306. Great British Menu Central Heat & Finals 2023.

There’s little doubt that the 2023 series of the BBC’s television programme Great British Menu has been one of the weakest ever when it is boiled down to the abilities of the participating chefs. This time the heat for the Central region (West and East Midlands and East Anglia) was the very last to be broadcast and one could only feel that things could only get better. And in true Midlands fashion, that is what happened. The only representative from East Anglia, Antigua-born Kareem Roberts, chef at a Caribbean-British fusion restaurant in Cambridge, was eliminated at the end of the first round (amuses gueles, starters and fish course) leaving Tom Shepherd of the Michelin starred restaurant Upstairs in Lichfield, Thom Bateman of The Flintlock of Cheddleton (both in Staffordshire) and Marianne Lumb, currently a private chef based in Leicestershire and aiming to open her own restaurant, The Pipistrelle, later in 2023, to fight out the second round (mains, intermediate course, dessert). Marianne had previously won the Central regional heat in 2018 but was not successful in her attempt to win a place preparing a course at the final banquet.

Those that produced the programme had decided that the theme of the dishes should be ‘animation and illustration’ on the rather specious premise that 2023 marked the 60th anniversary of the publication of Michael Bond’s first Paddington novel, with its pleasant illustrations. Marmalade, not surprisingly and rather obviously, had featured in several of the dishes presented prior to the Central heats.

For the main course Tom Shepherd turned his attention to the comic character Desperate Dan, who had an obsession with eating cow pies and that is precisely what Shepherd used as the inspiration for his dish calling it Desperate Dan’s Cow Pie. The pie was prepared by searing beef cheeks and then pressure cooking them for seventy minutes and serving the meat in hot crust pastry with mushroom ketchup, maple-glazed carrots, chive emulsion, a slice of sirloin and beef sauce. The anticipation of both the host, Andi Oliver, and the guest judging chef, Paul Ainsworth, was very high for this dish and that degree of excitement was addressed as the the dish saw Ainsworth awarding 10 out of 10 points to Shepherd for it and the statement by Ainsworth that it was the best pie he’d ever had. Pie praise indeed.

Thom Bateman meanwhile presented a main course, May un mar lady (based on a long running Staffordshire cartoon) of sirloin steak, pommes dauphine with blue cheese grated over them and Staffordshire lobby (a beef stew, traditionally eaten by pottery workers around Stoke on Trent), carrot, confit onion, beer sauce and brown sauce from Bateman’s own recipe. The meat, both sirloin and lobby, was pronounced to be delicious though Ainsworth felt the sirloin was not rested for long enough and the carrots did not have enough flavour while the potatoes were a little undercooked.

Marianne Lumb’s main course, Yumbly Hedge, was a vegan brined and roasted cauliflower dish served with a hazelnut Béarnaise sauce (which Ainsworth described as “delicious”). When Ainsworth announced the points he had awarded, Lumb received 7 points as did Bateman while Shepherd achieved the maximum 10 points.

Shepherd followed up with a dessert, No Ordinary Boy (recalling the cartoon character Bananaman) which was made of white chocolate containing banana mousse and served with banana ice cream and this too was awarded 10 points and ensured that he would join Thom Bateman in the judges’s chamber at the end of the week. Marianne Lumb was eliminated at the end of the second day but competed with charm, dignity and ably demonstrated her fine abilities. It is perhaps worth mentioning that, though the judge and presenter and fellow contestants were astonished by Shepherd’s banana dish, it was not the first time that regular West Midlands diners have seen it - with Alex Claridge presenting a very similar dessert titled Ch-ch-changes at The Wilderness intermittently since 2021. Indeed, the chocolate banana had appeared even earlier in 2019:when Alex Claridge was serving his version at the short-lived Nocturnal Animals.

Alex Claridge’s banana dessert first encountered at Nocturnal Animals along ago as July 2019:-

On the regional judging day, Tom Shepherd was chosen to represent the Central region and in the finals the following week. His starter, Pac man, was probably his weakest dish and he came seventh of the eight contestants on the first day of the finals. His fish course, Fungus The Bogeyman’s Breakfast, took fifth place (originally served with kohlrabi which was not well received and which was replaced by chopped leeks in the final).

The blue riband event of Finals Week is undoubtedly the Main Course on Day 3; this as we were constantly reminded, was the course all the chefs wanted to be selected to present at the banquet itself. There seemed little doubt from the various judges’ reactions to Desperate Dan’s Cow Pie that Tom Shephard’s immaculate dish would walk off with the winning main course award and this indeed proved to be the case receiving the maximum 10 points from all four judges, one of whom was the Birmingham comedian Lennie Henry. Shepherd therefore became the first Midlands Region chef to win the right to present the main course at the banquet and to score maximum points in doing so.

Shepherd’s mock-banana, No Ordinary Schoolboy, also won first place in the dessert course competition but shared another set of four tens with the dessert served by the Scottish chef, who had been runner-up for almost every course, being placed 1st equal with it. In a tie-break the informed presenter, Andi Oliver, chose the Scotsman’s dish to go forward to the banquet which was an act of kindness though it wasn’t hard to get the feeling that Shepherd’s banana was really the dessert the judges would have liked to be shovelling up from their plates on the day of the banquet itself.