The year has passed so quickly and I realised that I had not visited Adam’s. I seemed to have spent most of my dining out time this year sitting at a table (or a counter) somewhere in the Jewellery Quarter. Since I last visit it, Adam’s had acquired a duo of Head Chefs - Adam Wilson and Simil Gurung with Adam Stokes remaining the Executive Chef. So, Adam’s it was.
I arrived purposely early so I could relax (all by myself) in the comfortable and characterful bar area imbibing a Monkey 47 and tonic. The bar area has the modern chicness and smartness of the rest of the restaurant but is relatively small, bright and relaxing. Somehow it’s seems just right and I have resolved that when dining at Adam’s, for full satisfaction and the opportunity to dissolve the cares of the outside world and prepare one for the fine food to come, it is virtually de rigeur to start off in the calmness of the bar.
Then one is led into the familiar spacious, elegant dining room, the smartly dressed front of house staff, attending to one’s needs and intentions with politeness mixed with an optimal amount of informal small talk. Adam’s gets the balance right. It’s impossible not to know that one is dining in the right place. There’s a good range of menus - a three course lunch alongside either five or seven course tasting menus.
And so to the first course - Orkney scallop which was pleasingly flavoured but I would have liked a firmer texture to it - paired with variations of the use of peach, This worked very well and gave me much satisfaction. Next there was a piece of rabbit ballotine which was tender and tasty and pleasingly moist and it was accompanied by a langoustine which I thought needed a little more bite to it and delicious champagne and wasabi espuma with the wasabi scoring inoffensive and enjoyable little hits of heat from time to time on my throat. Among all this too was pak choi, which I usually find to have the lowest esteem and least charisma of all the inhabitants of the vegetable cupboard, a sort of culinary Keir Starmer, but here it was really very good. Adam’s has clearly found the way to get me to eat all my pak choi - something I have never managed to do before.
The third course brought lovely pan fried duck liver to the table - rich and creamy - with a ‘spice sauce’ and figs in their various forms as well as toasted hazelnuts for flavour and texture though thought their contribution was not as great as one would have hoped. This was luxurious and for a moment I felt I was a late Victorian diner, dear old Nathaniel Newnham-Davis for example, bathing in rich and extravagant dishes as one should when one gets the chance. Such pleasure.
Halibut, finely cooked and presented, was served with an orange and saffron sauce and a delightful helping of white crab meat, tasty crab sauce and courgette which lent some texture to the dish but was entirely lacking in flavour. Fish and orange, at least to me, sounds somewhat unusual but this certainly worked well and gave great pleasure. Then the main meat course was presented in the form of aged beef from Herefordshire with an excellent rich Bordelaise sauce. The accompanying aliums were less successful particularly the charred leek which was too inconsequential in size and too charred to enable any pleasure to be derived from it. A larger amount of good, soft sweet onion would have been a better route to go and woukd have really drawn out the flavour of the tender beef.
The end approached but before the finale there was a very successful intermediate course to be enjoyed - lovely Zerbinati melon nicely balanced with a truly refreshing lime granita and the very apt presence of young basil leaves. I asked what a Zerbinati melon was precisely, the waitress wasn’t sure but the power of the Internet informed me that the melon is the produce of Oscar Zerbinati, a third generation farmer of these fruits, located in Sermide, Mantua; the plot the produce comes from having previously been the site of an overflow reservoir from the river Po. No matter the intermediate dish did its job and lead in nicely to the full blown dessert of sweet, tasty strawberries, lovely light sponge cake which soaked up the pleasing strawberry sauce, admirable strawberry icecream, happy aerated white chocolate and Marigold leaves, which for once I could actually taste and appreciate their fleeting but noticeable contribution.
The meal ended, two little Mignardises were presented to take home - a gooey salted caramel truffle and a passion fruit chocolate. It’s the little touches that matter.
I noted while eating that unlike many restaurants with their bespoke artisan ceramics, Adam’s has opted to serve its food on clean-looking, shining white ceramics. This results in Adam’s being a restaurant where the food is the talking point and not the crockery.
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