418. Back To The Jewellery Quarter (2) - Dinner At Txikiteo.

Recently Txikiteo (pronounced Chikiteo) in Frederick Street was added to The Good Food Guide list of recommended restaurants. It is located in the same spot as the former Tierra which had also found a place in The Good Food Guide though I had never got around to visiting it (but it has now reappeared in 1000 Trades located in the building opposite Txikiteo so maybe I will still get to visit Tierra Tacos as it is now named one day in the future though it is not included in the increasingly eccentric and eclectic Good Food Guide).

The Good Food Guide is striving to be cool, trying perhaps a little too hard, a sort of Anti-Michelin Guide which remains unpleasantly snooty and elitist and far too self-aware in a Gallic sort of way. The Good Food Guide published its list of 100 Best Local Restaurants on 24 July - only three West Midlands restaurants made it to the roll call - the Kilpeck Inn in Herefordshire, Chapter in Edgbaston where the cooking, at least on my previous visit, has its faults and the very trendy Tropea in Harborne which seemed to me to be alright when I lunched there but certainly not achieving the heights that countless others, including the Michelin inspectors, feel that it has reached.

But I digress. I was back in the Jewellery Quarter in Frederick Street where decades ago, as a schoolboy, I used to work in the summer holidays as an office boy in a crumbling costume jewellery factory for the princely sum of £4 17s 6d for a forty hour week. But it kept me out of mischief. As I ambled down from the tram station past the flamboyant Chamberlain clock stranded as it is in the middle of a busy road junction, then past the building which had been home to the makers of Miracle Jewellery where my teenage summer days had been passed in meaningful employment (the workers there used to joke asking the question, “Why do they call it Miracle?”, the answer being, “Because it’s a miracle anyone ever buys it”, I took in the change which had occurred in the area - young, smug-looking people who must have just finished work for the day (if they had ever started it) sitting at outdoor tables of various bars, glugging cocktails, the men unshaven and dressed in shorts flashing their tattooed legs, the women, if anything somewhat smarter I thought, all so different from the days when the Jewellery Quarter was a hive of activity and productiveness from where products were despatched to around the world. Plus ça change.

Regardless, Txikiteo looked appealing with its pink frontage and deep yellow signage. It was 5PM. I was the first diner to arrive and I had the choice of spot at which to sit. Seating took the form of fashionable circular high tables with high chairs to match. Personally, I prefer a good old fashioned table with its legs a normal length and no accompanying sensation of high anxiety but I was quite comfortable and deduced that this was quite an effective way of using the limited space available. I liked the white tiled walls which were used as a notice board of what was on offer. I felt very comfortable in Txikiteo from the word go.

  The menu was made up  mainly of small plates - though Spanish-Basque style food was on offer the rather clichéd ‘tapas’ was avoided -  so familiar in the mid-2020s and enabling a vaguely anarchic structure to the meal so food came out of the kitchen when it was ready not in the form of starter-main-dessert and all the little tiddly bits in between them. Txikiteo was demonstrating all the features of new dining out - little structure to the meal, no formality, rusticity, a blast of foreign exoticism. And it worked.

Of the dishes I chose, the first to emerge from the kitchen, and understandably quite rapidly, was a pretty plate of heirloom tomatoes - red, yellow, purple (the colours of the flag of the socialist republic in Spain in the 1930s but I don’t suppose anyone was aware of the significance of the colours and I doubt any statement was being made by serving them). This was an enjoyable, light summer dish. Choosing to eat tomatoes in Britain is fraught with the risk - nay, the likelihood - that flavour is not going to be an English tomato’s strong point. But whether or not these particular examples of Anglotomatoism were even a stone’s throwaway in flavour terms from their Mediterranean cousins was hard to judge as the sherry vinegar and garlic dressing rendered unto them a pleasing and satisfying flavour. 

The main meat dishes - steak or pork - came as ‘big plates’. I chose the pork chop with Pedro Ximenez sauce. This was a robust, rustic, generously portioned dish, the pork acceptably tender and the sauce giving it just the right note of flavour. Alongside it I dived into a plate of equally generously portioned ‘new potatoes’, baked in their skins and served with an excellent mojo verde (a Canarian green sauce made up from coriander, garlic, cumin and olive oil. This was all a great pleasure, 

  Finally, though I lusted after some Basque cheesecake, I could not instead resist opting to indulge myself in a large bowl of scintillating Morello cherry sorbet. A powerfully flavoured dessert, just right for a vaguely warm summer evening.

Rating;- 🌛🌛🌛🌛  25 July 2024.

417. Back To The Jewellery Quarter (1) - Lunch at Folium.

 

  The Jewellery Quarter is certainly the place to dine at present - The Wilderness, Albatross Death Cult, Folium and now Txikiteo, located at the site in Frederick Street of the previous well thought of Tierra which I never quite around to visiting.

  Firstly lunch at the always delightful Folium. I have described visits there on several previous occasions but it’s always satisfying to describe the most recent experience at this soothing, delightful establishment (see also Blog 409). It’s just nice to turn up there, be greeted in a calm and welcoming way, to have the table set out taking notice of one’s previously chosen menu - short or long tasting - to order one’s gin and tonic and take advice on what wine to sip. It’s my favourite restaurant in the city, I think it really is, to go and enjoy a relaxed meal in a lovely modern little restaurant with really excellent food - each dish immaculately cooked and presented and, delicious. There’s probably a Folium in Heaven for those who’ve been good enough to get there. Outside, it was one of those rare hot days in this mediocre summer, but the air conditioning was on and did its work in making this visit to Folium even more of a joy. 

Sadly, whenever I visit there, few other people seem to realise what a gem this place really is. This particular Friday lunchtime, apart from myself, there was just a couple dining there. The restaurant should be overflowing with diners. I was interested to hear that many of those who do dine there are older people who have moved to the Jewellery Quarter rather than the cool young JQ flat dwellers whom one would expect to be the dining denizens of the area.

In several previous blogs I have mentioned and included photographs of the exquisite amuse gueule- the little cylindrical burnt onion crisp containing a small blob of rich, heavenly, exquisitely smooth and well flavoured chicken liver parfait and also the fabulous, freshly baked sourdough served with salt and cultured butter - the bread’s crust as wickedly crispy as anything dreamed up in the bakeries on Olympus where it is served to Zeus and stops him hurling thunderbolts. The warm savoury custard served with the most deeply flavoursome roast chicken broth and generous shavings of Wiltshire truffle has now really taken hold of my soul and the line caught mackerel was gorgeous though again, as on my previous visit, the English wasabi was more subtle than I felt it needed to be.

Then supremely perfectly textured Cornish lobster with a fine and tasty lobster head sauce and the little beignet, which I have grown to love very much, for mopping the remains of the sauce.

  The meat main course was outstanding. The A5 was wagyu was delicious and the knife cut into it as though it were the proverbial butter. Beside it was a fabulous item - a piece of endive grilled and then marinated so that when served it was brought with it the shock of sweetness and, just at the end, the hit of bitterness that we might have expected all along. This was flavourshock without doubt. Then the two desserts - the half frozen yuzu filled with zinging yuzu icecream, a true palate cleanser and then the familiar toasted hay icecream with texture from puffed rye and the perfectly judged sweetness of caramel.

  Two mignardises brought up the rear - a gorgeous freshly baked brown butter Madeleine paired with Cotswolds whisky cream, like ambrosia - something else to persuade Zeus not to exercise his thunderbolt throwing area - .and the sticky butterfly macaron (though this time the wings had gone missing), gorgeously gooey in texture, giving shelter to cep fudge.

There is nowhere better to eat in Birmingham. Ben Tesh remains a craftsman and artist of the first order.

Rating:- 🌞🌞🌞   15 June 2024.

416. Events, Dear Boy, Events. 2024. Part 2 July To December.

 See Blog 400 (January to June).

7 July - The Good Food Guide announces the inclusion of 4 West Midlands restaurants in its pages - Adam’s (Birmingham, rated ‘Very Good’), The Slamwich Club (Stoke-on-Trent, rated ‘local gem’) and Sam and Jak (Cirencester, rated ‘Good’) and Docket in Whitchurch, rated ‘Very Good’).

14 July - Laghi’s in Five Ways announces that it will close in 10 August after serving Italian dishes for 7 years as well as having hosted a recent collaboration with Stuart Deeley, Executive Chef of Smoke at Hampton Manor.

14 July - The Good Food Guide announced three new West Midlands additions to its website - Txikiteo in the Jewellery Quarter, The Venture In at Ombersley and Little Dumpling King in Stoke-on Trent.

24 July - Only 3 West Midlands restaurants are named in The Good Food Guide’s list of Best 100 Local Restaurants - The Kilpeck Inn in Herefordshire, Chapter in Edgbaston and Tropea in Harborne.

4 August - The Good Food Guide finally adds Simpsons to its list of recommended restaurants with a startlingly ungenerous ‘Good’ rating as well as adding the Italian-style Trentina located in Mary Street in the Jewellery Quarter which it rates to be a ‘Local Gem’.

16 August 2024 - Good Food Guide adds The Bell at Selsley in Selsley near Stroud in the most southerly part of Gloucestershire, not far from the border of the West Midlands and the West Country.

28 August 2024 - The Michelin Guide includes Albatross Death Cult as one of only 6 British restaurants in its August list of recommended restaurants.

407. Rough Cut At The Wilderness.

 

  After a week in the West Country it was back to Birmingham and I was soon back in the swing of things with a trip to The Wilderness to experience in its opening week its radical new approach and the remarkable Rough Cut menu. There was much to get excited about and there was some fun to be had from carrying out instructions and writing scores and comments about the meal on to sheets provided. There’s a worry that Chef will hate you if you are too negative about a dish, even if you’re trying to be constructive and honest, or if one is gushingly positive, which you may indeed feel quite legitimately about a particular dish, that one may then just be seen as being ridiculously sycophantic. A balance is needed and restraint.

  That said, there was little to be negative about.

  These were experimental dishes created to help fashion future menus at The Wilderness and, I expect, also at Albatross Death Cult. They are very much of the mid-2020s - British-Japanese-European which is just about the era we are dining out in at present. They were full of Flavourshock, mostly not too shocking but one at least a little too shocking in flavour. The chefs were having fun creating them and and the diners were having fun seeing where these chaps were going with all this.

  My dining companion and I scored the dishes highly. I stumbled at one hurdle - I found the BBQ lobster a little tough and fell at another -  the flavour of the lovely mangalitza was lost to the overwrought char siu. Exquisite ingredients need gentle handling and little apart from themselves on the plate to ensure they can give the diner what they’re looking for.

  Dessert was new to me - exquisite, thin slices of red and white strawberries embellished with a cold tomato consommé. I’d eat that everyday. And then the Thai Green curry Mr Whippy-style ice cream with yuzu jelly. That ice cream is magnificent.

  I look forward to the next stage of evolution of The Wilderness. Ever original, ever tantalising, always exciting, ever delicious, occasionally challenging, always thrilling.

Rating:- 🌞🌞

415. Zoomers And Flavour Shock.

 

  I am an old man who likes to dine out in good food restaurants. I am a student of food trends but only because one may eventually tire if one eats too much of the same sort of thing time and time again and consequently I want to have something different which therefore necessitates knowing what the latest food trend is, and sometimes these trends come thick and fast. I am not a dining expert, though my experience is quite broad especially in the West Midlands, and therefore I sometimes discover that I’ve missed something that perhaps I should have picked up on some time ago.

The 6 dining trends

  Today was one of those days. I saw something on the internet where, some months ago, The Caterer was reporting predicted food trends for the coming year and top of the list was Foodshock. Nope, I didn’t know what that was. I’ve tried reading about it but it’s all still very vague to me. Apparently it’s all about what Generation Z (is that pronounced Zed or Zee?, perhaps someone will tell me) wants. I get terribly confused about which Generation is which but, no doubt to their pleasure, Z seems to be those who will be entering the early stages of Middle age. 

  It’s the work from home generation who have never known physical work though they may have paid a lot of money to carry out physical activity in a gymnasium with a ‘trainer’ or even a ‘personal trainer’ to oversee their exertions. They’re moving out of their flats in cool neighbourhoods because the demands of parenthood, to which they’ve come relatively late, have landed on their doorsteps and they’re moving into houses, preferably in better neighbourhoods, which their swollen salaries earned from sitting in front of a computer and answering text messages and phone calls and sitting in Zoom meetings, have enabled them to purchase. And of course they can afford to dine out, quite frequently in quite expensive, even the swankiest, restaurants in town and in the coolest suburbs, where they mingle with aging hipsters, all of them swigging their negronis.

  Anyway, I read that Flavour Shock is just what Generation Z is looking for. I hope they recognise it when they find it. I think I have. Last week I went again to Albatross Death Cult and I think that glorious restaurant must be a very real manifestation of Flavour Shock. Apart from myself it seemed that all the other diners there were of either Generation Z or late Millenials. I doubted that there was anyone there under 35 (though a flamboyant gay character who held his wine glass as far down the stem as he could manage but with the added affectation of holding his little finger out while holding his glass - rather as middle class Edwardian woman once did with their tea cups - looked nearer forty despite his lustrous hair. I enjoyed watching them all and chatting with a lovely couple obviously in their mid-thirties - he with early streaks of grey appearing in the hair over his temples - who had found life in Birmingham cheaper than the capital from which they had moved and had been to most notable restaurants that one could think of. 

And here we all were experiencing the big flavours of the small plates that Alex Claridge and his crew had come up with. Each dish could be described as delivering a flavour shock so I guess that dining at A_D_C is the best way to experience flavour shock. And I like it. Riverine Rabbit has the same effect, though perhaps slightly less extreme than the effect at A_D_C and with them being my favourite restaurants in the city at present, I guess I could claim to an honorary member of Generation Z, as immersed in Flavour Shock as anyone in the city (though I am at least double the age of any genuine ‘Zoomer’).

The Albatross menu on this occasion was very similar to that previously reported though there were one or two changes - out had gone the lobster dish to be replaced by gorgeous cod with yuzu and miso but not one course out of the sixteen served, failed to give pleasure, frequently extreme pleasure..

Cod, yuzu, miso  Flavour shock

Sea bass, jalapeño, cordal olive. Flavour shock!

Plump, meaty mussels, back pepper & iberico. Flavour shock!

sushi rice cream, nori tuiles. Dreamy, dreamy dessert.

And now, I’m wondering, after Flavour shock, what comes next? Regardless, for the present, we’ll eat what we are given and will certainly be glad of it. But I must look up what Irresistible vegetables is going to mean for me.