill. But the service was good - despite the large number of people attending the banquet the food came out efficiently and swiftly and was pleasingly hot on arrival at the table.

  The servings were generous and generally comfortingly delicious - they represented the unchanging face of British style Chinese food with the same appearance as they would have had when Chung Ying first opened 41 years ago. This might have been depressing had not the food been really very enjoyable in an unsophisticated and unpretentious way.

  The dishes were clichéd but none the worse for that - as starters there were crispy spring rolls with sweet chilli dipping sauce, salt and chilli chicken wings and gorgeously succulent and meaty Peking style spare ribs. It was sticky finger time and the offer of a finger bowl might have been helpful. But gorging like a Labrador whose meal has arrived late, I and the rest of the diners ploughed on to the main courses. 

  The point is that they really were very good. Rustic in a Birmingham Cantonese restaurant sort of way but all essentially very tasty and a good balance of spicy and less hot dishes served with a very satisfactory fried rice. We did not wander far from the road of safe choices - sweet and sour chicken, crispy shredded  beef with chilli, a splendidly peppery black bean sauce dish with beautifully tender lamb and salt and chilli prawns. 

  This left me thinking why in these present times, do we go ou to eat rather than dine at home? The basic underlying reason of course is that so few younger people are taught anything about food and preparing it and so it is therefore necessary to consume food that someone else has prepared. Of course it was easy for men in the 1950s, they married women who were taught by their mothers and at school to be the preparers of food in the household. Now the British, male or female, often do not even know how to peel a potato.

  So reheatable food must be bought ready prepared from the supermarket or ordered from local food providers as ‘takeaways’ or, in the final instance, food must be eaten in restaurants and other dining establishments away from the home. 

  The main reasons to visit restaurants are -

1. To enjoy a special occasion social gathering often to commemorate notable personal or family events and anniversaries. The type of establishment dined in will still often depend on the social status and financial income of the host and participants.

Which brings us to -

2.  A division of choice of restaurant, once the diner’s social and financial status has been taken into account - is the diner going to a particular restaurant principally to -

  A. Eat and derive a sense of comfort and repletion from it (a worthy enough reason in itself)? or 

  B. To become a consumer of food as art which undoubtedly it is in the hands of a creative, imaginative chef? 

  This is where food guides go adrift. Many dining establishments serve good food though it may be pleasingly comforting and filling rather than artistically presented as though invented in the eye of a contemporary painter who additionally has paid attention to the textures of the items on his plate, as well the presence of enticing smells coming from it and, most important of all, the deliciousness and originality of the flavours. The achievement of pleasing so many senses rather than just the visual or the auditory which most artists set out to do really does raise the great chef to the heights of the great artist. Of course many chefs do not want to be thought of as great artists and many who do are not successful in doing so because they do not have the abilities or the dedication or the training or a sufficient gastronomic intelligence. The food of these unartistic chefs can still be good food even though food guides, certainly the more snooty, may decide not to recognise food which they do not see as art even though that food may be delightfully comforting and enjoyable.

  The food at Chung Ying Cantonese was certainly enjoyable though the restaurant is rather shabby. I enjoyed my evening at the banquet and would happily dive into another dish of any of the food presented to me at that meal. If not artistic in terms of delicacy of presentation perhaps it was artistic in terms of delivery of flavour.

Rating:- 🌛🌛🌛

295. Kray Tredwell-Ben Taylor Collaboration At Le Petit Bois.

 Taking pride of place at the head of this edition is a photograph of a gorgeous dish - possibly the most delicious I’ve had for ages - looking a little rustic but full of the most pleasing and happy flavours - a plate of wondrously moist and tender pork cheek Bourguignon with delightful duchess potatoes. This was a dish that memories are made of. It was the highlight of an extraordinary collaboration by two great Birmingham chefs - Kray Tredwell of 670 Grams cooking away from home at Le Petit Bois in Moseley where Ben Taylor was leading the home team. They are chefs of very contrasting styles and the outcome was an evening to remember.

  It really is so very nice at Le Petit Bois. It so comfortable and relaxed and yet the service is very good. I started off with a splendidly refreshingly bitter Bicyclette cocktail and then the riders were out of the stalls. The amuses gueules were an absolute hit. They arrived with a tiny little croustade perched in the lid of a dish which when the lid was removed, revealed a very happily tasting savoury Paris Brest, the crust of the choux being beautifully crispy and the interior a combination of gorgeously salty blue cheese and sweet finely chopped grape. A witty and delicious start to the meal.

  Then another exhilarating dish of perfectly seared scallop with celeriac remoulade, apple and the very recognisable and very welcome bursts of truffle on this dark, damp winter evening. To follow was a poached egg yolk with more admirable flavours - little crumbs of crunchy toasted brioche, fois gras and more truffle. It was enjoyable but the egg yolk was overcooked and not runny when cut into and if it had been it may have raised the dish to another level.

  I have already commented on the ecstatic pleasure of the remarkable main course of slow braised pig’s cheek Bourguignon (undoubtedly Ben Taylor’s dish I should think) and so to the fish course which had all the hallmarks of having been prepared by Chef Treadwell. This was a piece of very finely poached pollock served with an exquisite vanilla beurre blanc, fragments of Jersey Royal (I would not have minded a little more potato even though I had also had some with the Bourguignon) and a nice helping of Oscietra caviar. The two main courses - the beef and the fish - both excellent - managed to demonstrate the contrast in the styles of the two chefs and this was also evident in the two desserts. Firstly there was a freshly warm small vanilla Madeleine (perhaps the vanilla flavour was a little too subtle) served with a cheeky vanilla crême fraiche made saucy with a helping of marmalade and then, to round off, a triumphantly gooey tart tatin with calvados caramel and a miso ice Kray (no doubt about which of the chefs made that, I think).

  The evening was further livened up by spotting (not hard, he was only two tables away) Birmingham’s most recent Masterchef The Professionals winner Dan Lee (now working alongside that competition’s previous winner, Stuart Deeley, at Smoke at Hampton Manor) who was one of the diners. So then, three notable Birmingham chefs in the same restaurant all at the same time.

  It was quite an evening.

  The day before,  I had lunched at Orelle with an acquaintance who had travelled from South Yorkshire for the sole purpose of the experience of dining at Orelle to taste the food and take in the view from the 24th floor. It was not a pleasant day and when we stepped out of the lift that had whisked skywards we found that the view had all but disappeared, obscured by fog surrounding the tower. Still there was always the food. As usual the place looked very smart as did the front of house staff and the service was very good; pleasingly, perhaps because only half the tables were taken, service was not rushed and I was able to sip and enjoy my Orelle Sour cocktail in a relaxed and unhurried fashion.

  As it was lunch a three course meal was on offer for an extremely reasonable sum of £42 and comparing the lunch menu with what was on offer from the à la carte choice I felt perfectly satisfied to order from the lunch menu. We were brought an excellent sourdough loaf to share between us and I very much enjoyed it, having as it did, a good crispy crust and a fine interior texture, the flavour of the sourdough being not as brutally strong as some sourdough bread can be. And how lovely to have bread at the start of the meal, available to nibble while the rest is being prepared rather than having it suddenly turn up as a ‘bread course’ almost half way through the meal as seems to be happening with increasing frequency.

  The starter was satisfactory - Saumon - on the menu it was described as “barbecued Loch Duart salmon, pickled kohlrabi, calamansi and sourdough. I thought that fish was very accurately cooked and was nicely complemented by the pickled kohlrabi but the calamansi was the wrong sort of citrus for this dish, bringing in some sweetness which I did not want. My lunch companion in contrast was very pleased with the dish and liked the flavour of the calamansi (a fruit was is obviously now very much in vogue).

  For the main course I chose a very good and pleasingly flavoured and textured ballotine of chicken served with roast parsnips which were not adequately cooked and pear which, while accepting that a chicken-pear combination is an established pairing, did not, for me at least, contribute positively to the dish. There was some exquisitely delicious and perfectly prepared pomme purée with Dijon mustard 

underneath it all and I could have quite gladly eaten with relish at least five times the amount of that element served to me.

  There was something inauthentic about the desserts; they had the air of something that had not been prepared in the kitchens but had been brought in to serve. I chose ‘calamansi’ (yes, calamansi again) described as “calamansi mousseline, strawberry and mint jelly.  Perhaps it was because I was eating from the £42 set menu (and that would be a good enough reason) but the desserts were served on a plate rather than being presented from the wonderful dessert trolley, a pleasing bit of theatre, which had manifested itself on previous visits to Orelle (I do hope it hasn’t disappeared into history after such a happy, if short life. My dessert was not good - I don’t recall being aware of strawberry or mint and the gel was decidedly citric and excessively sharply flavoured to the point of being unpleasant. The body of the dessert was uninteresting and the plate was covered in crumble, a tiresome modern device used by chefs to bring a crunchy texture without having to work to provide a fine crispy pastry. 

  In conclusion, and I will not use the obvious cliché, this meal was good in parts. As an experience it was enjoyable even though the weather was doing its best to thwart one important element of dining at Orelle - the view. Rating:- 🌛🌛🌛

  Michelin has announced that the 2023 edition of the Michelin Guide Great Britain And Northern Ireland will be launched at a live event on Monday 27 March. Already you can feel various chefs’ pulse rates starting to quicken.

  Meanwhile, the Michelin inspectors on one of their apparent rare visits to the West Midlands, have included the vegetarian restaurant, Land (see Blog 180) in its January 2023 Guide update.

  Dishes eaten at Land in September 2021 - 

294. Restaurant Guides - How many do we need?

  Harden’s restaurant guide published, in the last few days, its list of the ‘UK’s Best Restaurants 2023’. How useful an exercise has that proven to be? Harden’s’ opinions are given based on those from its readers which is rather similar to The Good Food Guide. Its readers on the whole, judging by their opinions which presumably are based on the restaurants wherein they have eaten, are comfortably off, conservative with a small ‘c’ and moderately tutored in fine dining. I have an acquaintance who submits his opinions to the editors fairly frequently - he is not a food lover but enjoys analysing each course and searching for something to moan about (or very rarely praise) - he also sees himself as an amateur art critic and enjoys dissecting the elements of a painting and commenting on them without enjoying the whole.

  Hence I wonder at the usefulness of a restaurant guide which relies on people such as my acquaintance or those who are self-selecting by their wealth, conservatism and moderate knowledge to pinpoint the leading restaurants in the country. I assume that most of the opinions expressed by those from this privileged group are also identifiable by place of residence of this group - London and its well heeled suburbs - and the places where they have second homes - the south west, the Lake District, Oxfordshire, the Cotswolds - plus a similar well-off population in Scotland, notably in Edinburgh. These people have very few qualifications, apart from wealth and location of home(s) to pronounce on what are the best restaurants in the United Kingdom but they do so and that is why the list is dominated by restaurants in the locations mentioned above.

  It is also, I suspect, why it is routine for the West Midlands to be poorly represented in Harden’s’ 100. This year we are genuinely congratulating our restaurants that have received a mention but at the same time must feel deflated that only four West Midlands restaurants appear on the list - Adam’s at number 17, Lumière in Cheltenham (number 21), Opheem (60) and The Wilderness at number 92. 

  Meanwhile, around the same time, an internet-based restaurant site, of which I was not even aware previously, called Squaremeal, which appears to have been in business since 1990, announced it too had prepared a list of the United Kingdom’s ‘100 Best Restaurants’ and the results were very different  from those of Harden’s’ list - many more West Midlands restaurants appeared on it. The site appears to be a restaurant and hotel booking site with an accompanying critique of the places bookable on it. 

  The Squaremeal list placed Grace and Savour at the very top of its list - number 1 - with other West Midlands following - Opheem (7), Pensons in Tenbury Wells (38), Lunar Stoke-on-Trent (43), Lumière (46), Carter’s of Moseley (51), The Wilderness (61), Adam’s (65), Purnell’s (72), The Old Butcher’s, Stow on the Wold (82), Chakana (97) and The Slaughters Manor House, Lower Slaughter (98). In the list there is finally recognition that the West Midlands is punching well above its weight when it comes to gastronomy. It does not recognise Cheal’s which is a glaring omission and in my opinion there is room for Folium on the list as well, not forgetting Andrew Sheridan’s remarkable 8, Upstairs by Tom Shepherd and Liam Dillon’s The Boat, both in Lichfield, Sheridan’s Black And Green in Barnt Green, Shrewsbury’s The Walrus and Hampton Manor’s other restaurant Smoke and Toffs in Solihull. The West Midlands could quite easily occupy at least 20% of a ‘UK Top 100’ list.

  What is clear is that guides and lists are not necessarily all that helpful. Where Harden’s can only find four WM restaurants  to place in its top one hundred, Squaremeal can find twelve and place one of them at the very peak of its list. Squaremeal seems the better judge, as The Good Food Guide identified Birmingham as the most exciting UK city in which to dine at the end of last year and placed three Birmingham restaurants in its top twenty ‘most exciting’ restaurants list. And over them all looms the Michelin Guide, its recognition the most craved by chefs. It is conservative, impenetrable, obscure and often its decisions are inexplicable and abstruse, more inconsistent than its editors would admit and ultimately for these reasons, of less value than it thinks it is. The Michelin Guide’s underlying French-style food bias remains though it may deny it - it has glued itself to the book for eternity - this may have snob appeal but it does not necessarily result in a British diner sitting at a table enjoying the often expensive food laid before him. 

  In contrast The Good Food Guide seems much more alive, more relevant, in step with taste but does seem in danger of being dragged away too far from the mainstream - listing hipster haunts, furnished in shabby style, uncomfortable, where good food is indeed served but with nothing else to make the meal a pleasure. 

  So when it comes to Guidebooks or websites - Caveat emptor. Take a pinch of salt when you’re reading them and doublely so when it comes to ‘Best restaurant’ lists. Consider who are the people who have rated the restaurants, are they shadowy elitist figures or an untutored vox populi or trendy self-loving influencers? Personally, I like a good newspaper reviewer; with regular reading of their articles, one knows their prejudices, their pleasures, their dislikes and with those in mind one can put their informed opinions in context and judge the validity of their opinions and consider how that match with one’s own.

  On the subject of which, I enjoyed a recent piece by Jay Rayner in The Guardian, a paper I otherwise can not bear to read, on the future of fine dining and, in particular, the horrors of the twenty plus course tasting menu which may bring one many delights but also an angor animi as the meal drags on, the hours pass and the realisation dawns that there are still another nine courses to ingest - it’s a bit like a direct flight from New Zealand - you’ve been in the air for sixteen hours and you realise that there’s still another eight to go before you touch down in dear old Blighty. 

  There was another piece recently by a writer for The Financial Times - Janan Ganesh, more a political writer than a food critic but apparently he has devoted the past year travelling around fine dining (haven’t we all?) and in it he gave his opinion on “what to look for in a restaurant”, presumably a restaurant of the Now, of where fine dining is going. He arrives at all sorts of depressing conclusions - “the neighbourhood must be hipster” (groan), the “view must be rubbish” (goodbye to the bib gourmand and no herds of wildebeest sweeping majestically past the window), “staff mustn’t ask if you’re enjoying your meal” (should they just scowl at you, perhaps? What about the size of their gratuity?), “champagne must come in a wine glass (the modern triumph of lack of substance over style) and “the kitchen must be unconfidential” (really I am there to eat and enjoy and not to watch men work no matter how nice modern head chefs are to their staff). Newnham-Davis is turning in his grave.

  Coincidently Mr Ganesh was dining at The Wilderness when I was there for dinner a couple of week’s ago, doubtless continuing his mission to dine. I suspect there’s a book planned at the end of it - well he is a journalist - and now we know that Birmingham should have a place in it. I revisited The Wilderness three or four nights ago. The Jewellery Quarter was very dark, damp and moderately misty, the streets virtually deserted and the little passageway at the end of which was the prettily-lit entrance to the restaurant, had all the feeling of a Brummie version of 1880s Whitechapel about it. No wonder then that the restaurant was not fully booked on this mid-winter evening. But the punters there were treated to a magnificent repast - basically the same ‘Future of Dining’ menu from which I had dined a couple of weeks before but brilliantly executed. The wagyu beef was immaculate and generously portioned on this occasion, and in the fish course, pollock had transformed very pleasingly into turbot. The petit fours were also different from two weeks before with a charming cow’s head fudge sitting prettily on the plate beside a yuzu jelly. Chef Marius Gedminas was in cracking form and after a slight wobble at the end of last year one evening, The Wilderness was unquestionably still up there among the stars.

‘Carrot 2023’ - 

Chicken broth with egg yolk and seaweed - 

Magnificent wagyu with a fine sauce -

Seared Anjou pigeon with foie gras-stuffed paratha - 

Petit fours - Cow’s head fudge and yuzu jelly - 

  There’s certainly a new future in store for a couple of West Midlands established chefs - Matt Cheal of Cheal’s of Henley is putting his final preparations in place for his new restaurant in Knowle and Nathan Eades, Yorkshire-born but raised in Bromsgrove, once a sous chef at Forelles in Fishmore Hall in Ludlow from which he operated a pop-up, Epi, firstly in Ludlow in 2012, then in Bromsgrove from 2013 with side trips to the Kitchen Garden in Kings Heath (January 2014) and then Head Chef at Simpsons (from 16 September 2015 succeeding, coincidently, Matt Cheal though it had previously been announced he was to be the Head Chef at St Andrew’s Hotel in Droitwich, and thence to the Wild Rabbit at Kingham, is to open his own pub restaurant, Halfway at Kineton.

  Worldwide, the biggest gastronomic event of the year was the announcement that René Redzepi is to close his multi-course, astronomically priced restaurant Noma in Copenhagen finding that since he started to pay his junior chefs a salary the restaurant’s financial model did not work. Famously, the restaurant has been judged by the cognoscenti to be the best in the world but was it after all, just a side branch in the evolution of dining out which eventually fizzles out? Regardless, let’s face it, I was never going to get there.

 

  Finally the grim news that the BBC’s Great British Menu returns to the nation’s television screens next week sadly with the same judges as last year, in particular the exquisitely irritating Ed Gamble who brings the BBC’s dumbing down to new previously unplumbed depths and that magnificent chef Tom Kerridge who dominates the other judges with his opinions. With the West Midlands in general, and Birmingham in particular, leading the country’s gastronomic scene, perhaps the programme’s producers might even feature chefs this year who actually work in West Midlands restaurants to represent the region. Oh, this year’s theme is a celebration of Paddington Bear and British animation so I suppose every chef will feel obliged to incorporate marmalade in their menus or strive to produce Anglo-Peruvian fusion dishes. Bring back Fort and Peyton.  Please.

    Finally, when staying in town, I am still enjoying taking Lucy The Labrador to breakfast in Wayland’s Yard in Bull Street. A rather delicious and very filling ‘Full English’ is on offer but I’m rather keen on the bacon bap, literally piles of well-cooked streaky bacon on a sweet bap, washed down by some of the café’s fine coffee. I like the amusing mural there, it has the air of this year’s Great British Menu theme about it.