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.