274.Yikouchi At Chancer’s Cafe

 

  The Good Food Guide has gone a little potty this year since it cast aside paper and embraced digital publishing. I’m not entirely sure what its aims are. Is it to identify good food per se or is it to identify the very best of dining experiences? - the two are not precisely the same thing. Has the Guide even defined which of those goals it wishes to achieve? You might say it is titled ‘The Good Food Guide” so in fact you would think that food is what it’s all about but if that’s the case then I demand a spot in the book since I believe that my chilli con carne is “good food’ and people should know about it but whether or not anyone landing on my doorstep would want more such as atmosphere, comfort, choice, spot-on service, opportunity to relax and so on if they were paying more than, say, £20 to eat the food, is a good question.

  To be fair, the editors of the GFG have gone further than ‘food’ in defining their rating of restaurants - they additionally take into account ‘uniqueness’ and ‘welcome’ which are clearly words that embrace more than they initially suggest. Myself, I’m a little anxious about the ‘uniqueness’ element - I don’t really strive to find a ‘unique’ restaurant though I might very well welcome a restaurant wherein the chef has original thoughts on the dishes he prepares. It’s not particularly pleasing to visit restaurants which are clone-like - thoughts of the string of bistros on Sheep Street in Stratford upon Avon spring to mind - but ‘uniqueness’ is a little odd as one of three criteria when rating a restaurant; for instance I could come up with the concept of a restaurant inspired by Dante’s Seventh Circle of Hell - that would be pretty unique I think - should be rated ‘outstanding’ in the uniqueness category - but any steaks cooked there would necessarily be well done and food admirers might not view that outcome as optimal.

  I take a lot of notice of the Good Food Guide these days. The editors and inspectors are doing their best to level up (gastronomically) - they’re here in the West Midlands visiting previously unheard of neighbourhood dining establishments and covering a wide range of cuisines and restaurant styles. Good for them. But are the new places they mention really worth the mention? This is a national guide, not a local publication listing reasonable places to eat if you live there or are perhaps visiting there. Has the Good Food Guide gone too far?

  This appears to be the age of the hipster influencer when it comes to dining out. There are a number of the creatures here in Birmingham, denizens of Harborne or Stirchley (with Moseley falling out of fashion with them as places to live) (see Blog 272)  and it seems that these are the people who are luring food critics and guide inspectors alike to drop in on these suburbs of not immoderate affluence where they themselves have their homes. The question is - are the critics and inspectors right to do so? Well, they have certainly been very positive about some of these suburban dining establishments and so the question now changes to - is this a matter of The Emperor’s new clothes?

  One such restaurant which is rated ‘Very Good’ by GFG which makes it, improbably, one of the 11 best restaurants in Birmingham is Yikouchi at Chancer’s Cafe which is a tiny establishment on a section of the Pershore Road running through scruffy Stirchley (the locals call it ‘the High Street’ which takes pretension to levels only the comfortably off middle class would aspire to - t’was ever so). It isn’t unfair to say that the restaurant doesn’t really look very inviting. But stepping through the door, a rather pleasant and unfussy interior reveals itself and I was certainly made to feel welcome immediately. As was my dog (you can have dog-friendly pubs but dog-friendly restaurants are rare) who sensed the relaxed atmosphere of the place immediately and settled down on the floor beside me and was ready to make the most of things).

  The Good Food Guide and other sources tell us that the chef-patron, James Kirk-Gould, was brought up in Coventry and worked for 6 years teaching English in Beijing with his partner Cassie before working in London and eventually becoming head chef at the Duck and Waffle in Bishopgate in London, the capital’s highest restaurant, in the clouds with prices also in the clouds (well it is London) which makes us appreciate just how lucky we are to be West Midlands diners and not denizens of The Smoke (lobster roll £17 - £12 at the Grand Hotel in Birmingham, roasted scallops £27 - just hand over your bank account, a side dish of carrots £7 and roast potato £8, sea bass £50, I won’t go on). Kirk-Gould, a pleasant-faced, smiling man with a red beard and Cassie who works front of house moved to Birmingham looking for affordable housing and opened the converse of where he has previously worked - a tiny restaurant, definitely on the ground, serving food with which Kirk-Gould had become familiar during his time in China, at prices a tiny fraction of those at the London restaurant at which he had worked. 

  A visit from a real food critic, Jay Rayner of The Guardian, suggested by one of the Birmingham influencers mentioned above, brought the restaurant to national attention and various gourmands and inspectors and critics made their way there and, lo and behold, Yikouchi was getting an impressive rating from the Good Food Guide. 

 Clearly the denizens of Stirchley, in their hipster clothing, barely any male beardless, loved the place too because within a few minutes of my and Lucy the Labrador’s arrival, the place was bulging at the seams. We were nicely settled in and the local hipsters took their places while giving the dog plenty of space to lounge. 

  Meanwhile I spent a couple of seconds perusing the menu (there were two choices, one dish which could be either chicken or cabbage, or both, or a second chicken dish, fried chicken in house chilli oil, which I chose after some discussion with Cassie and instead of having rice with it I settled on the only other available accompaniment of smacked cucumber which was made up of generous-sized cucumber  pieces with chilli oil.

 The fried chicken was stupendous. The batter was perfectly crispy and the chicken inside was as perfectly cooked as one might hope. The house chilli oil had a precise degree of heat, the Szechuan pepper corns had their own heat and flavour and the pleasure increased the further down the bowl I reached as I worked  my way through the pieces of chicken to those that had the most oil on them, A very memorable dish nicely complemented by the cucumber.

  The only dessert available was the fun of a Mr Whippy-style vanilla ice cream with fudge sauce and honeycomb. Really rather enjoyable but hardly contributing to a rating of “Very good”.

  

  I enjoyed sitting at the counter in the window looking out at the goings on outside. For a second or two I thought Stirchley was mimicking perfectly a socialist republic that its residents so aspire to as a long queue formed outside a bread shop with Oxfam shop-clothed residents waiting their turn to be admitted to get their hands on a loaf just as happened in communist states pre-1991 but what I needed to remember that this was Stirchley and that was an artisan bakery and this was the more middling of the Birmingham middle class showing what good taste they have in buying the sort of basic food items items which the working hoi poloi would never appreciate.

  I very much enjoyed my meal at Yikouchi. It was, beyond doubt, quite delicious. But quite how one compares this restaurant on equal terms with those which present multiple complex dishes to their diners, is not clear to me, the Good Food Guide is correct to judge the food very good, the ‘welcome’ is very pleasing and the ‘uniqueness’ is obvious. As I write I am thinking of a date to revisit the restaurant very soon to eat again what this accomplished chef has to offer. But I do feel I want more on my dining out package than this neat little restaurant can give me.

  The restaurant has the air of  a ‘pop-up’ in many ways. I should like to see this excellent food - I say “excellent” admittedly on the experience of one meal alone - being served in grander, more comfortable and more spacious surroundings so that it can be more fully appreciated. I shall be interested to follow how this chef’s story develops over the coming few years.

Rating:- 🌛🌛🌛🌛

270. Eat Vietnam.

 

  Stirchley is reputed to be, according to some newspaper survey or the other, one of the coolest suburbs in Britain. The ‘High Street’, which is actually a section of the Pershore Road, is an ugly, neglected, characterless dump (away from the main thoroughfare there are some lovely green areas and pleasing 1930s estates) and its rundown appearance hasn’t really changed since my boyhood in the 1950s. It is very unattractive. 

  In very recent years however middle-class middling-achievers have moved into Stirchley because, being middling achievers, they are unable to afford property in the more established, expensive suburbs where the better-off socialist middle class would aspire to live, starting with Edgbaston and Moseley and working down to Harborne and Kings Heath. They say that they have brought ‘gentrification’ with them to the area though, since they are not in any way members of the gentry (being in actual fact a population of socialist hipsters, negroni drinkers and women in dungarees, mostly employed in jobs which generally benefit their fellows but little) in the case of Stirchley ‘gentrification’ actually means tarted up small terraced houses where honest workmen lived sixty years ago accompanied by a profusion of cafés and small independent businesses where the denizens of the suburb can learn to bake their own bread, swig negronis and hang out in thirdhand attire bought from charity shops.

 Being very cool, it is not so surprising perhaps that Stirchley and its businesses get reported on by the gullible as being of high quality either by the hipster denizens of the area or by those lured to the area by its reputation for cool. I was certainly surprised to find that The Good Food Guide inspectors were suddenly inflamed by one or two micro-businesses in the area handing out plaudits to unpromising-looking restaurants on the ramshackle high street. 

  First, remarkably, up popped Yikouchi At Chancers Cafe accredited with a GFG ‘Very Good’ rating which makes it one of the Guide’s leading Birmingham restaurants though it is hardly any bigger than a dog kennel, does not offer reservations, and only seems to sell the award-winning food on Fridays. I intend to go there when I get the chance but was not excited by the thought of doing so after squinting through the shop windows to see the restaurant’s interior. The food will have to be very good indeed to convince me that the Good Food Guide inspectors haven’t gone mad.

  Then a second Stirchley restaurant appeared in the Good Food Guide - rated ‘good’ it was Eat Vietnam, a couple of doors along from Chancers Cafe. This place, from the outside at least, appears even more unpromising with the sign of the old greasy spoon cafe which was the previous occupant of the building still very visibly in place and a tiny sign advertising the real name of the restaurant plus a large ugly red and yellow poster dominating the upper part of the building and reading, “FISH SAUCE IS NOT FOR EVERYONE”.

  The Good Food Guide notes that the Chef/owner Ming Nham “was in the music/fashion business before taking to the stoves” and ascribes the “cool soundtrack, buzzy vibe and hipster clientele” to Mr Nham’s former profession. Presumably Ming Nham’s previous occupation also explains the rather unique approach to signage though it has to be said that the interior decor, as I discovered when I visited the restaurant, is without any real amount of artistic eccentricity apart from there being another of the ‘Fish sauce’ epigrams in large letters on one of the walls.

  The welcome by the front of house staff was pleasing and a bottle of water was brought to my table immediately and I was not rushed into ordering a drink or making a choice from the menu. I felt comfortable and cosy on a dreary autumn late afternoon - the GFG notes that Eat Vietnam is a “super-relaxed, friendly and comfortable eatery”.

  There was a sensibly short paper menu plus a blackboard on the wall above my head with the ‘specials’ written on it. Many dishes were small plates though larger dishes were on offer with accompaniments included in the moderate prices. The dishes looked interesting and highly tempting. After a little discussion with the very friendly and helpful waitress I settled on four small plates though it emerged that one of them was not available which was just as well as three proved to be very ample.

  From the board menu I chose pan-fried scallops with potato dauphine and a coconut and scallion sauce. All elements of the dish were delicious and the scallops were nicely cooked and the whole was delightful. I chose from the paper menu, under recommendation, the splendidly tasty spicy, crispy cauliflower, delightfully unctiousness and enhanced with peanut (proof that there is a way to cauliflower heaven for anyone who would not normally wish to eat that vegetable).

  Finally, again from the ‘specials’ board, glazed pork with green beans. The pork was pleasingly tender and the glaze acceptably if subtly tasty. Sesame seeds made a contribution to the taste and texture.

   There are no desserts available apart from three flavours of ice cream sold in, one presumes, bought in cartons. I question whether this is adequate for a GFG-listed restaurant. I chose the pandan-flavoured offering which was pleasant if unremarkable.

  The food was indeed good and well-cooked and presented. The restaurant itself is perfectly apt for its location - a suburb which is home to the self-consciously hipster who in the past might have liked to think of themselves as being Bohemian. A party of about eight arrived while I was there led by a pushy, early middle-aged hipster demanding to be seated in the open air, rather chilly, area in the garden at the back of the restaurant though one or two of of the party, feeling the pleasant warmth of the restaurant itself, looked a little doubtful about the group leader’s decision. Other diners did indeed include a woman dressed in dungarees who looked like a refugee from Greenham Common and I doubt if any diner apart from myself was aged less than forty (and most under thirty).

  The toilet was also ‘round the back’, was clean and workable but had a broken lock and no way of indicating that there was already someone in there carrying out their bodily functions. This summed up the restaurant. The food is good but a lot of small neighbourhood restaurants produce good food. If one lives in Stirchley or its vicinity this is a good, moderately priced, place to eat a filling and tasty meal but I think that the Good Food Guide has been a little generous in elevating it to a place in its hoary pages. The Guide is making a move to be more inclusive of small local dining establishments which would quite reasonably make it into a local guide but I’m not sure that if I came all the way from, say, Leeds I would be all that delighted to consult the GFG and as a result, venture out on an unreliable local bus service on a dark evening to find myself on the scruffy Stirchley main thoroughfare and turning up at this odd little restaurant without proper signage.

  Ming Nham really needs to take the place to a higher level (first of all fix the lavatory lock) before the GFG, or any other guide starts recommending it on a national basis. It feels like the Good Food Guide inspectors had had one negroni too many the evening they visited this establishment. But that does not mean that I shall not return - the food is indeed ‘Good Food’ and the restaurant is dog-friendly which makes a refreshing change and the Labrador would enjoy an evening there sniffing at the vaguely comical Stirchley hipsters even though, in my experience, they tend to be cat fanciers. Rating:- 🌛🌛.

Ming Nham:-