371.Luke Butcher leaves Purnell’s.

 

2024 will usher in some changes in the restaurant scene in Birmingham. Notably Purnell’s will have a new Head Chef after the announcement just before Christmas that Head Chef, Luke Butcher, was leaving his post at the restaurant although his replacement has not yet been named.

  Butcher began to work with Glynn Purnell when he was appointed to be chef de Partie at Purnell’s in 2010, having started his career at Adlard’s Restaurant in Norwich and then moving on to be pastry chef at Tom Kerridge’s Hand and Flowers in 2006. He was appointed Head Chef at Purnell’s in April 2017.

  Regular diners at Purnell’s may have felt that in recent years, menus had become too repetitive with many of Purnell’s longtime signature dishes featuring constantly on the tasting menus and it will be interesting to see what role Butcher takes up elsewhere which might enable him to develop menus of his own with more freedom as well as seeing what direction Purnell’s’ menus travel in with the appointment of a new Head Chef.

  Bizarrely The Caterer initially reported Luke Butcher’s departure on its site and in a tweet and named  him as ‘Luke Batch’ and it was only after I commented on the tweet identifying his correct name that the tweet was deleted (and not replaced) and the name in the website article was corrected. It does seem vaguely insulting when a long-serving, well respected chef is wrongly named on a professional reporting site specifically designed to report on the hospitality industry. 

Corrected version on website - 

  Meanwhile, in the so-called Edgbaston Village, in Highfield Road near Simpsons, a restaurant describing  itself as ‘fine-dining’ and offering an opportunity to “celebrate the new year with a mesmerising eight-course fine dining experience inspired by the historic Silk Road” opens in January 2024. The publicity promises a “unique gastronomic adventure” with the menu taking the diner “on a journey through the rich and diverse food cultures of Turkey, Iran, Balochistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India - a true feast for the senses!”.

  There’s clearly a lot of hype around this new restaurant which is named Baloci and this term, ‘fine dining’ is bandied about rather a lot. Six by Nico (see Blog 364) is a good example of a restaurateur locating a restaurant in a smart dining room, plating up the ingredients attractively and calling it ‘fine dining’ but these are not necessarily a guarantee that what you get is actually ‘fine dining’. Fine dining needs a lot more than glitzy decor and the use of the term. We are approaching a stage where fine dining becomes a pastiche of itself just as nouveau cuisine suffered a similar fate. Still, I will give a Baloci a visit and report back but I go with a mild feeling of dread about what will happen when I go there. I’m also a little anxious about what the term “Electric Fine Dining” coukd possibly mean - some publicity expert seems to have gone a little bonkers. I hope Baloci does not turn out to be baloney.

  One of the less satisfactory dining experiences of recent years, allowing for the high price of the meal, was at the Bracebridge in Sutton Coldfield. This was another one of those restaurants with fine dining pretensions which failed to live up to what one was expecting (see Blog 59). Not before time, the restaurant closed in October 2023 but is now to be reopened, as reported by the BBC on 27 December 2023 by Andrew Sheridan and Sam and Emma Morgan’s Open Restaurant Group with some added investment from local residents in the well-heeled area. Sheridan himself of course, has decamped to reopen 8, previously located in the International Convention Centre, in his native Liverpool but retains his interest in the West Midlands with several enterprises including Black And Green in another affluent location - Barnt Green.

  It will be interesting to see if Sutton Coldfield, after a long absence, can finally find its way back into the pages of the Food Guides.