357. Sublime Simpsons.

 

  At a recent event dinner at Simpsons, a fellow diner asked me which, in my opinion, was the best restaurant in Birmingham. I replied, as I always do when asked this question which is more often than one might think, that our city’s finest restaurants are such an eclectic bunch, offering various styles and atmospheres and settings and experiences, that I could not pick one out from the others. I like to travel down which ever road a particular restaurant is heading on the particular occasion I am dining there.

  Having written that, this particular dinner at which I was being quizzed on my choice of restaurant, left me feeling that it may well have been my favourite meal of 2023. Putting aside the generous supply of wine on offer as part of the event, indeed I was relatively abstemious on this particular occasion, for me it was all about the food menu and what Luke Tipping made of it. It was …. magnificent; and I’ll take anyone on who says otherwise.

  As the diners sat in the lounge getting their first awkward little chats and self-introductions out of the way, gorgeously delicious amuses gueules were served. There was a platter of fine salumi, this being a meal to complement the Italian wines showcased at the dinner, though there was also deeply flavoursome acorn-fed Iberico ham, and with this came optimally crispy and delicious cep and Parmesan arancini. An evening of diving into a plate piled high with these little pleasures would have ben a manifestation of an earthly paradise in itself.

  But, like MacDuff, untimely ripped from his mother’s womb, we Simpsons Dozen were ushered from the lounge to the dining room and the main performance began. To start, there was a ridiculously perfect ox cheek raviolo, the meat cooked impeccably, the pasta spot on, served with rainbow chard, aged Pecorino and a happy red pepper sauce, accompanied by my favourite wine of the evening, Villa de Cappezana. The mere act of revisiting the photograph of the raviolo brings on salivation and a quickening pulse rate, so good was this dish.

  Then, a dish similar to that served at another recent Simpsons event but no less delightful for that - Duck liver served on gingerbread with black fig. Previously, foie gras had been served but it had only been a temporary month-long and somewhat furtive indulgence to coincide with Simpsons’ 30th anniversary celebrations necessitated by a demonstration some time ago by animal rights activists outside Simpsons. It’s true, the foie gras dish had been spectacular but that on this occasion was still lovely.

  The main course was accurately cooked and finely flavoured, shockingly tender roast lamb with a confit baby leek, hispi cabbage and potato purée. The vegetables were perhaps more frippery than anything and the lamb was everything. It was complemented with black garlic but I might have liked a little acidity with the dish to fully match the lamb. But the lamb could quite easily have stood alone.

  The dessert was an excellent chocolate and hazelnut delice. If I am often reticent about choosing a chocolate dessert then this gem, luxurious and beautiful, told me that I should not be hesitant to opt for a Simpsons chocolate dessert. The delice was nicely matched with a soothing hazelnut ice cream. It was a very pretty dish.

  This was fine dining indeed. 

356. 670 Grams.

 

  It has to be said that I could well be on to a winner when I say that 670 Grams probably has never had such a great combined age at a single table as when I and a number of old - in both senses of the word - friends dined there recently. This was the first time I had eaten in its extended space and the spaciousness certainly enhanced the pleasure of being there though I thought privately that maybe this might have been a good time to review the decor and make it less austere in its cutting edge sort of way. It’s a little joyless but ferociously interesting. 

  How nice it was to have a printed menu. Short of making detailed notes at the moment each dish was described to my straining ears, I have always found it hard to remember precisely what I have eaten at 670 Grams. 

  The aged group settled into our comfortable spot in view of the still small kitchen area. Chef Patron Kray 

Tredwell did not appear to be on the scene this particular evening and the dishes were being prepared by Sous Chef Callum Slater who had worked at 670 Grams since August 2020 and who has clearly been working with Tredwell long enough to know what he’s doing with Tredwell’s culinary style and dishes.

  Those dishes which I had previously experienced were very much as they have been when I dined there before but at times they did take a long time to come to the table - a three and half hour meal starts to become a little wearing though as old friends we had plenty to talk about and the gaps allowed for good conversation and inevitable reminiscences.

  I did not photograph dishes I have illustrated before but the meal included the profoundly tasty slow cooked lamb in tiny oriental pancakes, the gastronomically lust-inducing Kray FC (gorgeously crispy salt and pepper chicken with Szechuan mayonnaise), the glorious chicken stock soup with ginger and lemon grass, the prawn with ponzu and burnt lemon, the powerfully flavoured prawn bread, the scorched sweetheart cabbage … seemingly unending familiar pleasures.

  The apogee of the meal was reached with finely cooked Newlyn cod with a red pepper sauce and then Market Lavington Guinea fowl accompanied by a crispy little spring roll, the dish happily bringing with it turmeric, garlic and ginger.

  The evening was drawing on and we were all a little anxious about being able to obtain taxis to take us home amidst the bustle of Saturday night Digbeth, with its hints of being Birmingham’s closest shot at a Soho district. We worked our way through the three desserts featured on the menu - toasted waffle with smoked ice cream, parsnip and miso caramel, ‘custard factory tart’ (aptly) and a chocolate dessert served with ‘espresso slush’ which had one or two of my fellow diners full of dread lest the caffeine in the dessert keep them awake all night though I have to say that it did not inhibit my sleep once I eventually got between the sheets (which was not immediately as a brave subsection of our group, successfully and immediately enubered, finished off the evening comfortably at the far from austere Madeleine bar in the Grand Hotel). The old people - we few, we happy few - were entranced by what there was to witness in Digbeth at 1145PM on a Saturday night - one of my obviously more suspicious-looking companions was approached at least twice by those wondering if he would like to buy interesting, and illegal, substances though I would have thought that the query was made more in hope than expectation.

  So, a memorable meal at 670 Grams and afterwards, for a minute or two, in the rude streets of Digbeth.

354. Bower House And Salt.

 

  I have reported already this year on the Michelin listed The Bower House in Shipston on Stour and the Michelin starred Salt in Stratford upon Avon. This summer and early autumn I have enjoyed a few stays in Stratford and on each occasion I have taken the bus to Shipston, enjoying the scenery of south Warwickshire as the vehicle cruised calmly and peacefully through it and then delighted to be ambling around this pleasingly understated town, where everyone wears body warmers, now I think to be known as gilets, and generally look comfortably off and pleased with their lot, as I suppose they should. A bankrupt Birmingham seems a continent away and though there are no Michelin stars twinkling in the town the Bower House does give the place a spot in the firmament. The owners of The Bower House have identified their market - they oversee the serving of good, sensibly priced food in a comfortable, attractive setting with a relaxed atmosphere.

  I love the opening - a fine bread with good salted butter and tasty miso butter - a clever and more harmonious version of the ubiquitous Marmite butter. For starter, I thoroughly enjoyed my choice of heritage beetroot and the main course of pork loin with ratte potatoes and chicory salad was equally pleasurable and interesting. This is a restaurant where the chef is forever working to keep his diners on the edge of their seats to see what delights he’s going to send out to them from the kitchen.

  The dessert admittedly did not work quite as well for me - the compressed pineapple was tasty and pleasing and the accompanying pineapple sorbet equally fascinated the tastebuds but the coconut espuma was no substitute for something with a bit of real texture - the dish would have been elevated by substituting it with some coconut sponge or something with a bit of body.

  Still, all in all, another visit to the Bower House is a future prospect I view with pleasurable anticipation.

  The previous evening I had experienced the great pleasure of dining again at Paul Foster’s Salt in Stratford’s Church Street where Laura Kimber is doing such a fine job in her role of Head Chef and on the Wednesday evening I dined there, where Aurélian Molliere, was accomplishing a brilliant one man performance front of house. 

  I opted again for the fine five course menu which was well priced, superbly realised and eaten with relish (by me).

  After the excellent amuses bouches of fine cheesy tartlet and the splendidly crispy and generously sized ‘pork scratching’ and the equally excellent nut brown loaf with Ampersand butter which is one of God’s finer gifts to Man, the starter of Charlotte potatoes with dill emulsion delivered the continuing pleasure promised by the amuses gueules. The next dish, centred on Burford Brown egg, did not lower my expectations either and the main course of Cornish plaice cooked impeccably and enhanced with a happy medley of sea herbs and vegetables and naughty little brown shrimps showed that in the hands of a fine chef a truly admirable fish dish can be brought to the diner’s table even in these landlocked Middle Lands.

  For dessert I was happy to be served chocolate crémeux nicely complemented by blackberry sorbet, plump autumnal blackberries and pistachio crumbs.

  This was a very satisfactory meal. Just as I have learned to expect from this fine Head Chef and this restaurant.

  A quick mention of another bus journey from Stratford, this time in the company of the indomitable Lucy  The Labrador, to Moreton in Marsh to visit the town on market day. The traffic flow through the town was awful - a fine utterly Cotswold town being smothered by the vast amount of vehicles that pass through it. Moreton really needs a bypass. 

  The market is unremarkable with less personality to it than you might expect given the glorious Cotswold buildings which surround it. But Lucy and I headed for the Black Bear to find it crowded mainly with raucous and unappealing ladies who lunch but we found a table and gained much pleasure from an excellent beef and ale pie (the both being from local sources) served with big fat crispy chips which fell at the hurdle of being somewhat undercooked internally though the accompanying vegetables were accurately cooked. Though there was plenty of gravy in the pie (with very adequate amounts of meat), I think a little jug of additional gravy to pour over the pastry would have helped. The pudding I chose was rather more bulky than I should have liked being a ‘ginger cake’ which turned out to be, for me at least, a too generously sized, rather dense sponge when I had been expecting a light cake.

  Though I had my niggles, I do like the Black Bear and think its food is a good example of what one might hope to find in an English pub in the 2020s. The Ladies Who Lunch there certainly seemed to have a grand time scoffing all that was laid before them as well as knocking back a couple of bottles of wine between them.

  The area has a number of dining establishments of note which I hope to visit at some time in the not too distant future - on the bus journey to Shipston for instance we passed the Michelin-listed Howard Arms at Ilmington and The Fuzzy Duck at nearby Armscote.

355. Gulp and Honey & Rye.

 

    Annabelle Davis is a pastry chef in Birmingham who runs her own business, Honey & Rye. On the evening of 20 October, with half the country flooded by the unrelenting Storm Babet and amid the constant unremitting deluge, it seemed of Biblical proportions, I set off for the Jewellery Quarter on a crowded 101 bus filled with damp passengers from Colmore Row to head for Spencer Street and Kaye Winwood’s GULP, a dining establishment currently highly placed in my affections, where Annabelle was collaborating with Kaye to render on to those who know their rewards for knowing - a feast described as “an edible journey through autumn …. the perfect way to celebrate the fruits of autumn, with a menu designed to bring the season to life” [despite Babet’s attempts to drown it].

  The publicity noted that, “Taking inspiration from the orchard in Warstone Lane cemetery and surrounding areas, the menu will take guests on a journey revealing the deeper meanings and rituals behind some of the everyday foods we eat ! Expect foraged ingredients, locally seasonal produce, and heart-warming flavours to excite the senses! The vegetarian menu draws on themes of food rituals and symbology to produce a creative experience for curious diners”.

  I can confirm that this really was a celebration of an English autumn. There’s something of a deeper magic and mythology about this season of mists and mellow fruitfulness in the middle lands where ancient gods were worshipped in groves and by rivers that you feel all around you at this time of year. You feel that this is the season when the Once and Future King could just appear in the autumnal dawn of a Mercian morning and you can almost hear the clang of Wayland’s forge in the distant Cotswolds which the dog and I were just visiting a couple of days ago. In Edgehill the ghosts of fallen civil war soldiers cross the brow of a hill and in Digbeth phantom smiths still lay the bellows to their forges to boost the flames that light up the dark late afternoons in the old town. Old Mrs Allday’s ghost is still serving up tripe in Union Street and Joseph Priestley’s phantom is busy fleeing once again from the rioters sacking his house in Sparkhill. Autumn indeed has its own special place in the total of our hours upon the stage and the deep, earthy, rich, umami flavours which accompany it have a special place in our culinary pleasures as the year moves on.

  Kaye Winwood started off the evening with an exhortation to her diners to experience the textures and olfactory pleasure of an edible hand lotion she had made with sugar and oil and local herbs. Rosemary was the theme though no mention of remembrance was made albeit that autumn is the season of remembrance as the anniversary of the end of the Great War is commemorated, as ever, on Remembrance Sunday.

  And so to Davis’ splendid food.  We started off with Emmer grain bread with a lacto-fermented mustard butter - excellent - and labneh as a spread with burned lemon, the sweet hit of pickled blackberries and dried yarrow leaves. Autumn was already bursting out all over.

  

  A main of exquisitely, perfectly al dente home-made tagliatelle, butternut squash purée and a remarkably successful dish of local wild mushrooms, deeply flavoured, full of earth and umami, all rounded off with locally foraged salad. Truffle may be everywhere at the moment - barely a highly placed restaurant is not offering it - but these more modest fungi gathered from under our Brummie noses, made for the most memorable mushroom dish of the year, and possibly the most delicious.

  

  Autumn rosehips were used to give us a delightful and highly successful palate cleanser in the form of a rose hip sherbet accompanied by a pleasingly not over sweet biscuit and then another highly memorable dish of apple custard tart with a layer of crabapple jelly all soother with a restrained blob of crème fraiche. This was an immaculate piece of pastry making - crisp and light - it’s clear that Annabelle Davis really is a very fine pastry chef. I loved the autumnal crab apple jelly and the custard was smooth and pleasing.

  Kaye Winwood had prepared an interesting - and soothing - infusion of foraged local herbs and there was a lovely petit four by Annette in the form of local wood ear mushroom, which only grows on elderberry trees, rehydrated in elderberry liquor and dipped in chocolate. 

    A very real celebration of an English autumn and the fare it throws up delivered to the diners present by an artist and a fine chef especially in the field of pastry. It’s such a joy to be presented with real pastry as a dessert rather than the usual hotchpotch which can appear as the final course. All served in the eclectic and moody GULP dining room through which you could just imagine the ghost of some ancient jeweller wandering at midnight on a dark, moonless autumn night.

353. Atelier.

 

  

  In 2016 I decided that and pronounced that Alex Claridge is a genius. Last year’s Good Food Guide judgement that The Wilderness is among the top ten most exciting places to eat in Britain was fully in line with my long held view whether or not the Michelin inspectors judge that the restaurant deserves one of their overrated stars. Since 2019, his Head Chef at The Wilderness has been the very amiable and modest Marius Gedminas. Since his arrival there, through plague and whatever else Fate has thrown at the hospitality industry, the food served at The Wilderness has been original, obsessionally beautifully executed and presented, and, in the words of The Good Food Guide, “exceptional”. The Wilderness is clearly a creatitional collaborative triumph but we can not doubt that Gedminas’ role has been pivotal.in recent years.

  Claridge’s brilliance of course extended to employing the immortal Sonal Clare, previously of Purnell’s as we know, to lead on wines at The Wilderness and previous Blogs have reported on some of the occasions staged by Clare to entertain the palates of the oenophilic good burgers of Birmingham and surrounding counties. 

  And now the latest flash of brilliance involving Atelier and making permanent, I think at least for the weekend, a combination of food prepared by Marius Gedminas and the pleasures that Sonal Clare can serve up which originate from a bottle. My knowledge of Japanese food is limited and I can not approach judging how Gedminas’s delicious sashimi and sushi dishes compare with the sort of food being served up in the trendy and heart attack-inducingly expensive Japanese restaurants in London (one has recently set a new record for the most expensive meal served in a British restaurant at a rather shocking, and distasteful £750) but for me every bite was an enormous pleasure and coupled with Sonal Clare’s choice of wines, the new Atelier represents a very exciting new dining opportunity here in Birmingham. Floreat Atelier.

  Delights included mackerel, lobster and wagyu and at the end of it a new species of the recently discovered genus of Wilderness chocolate frogs.