403. Cuubo.

 

  On 24 June 2021, as the storm of the COVID-19 pandemic which had raged around both diners and those who served them in the hospitality industry, had at last settled and tentative bright sunlight was once more beginning to peep through the clouds of national anxiety, a young chef, Dan Sweet, who had trained at Birmingham’s University College and subsequently worked for more than three years at Simpsons, where so many careers have taken off to subsequent success, opened a fine dining-style ‘take away’-style establishment in the very well-heeled suburb of Harborne called Qbox. 

The interior of Qbox

  This proved to be very successful - Dan had wisely chosen the right location and the right audience, those who wanted to go to his culinary theatre as well as being able to afford to buy a metaphorical ticket for it, though, in truth, his food was very fairly priced. By 2023, the pandemic being largely forgotten except as something else to blame the government for, Sweet crowdfunded enough money to enable him to equip a full kitchen and dining room, titled Cuubo. 

  Soon after opening, he was blessed by a visit from a god descending from Olympus  - the socialist restaurant critic Jay Rayner of The Observer - who pronounced that Cuubo was “as exciting a new restaurant as” he had “encountered in a long while” although he had reservations about the crab risotto “Just to prove my critical faculties didn’t completely desert me”. Mildly for him, he stated, “there was a crab risotto that didn’t taste especially of crab” (a fault I find that happens with crab dishes far too often in even expensive and ‘fine’ restaurants. Chefs, use crab in a dish at your peril).

  Thus, trailing in the wake of the good food-loving, fine dining, socialist restaurant critic from the rarified and excruciatingly expensive culinary atmosphere of The Smoke (though to give Rayner his due, he does gird up his loins more often than most others to haul himself to the provinces and notably to Birmingham to report on our fine new restaurants (doubtless he’s champing at the bit to get to Rabbit in Stirchley) and indeed, now close to two decades ago, reported on Glynn Purnell’s first voyage into gastronomic distinction, Jessica’s (ahead of Matthew Fort by a head)), I myself found myself in a rainy Harborne High Street festooned as it is with a near excess of dining and coffee-imbibing establishments and wondering if it always rained in Harborne. The reservation, please note, had been made some time before our well-fed Olympian socialist writer had reported on his visit there.

  But enough of food critics, it’s the food that counts. The restaurant definitely looked smaller on the outside than it did on the inside - a reverse TARDIS effect - and while it’s true that it is quite small, it’s comfortable and the tables are not uncomfortably on top of each other. I had booked lunch for 1PM and the place was full as I arrived - populated mainly by elderly diners taking advantage of a three course lunch for £40. The restaurant was decorated brightly and anonymously, which in itself was not unwelcome as it conveyed newness and freshness and a canvass yet to be fully realised. The two front of house staff knew what they were doing, were appropriately friendly and were not at all perturbed by me changing my prebooked request for the lunch menu to the 7 course tasting menu (£75) although providing the premeal snacks was a problem which bothered me not at all since I was responsible for the last minute changes of heart.

  I was pleasingly sat by the pass and was able to watch Chef and his young sous chef going about their work calmly and smartly. And what a pleasure it all was.i was served some good sourdough bread and then was launched into the menu proper with a fresh, well flavoured dish of tasty heritage tomatoes served on sourdough. Summer was bursting out all over ignoring the ongoing onslaught of rain outside in Hungry Harborne. The dish reminded me that many of the dishes were to nod in the direction of Chef’s partial Italian heritage and the wines, well chosen, were also mainly Italian.

  Then a plate of very well cooked pork belly with crispy skin and mostly melted fat with smooth bacon cream cut through with nduja oil and accompanied by a fennel salad though it has to be said that the flavour of the fennel was a little too subtle. Pork belly does not rank highly in my list of favourite meat ingredients but this dish was considerably more enjoyable than most pork belly dishes I have been served elsewhere.

  Next, the crab risotto which had disappointed Zeus during his descent from Olympus and it has to be said that the old lightning hurler had a point - the flavour of crab was not as discernible as one would have hoped but the texture of the rice was spot on and the wafer thin slices of cauliflower gave texture to the dish. Still, crab should have been the centrepiece and, as Rayner wrote, it really was not.

 Next the main course - a fine, meaty, plump piece of very nicely cooked chicken with broccoletti (or friarelli) and a supreme sauce and a delicious little pile of mild wild garlic purée and a sliver of Iberico capping the chicken. An excellent dish.

  As an avoider of desserts, I was delighted with the charming vanilla and basil mille feuille paired with a blisteringly tasty strawberry sorbet. Given that Dan Sweet had spent three years between 2013 and 2016 at Birmingham’s University College working on a Diploma of Education in Baking and Pastry Arts and had been a baker and pastry chef it is little wonder perhaps that he was turning out a very admirable dessert.

  So, a very enjoyable lunch in Harborne at Cuubo. I shall have no hesitation in returning. Perhaps I will bump into another member of the Pantheon down from Olympus to see what wonders Dan Sweet is cooking up.

Rating:- 🌞.

402. Pre-theatre Dinner At Purnell’s Plates.

 

  For the third time in six days it’s off to the theatre I go. But now, back in Birmingham, this time to the Birmingham Repertory Theatre to see the theatre version of Bruce Robinson’s sublimely comic, excruciatingly enjoyable classic film set in the dying days of the 1960s. Withnail And I. Expectations are high, after all the Royal Shakespeare Company, with its usual license to bowdlerise to the Nth degree, has not been let loose on this gem, worthy of Shakespeare himself and indeed quoting as it does from Hamlet at the very end of it as Withnail is left alone, fated perhaps never to play the Dane.

 But, as I wrote above, expectations are high, anticipation is electric and  a pre-theatre dinner is needed though I have no intention of demanding, to accompany it, the finest wines known to man. It is some time since I have eaten at Purnell’s Plates in Edmund Street, a short walk from the Rep, and it seems like an ideal place to start the evening which, incidentally, is warm, dry and pleasingly seasonal for late spring day. And so to Purnell’s Plates, to be greeted by Adrien Garnier, restaurant manager at Purnell’s, sitting outside in the early evening warmth with, I expect, other staff prior to heading off for Cornwall Street prior to evening service there

  I am shown to my table by the painting of the bull which reminds me of just how many bulls there are in the city. And so to the menu.

     Switching from present to past tense, I ordered four dishes from the menu which proved to be a little more than my advancingly elderly stomach had full room for but my mouth and taste buds felt differently from my stomach and welcomed all-comers. First to arrive at the table was a plate of nicely crispy and robustly flavoured cheese and basil croquetas and I set about demolishing these little gems with pleasurable gusto washed down with a complementary glass of cava and then some Spanish beer.

   Then, along came four beautifully meaty and happily spicy beef and pork albondigas served with a keenly tasty tomato sauce and some patatas bravas which did not have so much heat to them as I would have liked though the finely shaved cheese on top of them gave them added flavour. Finally along came a lovely piece of pan-fried sea bream - its meat nicely cooked and snow-white - with saffron and garlic and a couple of rather insubstantial potatoes and two or three segments of sliced, sweet piquillo peppers. 

  I eschewed the irritating deconstructed crème Catalan which I was surprised to find had hung on to its place on the menu and instead opted for the Basque cheesecake. This was sensibly sized and a fair representation of the dish and, after it, I was ready to amble along to Centenary Square to see the play.

  It took a while to accept that the two very frantic young men on the stage were Withnail and Marwood though they spoke almost the very same lines as Richard E Grant and Paul McGann did in the movie. At times Withnail was more Bertie Wooster than Grant’s far more subtle, more deeply upper crust, viciously cynical rendition of the part and poor Marwood just was not beautiful enough. But the lads did their best and made me laugh at times though that was more to do with the crushingly hilarious script than the acting to be fair. And how could the actor playing Uncle Monty, a fraction of Richard’s Griffith’s scene-filling bulk, ever hope to fully win over a Withnail and I aficionado when a picture of the salacious, predatory film version of Uncle Monty is lodged firmly and eternally in the mind’s eye?

  But it was an entertaining evening with great efforts put into the costumes and the scenery and scene-changing remarkable. The Rep had certainly put in the necessary effort on this one and it showed.

401.Pretheatre Dinner At Hotel Du Vin.

 

    I was in Stratford upon Avon to see what degree of mauling the RSC was inflicting on the works of Shakespeare on this particular occasion - the victim being Love’s Labours Lost which the RSC had delivered to its audience so perfectly and memorably ten years before, setting it in a long lost Edwardian England - it’s now remembered as the Downton Abbey version - with the lines being delivered by mature actors who knew how to do it. This time, I had read that the production was to be set on a South Pacific island and the four lords were to be multi-billionaires attending a resort there. Ho hum.

  Clearly I was going to need some food prior to viewing the play. As I was again staying at the Hotel du Vin in Rother street and having previously enjoyed an excellent dinner there, it seemed most convenient and  pleasing to dine there again in its Bistro du Vin. The service was spot on on this occasion having had its ups and downs on my last visit. Wishing not to overindulge prior to an expected ordeal in the theatre I went straight to the main course. This was very well cooked, meaty, tasty hake, with a successfully crispy skin accompanied by a gorgeous velouté riven through with the delicious flavour of tarragon and crispy deep fried capers. The Parmentier potatoes looked a little anaemic but were enjoyable and well cooked all the same.

  I could not resist the opportunity to have tarte tatin for my dessert though I was a little anxious as the fruit used in the ‘tarte tartin of the day’ was billed as being pineapple. Tarte tatin, in my humble opinion, only really works with apple, and pear if you’re lucky. In the end this turned out to be a pineapple tart rather than a tarte tatin - the pastry was light and reasonably successful but the tarte had none of the unctious gooeyness and caramelisation that one would lust after in a triumphant tarte tatin. To make matters worse the chef had opted to place a rather naff demi-Maraschino cherry at the centre of the warm slices of pineapple adding to the impression that the restaurant was not offering sophisticated fare. On the other hand perhaps the tart might have been dreamed up to serve as a witty little joke by the chef though I doubt it.

  Needless to say my love’s labours for the tart were lost as they were for the play itself - this production being best described as ‘energetic’ and left at that.