298. Salt. Tempest.

 

  It had been a while since I had last been able to visit Paul Foster’s Salt in Stratford upon Avon. I have paid fewer visits to the town because the number of Shakespeare plays being presented at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre has been considerably reduced in the last year or so and some of the plays have been terrifyingly bowdlerised by its thankfully outgoing ultra-woke production managers (let’s hope the next lot are not even worse) and also because the days on which I was to be in town Salt has been fully booked.

  But now I was back. After a friendly greeting I was sat comfortably at my table in the recently redecorated dining area which could be described as chic rustic. At the small pass area, the chefs were gearing up for the evening and while waiting for the main event to start I discussed what I was going to have to drink with Salt’s enthusiastic and knowledgeable sommelier and nibbled smoked almonds and olives. Two fine amuses gueules followed and then some delightful in-house produced sourdough and butter with yeast fermented now for ten years.

  The first course was a fabulously delicious mushroom consommé full of shimeji mushrooms floating like mermaids in a still sea of deeply flavoured but nuanced mushroom consommé which was so fine that one feels it should be gradually lapped up rather than scooped up in a spoon and bodily delivered to one’s mouth. On top were enjoyably crispy shreds of mushrooms but an egg yolk purée in the depths of the consommé contributed nothing for me at least to this otherwise very special dish. I am a little perplexed about how one purées an yolk but I leave the cooking up to chef and take responsibility for the eating - and the tasting - of it.

  

  The next course was cured Loch Duart salmon served in a very adult way with sea fennel, dill and the lash of kombu powder. Then I chose red emmalle potato mouse textured pleasingly with puffed rice and then a magnificent beef tartare enlivened by charcoal mayonnaise and the earthiness precise tiny cubes of swede. 

    For the main I chose a lovely piece of Isle of Gigha halibut over saddle of fallow deer (which looked magnificent in the cooking which I could view being carried out near the pass and on the plate when presented to the table next to me). The roast halibut was seared to golden, exquisitely accurately cooked and perfectly accompanied by fine plump St Austell mussels and sea vegetables with the most impressively successful piece of crispy fish skin I have been served for a long time. A gem of a dish.

   

  The intermediate course epitomised the sophistication of dishes served at Salt - this brought the clash and cooperation of sweet and savoury together beautifully - goat’s milk ice cream, the sweetness of mango and the dark flavours and crunch of a sesame seed crisp. Finally the meal took its leave of me with a delightful ‘sweet’, outwardly simple one would think, of a remarkable ball of duck egg custard with precisely cooked rhubarb, a tasty rhubarb ice cream and ludicrously indulgent lumps of aerated white chocolate.

  Salt is in the vanguard of sophisticated yet accessible cuisine in the West Midlands. The new decor and the more comfortable seating and even the approachability of the staff help to make a visit to the restaurant pleasurable but the ingenuity and quality of the food served there means that Salt has not only fulfilled its early promised but has  established it as one of the highlights of dining out in the West Midlands region.

Rating:- 🌞🌞🌞

  The day before - 

  Lucy The Labrador and I were in Stratford upon Avon so that I could go to see what I expected to be its RSC’s latest bowdlerised Shakespeare production, this time I expected a mangled version of The Tempest. This gave me the chance to try lunching in the recently opened Prospero Lounge in Bridge Street whose offerings on its enormous menu are drastically eclectic and include an international tapas section, a wide variety of full English breakfasts and a long list of various burgers. 

  The lure was that the dining establishment is dog friendly and Lucy could sit with me and try to tempt me to feed her tidbits from the food on my plate. She has developed this form of emotional blackmail to a fine art, nothing looks more appealing and persuasive than a Labrador’s face when it is in a give-me-your-dinner mode. But a dog is a man’s best friend so by extension a man must be a dog’s best friend and therefore share what is on his plate with his best mate.

  The Prospero Lounge is a large space filled with shabby chic furniture and its walls are lined with a vast number of paintings which are obviously there as some sort of in joke since they seem to have been bought as a job lot from some sort of dire flea market. This a decidedly hipster sort of place - though admittedly far too big in spatial terms - but I can’t think of any hipsters I’ve ever seen in Stratford; it’s the sort of place where scruffy young socialists who have just carried out a couple of hours of canvassing for the local Labour Party Constituency Association will gather after doing so to join in a self-congratulationary comradely latte. But on this particular late lunchtime the customers were none of those - the place was full of better-off pensioners most of whom would never welcome a socialist government no matter what degree of meltdown the Conservative Party descended into. Cost of living crisis - what cost of living crisis?

  As reported in previous Blogs I am not a burger enthusiast but for some reason I had it in my mind that that was what I should order and I was going to do it in style. There were in fact a remarkable and ambitious fifty dishes on the menu (not including side dishes, puddings and cakes) plus cocktails, smoothies, beers, wines milkshakes, coffees, teas and so on. This all looked like a recipe for disaster.

  When the dog and I arrived many of the tables needed to be cleared - it was not an attractive sight. Still we found a table in the pleasingly warm dining area near the large windows from where we could watch Stratford passing by. After a prolonged study of the Bible-length menu I went to the counter and ordered a vanilla milkshake and the most ambitious of the burgers - the so-called Smokey Joe. The milkshake arrived in a large milk bottle with a straw that was irritatingly not long enough to reach the bottom of that particular container but the drink was pleasingly tasty and the vanilla flavour was delightfully discernible.

  The Smokey Joe burger arrived not longed afterwards. The menu describes it as, “6oz beef patty, spiced beef brisket, chorizo, lettuce, tomato, red onion, American cheese, spicy chilli ketchup and burger sauce” served with brioche bun, fries and house slaw”. The chips were good, tasty and a little crispy and not dry inside as some dining establishments seem to serve up.

  The burger itself was inelegantly served.The brioch was sweetly tasty and the ketchup added flavour but the slivers of cheese on top were unmelted and unpleasantly cold, the ‘slaw’ was far too cold when eaten with the burger and was not a pleasure and as for the chorizo there were just 3 little slivers of it and equally there was an ungenerous portion of brisket. The patty while well-cooked on the outside was certainly very rare inside to the extent I began to wonder where rareness ends and rawness begins. It was not appetising though the Labrador, who enjoys a little helping of raw meat from time to time, had no objections to it so all was well that ended well, for Lucy at least.

  The staff were quite pleasant. 

  I left Prospero’s Lounge in doubt that I would visit it again even if the dog is allowed to accompany me. I was pleased at least that the name of the restaurant I had eaten in that day tied up nicely with the play I was to see that evening. I like coincidences. 

  And I enjoyed, against all the odds, this production of The Tempest once the director had allowed magic to seep into it (throughout, it strived to relate the play to the current concern about man’s abuse of the environment and the natural world - a sort of Shakespeare as Greta Thunberg; the printed programme was full of drivel including Prospero’s magical initiation of the tempest which strands many of the protagonists on Prospero’s island being attributed to ‘geo-engineering’ by Prospero[(no, it wasn’t, it was magic]). Alex Kingston, in the RSC’s now established and frequently tiresome gender switching, played Prospero and very well too. Her delivery of the immortal soliloquy, “We are such stuff as dreams are made of …” was powerful and tears transiently raced to my eyes. The director was finally unable to continue cutting out the magic in the play as the final scenes brought spirits and monsters and thrills which even the RSC and its world wise production staff could not suppress. 

  Magic then is what we want - in the world, in the theatre and in the restaurant.