345. Salt. The Bower House.

 

  I have already waxed lyrical about Salt this year (Blog 298) and was sufficiently enthused by my evening there, wallowing in the pleasure of the tasting menu, that I rated it 🌞🌞🌞. Since those early days, back long before the pandemic lockdowns it has matured into a provider of very fine food. The present Head Chef there is Laura Kimber and she has a very firm hand on the tiller. Likewise, Salt’s exceptional restaurant manager, the splendidly named Aurélian Molliere, who was appointed there in November 2022 having previously been restaurant manager at Buckland Manor, has the front of house running at tip top level, embracing the intention to be relaxed but at the same time to serve the diners with perfect poise and style.

  An autumn 4 course menu has been introduced there at a very reasonable price of £65 (sans gratuity) and  as my reservation was relatively late, and having visited Libertine Burger earlier in the day (see previous Blog), I opted to have this lighter menu if only to address the issue of my overnight gastrointestinal comfort.

  Though a menu of limited size, all the extras were pleasingly presented to make this feel like the full monty - hors d’oeuvres of fine olives and toasted almonds, 2 delightful amuses gueules made up of a crispy, flavoursome cheesy little tartlet and a splendid piece of pork ‘scratching’, some excellent bread with cultured butter and then a delicate heritage tomato starter, and afterwards a second starter of tasty Roscoff onion, very nicely cooked with pickled onion to bring sweetness and bite and crispy onion for texture. 

  The main was a beautifully and accurately cooked piece of Gigha halibut with sea herbs and for dessert a very pretty dish centred on plump blackcurrants, delightfully seasonal, with a soothing yoghurt sorbet. Two pleasing petits fours - a fudge and a jelly - were served with coffee. A well rounded fine meal.

   This four course supper was an excellent illustration of how multiple courses are not necessary for enable a chef to highlight their abilities and are kinder not only on the digestive system but also, of course, the pocket. The absence of meat was of little concern to me - I very often prefer fish for my main course but it may be a sign of things to come. This was a great pleasure and reminded me of just how good a restaurant Salt is.

Rating:- 🌞🌞🌞.

  The following day, back to Shipston on Stour by bus through the quiet and beautiful south Warwickshire countryside for another lunch at the Bower House. Unlike my previous visit which had taken place on a miserable wet day, I arrived in bright sunshine set in a blue sky, and the town was looking very appealing. 

  Just as the previous evening had reinforced my very positive opinions about Salt, so this lunch had the same effects on me regarding the Bower House. The welcome and service is very good and the interior is very atmospheric, in one part stone flagged floors, in another a spacious dining room with large windows on two sides letting in the bright light.

  Here too I chose the set three course lunch, finding it appealing because of its highlighting of Japanese ingredients which I did not really expect to see being offered as a theme running through the meal. It represented exceptionally good value bringing with it a glass of house wine, bread with two types of tasty butter and petits fours to accompany the coffee (at an additional price). I indulged myself in a delicious Bower Sour to kick things off.

  

    The starter was a dish of tasty aubergine gyozas, very nicely cooked, with a mushroom and soy dip giving a real zing to the dish.

  I thoroughly enjoyed the main of stir fried roast breast of duck and vegetables and udon noodles. It was delicious and I felt very happy with my meal. The dessert of ‘Japanese crème caramel’ - a very good crème with slices of mandarin orange - was enjoyable though I suspected that the dish was more a playful invention of the chef rather than something whose origins can be pinpointed to the vicinity of Tokyo!

  

  The petits fours rounded off the meal very happily. The Bower House is such a pleasing restaurant to visit and its unpretentious but enjoyable food together with the excellent service and comfortable atmosphere make a trip out to Shipston to dine there very worthwhile.

Rating:- 🌞.

344. Lamb At Lamb’s Of Sheep Street; Burger At Libertine Burger; Chaplin Dines.

 

  The Shakespeare Hotel in Stratford upon Avon, which Lucy The Labrador and I have been visiting regularly for the past ten years, will close on 31 October for refurbishment for eighteen months. It’s almost like a second home to us, its staff have been friends and its absence will represent a little hole in our lives. Therefore we are paying a couple more visits than we would have otherwise done to have a final few days in the hotel. Which means dining out.

  In Blog 335 I described a visit to The Opposition, one of the row of bistros a few yards from the side entrance to The Shakespeare. It was tolerable but the dishes I was served were imprecisely cooked. Detail is everything if one is paying a not inconsiderable sum of money for a meal and overcooked, if not seriously so, fish makes the diner wonder if it was all worthwhile. 

  As mentioned in Blog 266, I have dined at Lamb’s of Sheep Street, in the past - in fact almost exactly one year ago. It is just a matter of few yards from the Shakespeare Hotel and while being timber-framed, oak beamed and altogether Elizabethan, is very spacious, has excellent staff and a good choice of food.

  The starter was never going to set the culinary world on fire, being a sort of deconstructed crayfish cocktail but the Marie Rose was nicely flavoured, the sliced avocado creamy and nicely textured, the pink grapefruit aptly citric to match the dish and the chopped leaves fresh and crispy. This wasn’t anything you couldn’t do at home but fine all the same.

  The main course was in a different league - three perfectly cooked cutlets of rack of lamb - an exact pinkness, joyously tender and mildly flavoured with bursts of rosemary. An accompanying dauphinois was delightfully buttery but in need of more seasoning - salt and pepper were available on the table but I always feel one should never have to use them though on this occasion I did, and precisely tender green beans, all tied together with a pleasingly adequate amount of gravy. A joy to behold - and eat.

  For dessert a tasty iced caramelised hazelnut parfait of excellent texture. The only problem with it was that it was a dish of one flavour, with nothing to contrast or complement it and eventually I felt like I was just working my way through it, somewhat bored. 

  Since dining, I looked back at Blog 266 and discovered that the starter and main had been the same dishes that I chose a year ago which says a lot about my limited range of preferences and the unchanging nature of the basic Lamb’s menu. This restaurant was included in the Michelin Guide from 2000 to 2020. The food it serves certainly seems to be more accurately prepared than at least one of its rival neighbours but it might be said that it needs to catch up a little with the proceeding 2020s.

Rating:- 🌛🌛🌛🌛

  Having surprised myself by discovering how little my tastes in starters and dessert change when similar menus are presented to me a year apart, another surprise grabbed my attention on this Stratford visit. While contemplating and musing in our room at The Shakespeare, with Lucy doing the same, both of us, she and I, thoughts firmly related to food, I noticed on social media that a West Midlands tourism promotion organisation, Make It West Midlands, had listed as finalists, three very diverse catering establishments for a Taste of the West Midlands award - Chapter in Edgbaston, Libertine Burger with outlets in Leamington Spa and Stratford upon Avon and Baxter Baristas @ 16 Hales Street in Coventry. An eclectic mix if ever there were one.

  But there I was - in Stratford wondering where to go for lunch and less than five minutes away was the town’s branch of Libertine Burgers and it was dog friendly and Lucy could therefore accompany me. It was not a hard decision to make and off we headed for a very unStratford-like concentration of popular chain restaurants off High Street. The restaurant is a narrow, clean-looking but fairly basicly furnished dining area like an English version of an American diner, with the kitchen where all the burger-making was taking place, at the centre of it all. An excellent young waitress took my order - I decided on the beef pattie with very nicely crispy smoked bacon, good cheese, a spicy sauce and crispy fried pickles which were great fun. I also chose the accompanying chips and these were really good - it would be hard to find any better. I’ve said it before, I’m not a burger lover but this was remarkably good. Now if only someone could find a way of preventing the base of the bun from being soggy. By the way, I washed it all down with a can of ‘cherry soda’ which we always used to call ‘cherryade’.

  The Stratford branch of the restaurant, so the waitress told me, opened about five months ago.

Rating:- 🌛🌛🌛🌛

  Another surprise of the stay in Stratford was discovering a fascinating, even fabulous, item hidden away in the lobby of The Shakespeare Hotel. It’s probably been there for years but I had never noticed it before, despite my many visits there. Hanging on a shadowed wall is a menu of the hotel’s restaurant, dated 7 November 1931 and signed “To the cook, the dinner was excellent” by Charlie Chaplin.

  I have to say, I covet this remarkable item. Of course Chaplin’s annotation makes this a culinary gem but the dishes on offer are also intensely interesting. It’s 1931, it’s the Jazz Age, Chaplin is a superstar and menus are still full of Escoffinalia. The travelling middle class, the visiting actors, the Bertie Woosters, Woosters’ aunts, the local upper crust are all staying at or just, perhaps, dining in the Shakespeare, the town’s greatest hotel. And they’re dining from a menu, as you would expect, written in French and made up of exotically named dishes, with famous people remembered by them. There’s Careme - Faisan D’Ecosse Careme, Carmen (from the eponymous opera? I wonder) - Délices de sole Carmen and even the bard himself - Specialite Chestnuts Shakespeare (such splendid Franglais). 

  Food - not all the pleasures are in the eating.

343. Orelle. Chateaubriand With A View.

 

  Recently I had an excellent dinner at Orelle in Colmore Row. The restaurant had not been consistent in the past in the meals it served to its customers, I felt, but this dinner had completely pushed it up a level in my estimation and I was so pleased with it that I asked a friend to join me there for a midweek lunch. This would be a different experience as the sublime dinner I had eaten there shortly before had been served brilliantly by the smart and very professional front of house staff despite the extreme busy-ness of the restaurant that evening with tables being turned incessantly. This lunchtime was altogether more serene and slower paced and there was more opportunity to drink up one’s cocktail and graze on the dishes presented to us and goggle at the views. 

  Is anticipation the awful enemy of satisfaction? We both chose a crab starter - crabe - prettily presented dressed Brixham crab, avocado, with slices of Pink Lady apple, Melba toast-like pieces of sourdough and sunflower seeds somewhere or the other. It was edible but over seasoned and the price of £22 was excruciatingly ambitious, the company that Orelle owns is London-based and these were London prices. True we could have chosen the much more reasonably priced set lunch but what’s the point of setting out a menu of appealing dishes if they are not be available unless a sound financial penalty is paid?

  We shared our main course which was for two - this was exquisite. Three magnificent slices of Chateaubriand - tender and delicious. The meat was all that was needed, it required nothing to distract the diner’s attention from it apart from the sauce. But there were two unglamorous carrots, far from perfectly cooked, trying to muscle in on the act and bask in the beef’s glory plus some terrible chips - stunted, pale and no more crispy than a sponge though cooked in some much vaunted beef fat and there was a dish of leaves which looked like they were still growing in an allotment somewhere or the other and looked better left alone to get on with their own business.

  The dessert was pleasing - Fraisier des bois - a strawberry-flavoured white chocolate mousse in a strawberry-like white chocolate case with strawberry and hibiscus compote. It was refreshing and enjoyable and a happy end to a meal which seems to summarise Orelle - much that is good but inconsistent. Nevertheless, there’s always the Chateaubriand and the view.

  Some highlights from the above-mentioned dinner I had eaten at Orelle a short time before going to the reported lunch - 

  This was an excellent tasting menu - delightful amuses gueules, excellent bread, a truly delightful and delicious ballotine of salmon (cured salmon with a perfect citric element coming from the kalamansi, an excellent heritage tomato dish with smoked burrata (at last, burrata with some flavour) and a silky gazpacho, well cooked, meaty halibut with a fine champagne beurre blanc, mellow-flavoured roast Sladesdown duck happily with beetroot and the the strawberry-white chocolate dessert mentioned above and looking just that little bit tidier than it did at the lunch I described.

Rating:- 🌛🌛🌛🌛

342. Here Comes The Rain Again …. Ludlow 2023 Final Day.

 

  Come Sunday morning, the temperature in Ludlow had moderated somewhat but there was equally a degree of humidity in the morning air. This was the final day of the Ludlow Food Festival and there was a day packed with activities ahead.

  The first event on the main stage was a double act of Neil Crouch of CSons on the Green and Mark Harris of the Pheasant Inn ar and Tally Ho at Church Stretton. This was 40 minute session of worthwhile culinary bandinage and was followed by a pleasing demonstration of the cooking of lamb rack by Louisa Ellis, now a private chef based in Nottingham, who had been a finalist in the 2017 series of Masterchef The Professionals and had one the Christmas Masterchef competition with an Asian-based meal of Wagyu beef, spiced shrimp emulsion, tempura enoki and Szechuan spiced potato and Lime yogurt mousse with a mango and yuzu centre, lemon granita, compressed mango and pineapple and ginger crumb.

  I had been looking forward to a demonstration by Chris Simpson of Pensons but he was unable to attend and so I headed for lunch and joined the long queue at the Beefy Boys stall feeling that I must continue my brief foray into burgers after my experience earlier in the week at Simpsons. The heavens opened and torrential rain gushed on to the castle grounds. Fortunately, though never a Boy Scout, I was prepared and had brought an umbrella with me and so managed to avoid a drenching while queuing for my The Beefy Boy. This was a burger, cooked to my liking, with bacon and cheese and mayonnaise, the latter of which rendered much of the bread soggy and not pleasant. It was tasty for sure but reinforced my doubts about the pleasures of street food. Time perhaps to take another break from burgers.

  I ate my burger, sheltered from the deluge, in the main demonstration tent listening to a talk on Indian cuisine and then moved on to the highlight of the day which was the talk given by Dr Neil Buttery, chef and historian, on the life and works of Elizabeth Raffald, a remarkable Yorkshire woman, who, as Dr Buttery pointed out, did more to establish traditional English cuisine than the rather more famous Mrs Beeton who seems to have plagiarised, as did many others, the work of Mrs Raffald.

  This was a fascinating and revelationary talk, nicely delivered by Buttery and at the end, I was delighted to add Dr Buttery’s book, author-signed, to my culinary library.

  There was one more demonstration to attend before I departed the castle grounds for another year - that by Andrew Tabberner, Head Chef and Co-owner of the Gaerwen Arms, which had unfortunately recently  burned down and it was impressive to hear him talk of his plans to bounce back from this misfortune.

  Back to Fishmore Hall for dinner in the ‘bistro’ and a wonderful & memorable dish, served as a starter, of smoked trout rillette with avocado, cucumber and trout roe. This was a lovely dish for summer, or even an Indian summer, being refreshing, cool, fresh, light. I thought it was delightful.

  I little expected to be eating another burger that evening but I surprised myself when I chose to do so and this time it was a buttermilk and paprika marinaded fried chicken - tasty though I should have liked the coating to be a little crispier - with an equally tasty red pepper and onion relish, chipotle mayonnaise and little gem lettuce plus some excellent chips and a less exciting collection of leaves which I suppose are necessary but rarely give me any pleasure wherever I encounter them.

  For dessert I enjoyed the light and pleasing rhubarb posset with poached rhubarb and ginger crumble and ice cream. This was a pleasing, unpretentious meal and it gave me a lot of pleasure. And with it, my visit to the Ludlow Food Festival drew to a close for another year.