A companion and I set out for lunch at Folium in the Jewellery Quarter on the day it had reopened after the Christmas and new year break. En route we had each enjoyed two glasses of the soothing cocktail Three and half ounces of happiness - making a total of 14 ounces between us - they lived up to their name - at the increasingly simpatico The Alchemist in Colmore Row, nestled very cosily as it is on under the simply stated luxuriousness of the grand Grand Hotel. Thence a slightly unsteady progress along Newhall Street, which in centuries past had once led to the grand home of the Colmore, past the now boarded-up and greatly missed Ginger’s Bar and Purnell’s Bistro where once we had enjoyed such pleasures as Cockney Rhyming Sling and Penicillin, eventually taking a right hand turn towards the beautiful Georgian St Paul’s Square, and thence a short distance up Caroline Street to the rather anonymous frontage of Folium.
It was good to be back at Folium where the welcome was real and the faces are always friendly. It’s a smart place and looks the part. When everyone is going on about the future of fine dining and when hipster burger joints are breaking out all over in middle class suburbs to overhyped acclamation delivered by internet influencers and a meal’s not a meal without several negronis to precede it, it’s so lovely to still have a calm, tasteful haven in a quiet Victorian Street where very fine food, beautifully presented with originality shot through it, can be enjoyed at a restful pace.
We had chosen the sensible five course lunch menu and were delighted with the dishes that arrived at our table.
To start, there was a delightful amuse guele which took the form of a little tube flavoured with burnt onion and filled with fine chicken liver parfait, gorgeously flavoured and silkily textured.
After the excellent bread served with cultured butter, which we ate with relish, there followed Amela tomato with bonito vinegar and pretty, tasty little shiso leaves. I thought that this was very tasty; my companion felt that the tomato itself was not as full-flavoured as he might have liked but we both agreed that the dish as a whole was very pleasurable. It may be that a tomato-based course in mid-January is a little incongruous and I really do not know what time of year this variety of the fruit is at its best, originating as it does from Japan where it first appeared in 1996, but the tomato’s original homeland, together with the dish’s dressing and garnish, were a summary of much of the rest of meal - Japan was very much on the cards.
Next a fine, Orkney plump scallop served with what appeared to be a rather pleasing, small beignet which was described perhaps a little inelegantly on the menu as ‘fried bread’. The scallops, which we both thought to have a spent a little too much time in the pan, were accompanied by an apt and delicious Ponzu espuma. The scallop was served sliced; is this a new trend? I see that Andy Hayler in his inestimable Blog (sadly almost entirely devoted to dining out in London and increasingly almost exclusively to dining at The Ritz, where once Escoffier plied his trade after defrauding and being sacked by The Savoy) also reported experiencing a sliced scallop in the past week which led him to express regret at this particular action by the Chef.
The main course was really very good. This was Guinea fowl, which Chef Ben Tesh serves quite frequently, served as a ballotine, accompanied by a tasty yeast Béarnaise sauce. It was moist and nicely textured and thoroughly enjoyable. On then to an intermediate dish of iced horseradish with white chocolate shards and sorrel sauce. This was excellent with just the right amount of heat coming from the horseradish to liven up the tastebuds and reexcite the appetite for the final stage which was a toasted hay ice cream with a final burst of Japan in the form of miso and there was toasted buckwheat for a crispy texture. We both felt that the flavour of hay was a little too subtle but we certainly enjoyed the dish and the pleasure of our coffee drinking at the end of the meal enhanced by two delightful mignardises a ‘whisky and peat butterfly bun’ about which my lunch companion fell into raptures using the term ‘whisky baba’ to describe it and a chocolate and lavender choux, which was flavoured absolutely accurately and textured precisely.
Rating:- 🌞🌞
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