237. Sunday Lunch At Cheal’s Of Henley.

   As touched upon in Blog 236 the evening before I had endured a pretty rotten meal (or two thirds-meal as the dessert was never served to me) of roast beef with all the trimmings at a hotel which shall not be named on the outskirts of Stratford as part of one of those exercises in human endurance which we face in our lives - the university year reunion. It was a wonderful example of how, amid the bubbling hype surrounding our high grade restaurants, there is a rotting underbelly of British hospitality which can not cope, or does not want to cope, with providing well prepared food at a not totally savage price. It is a part of the industry that functions but serves without any love for its produce and its customers. Like the poor, I suppose, the hopeless part of hospitality will be with us always despite the daily tirades which find themselves published on the internet from barely literate Tripadvisers whose opinions are as useless as Lucy The Labrador’s (she’ll eat anything without complaint).

 But that was yesterday. Today I returned to the wonderful Cheal’s of Henley for Sunday lunch with much hope in my heart and great expectations. My hopes and expectations were not to be dashed.

  Firstly the price is ridiculous but I’m not complaining - £47.50 for olives, 2 amuses gueules (works of art in themselves), bread, three stupendous courses and a petit four - extraordinary good value for the quality of the dishes served. 

  I mentioned the wonderful amuses gueules and bread in Blog 223 so suffice it to say that these introductions to the meal were as delicious as they had been on my previous visit. My starter was a fine pea risotto with salty Windrush goat’s cheese, pea shoots and little pickled adding a sharp sweetness to really lift the dish. Very good.

  Then the roast. Spectacular. A plate of several slices of beautifully cooked 38 day aged beef rump cap with all the trimmings, each element beautifully served in little pans and pots. Everything was perfectly correct - the garden peas and hispi cabbage, fine slices of carrot, exquisitely crispy roast potatoes - they were an absolute picture, startlingly tasty cauliflower in a robust cheese sauce, root vegetable mash and a grade 1 Yorkshire pudding with a fabulously delicious gravy. Mustard and horseradish sauce were not forgotten. The plate of beef looked like a mother hen surrounded by her chicks.

  Cheal is the master of using ingredients which have long been known to work well together and to use them to produce something pleasingly comforting but vividly exciting. I almost fell off my chair in anticipation of my choice of dessert - a brilliantly alcoholic rum baba with everything that should go with it - little cubes of pineapple and mango and drops of passion fruit with coconut espuma and coconut sorbet. This was a lovely dessert, the sponge of the baba was light and the whole was pleasurable.

  Finally along came a delightful truffle as a petit four and my pleasure was complete.

   Cheal’s of Henley us at the top of its game - comfortably welcoming, immaculate service, a maestro of a restaurant manager and fine, delicious, really quite faultless food coming of a kitchen where the chef is exactly on the right track. It could well be the best restaurant in the West Midlands.

236. Shakespeare’s Birthday Lunch 2022.

   After 2 fallow years when the COVID-19 pandemic prevented the Council in Stratford from holding their otherwise annual Shakespeare’s Birthday celebrations, everything was on again - the parades, the church service and for me, the most anticipated of all - the Shakespeare Birthday lunch, held once more in giant tents in the grounds of the theatre gardens having been very comfortably housed previously for three consecutive years in a very agreeable hotel on the river bank. But of that, more later.

  Lucy The Labrador and I arrived on the eve of the big event and I was pleased to have managed to reserve a table at The Woodsman which is a pleasingly atmospheric place to lounge over a robust meal on a very comfortable spring Friday evening. The Woodsman is undoubtedly my favourite dining place in Stratford. I used to love No 9 Church Street and was very happy at No. 33 The Scullery but their numbers have all been counted up and there is little else in Stratford to match the pleasure of dining at The Woodsman now. I feel like a bad person for not admiring the Michelin-starred Salt as much as others do but there we go, it’s one of my little quirks. On the other hand I have recently developed a little place in my heart for Lamb’s of Sheep Street and there’s also a place in the same part of my anatomy for the really rather good Italian restaurant on Ely Street, Sorrento. So I am never short of anywhere to eat in Stratford on my visits there.

  And so to The Woodman. After a delicious daiquiri which had the rather unfortunate colour of a glass of meths and some very fine bread indeed (slices of ultra-fresh focaccia and soda bread with marmite butter and lovely cultured biputter), I thoroughly enjoyed my starter of house cured and smoked Chalk Farm sea trout served aptly with horseradish and buttermilk, nicely cooked beetroot and grilled turnip tops of just the right texture. A great dish.

  I ordered Grilled chop of Lavinton lamb as my main course and after a false start of an appealing plate of  wood-fired cod arriving at the table (which looked delicious and which I would have been delighted to eat) the dish which I had ordered arrived looking very alluring. The chop, exquisitely tender and pleasingly tasty was accompanied by a lovely lamb rissole on a stick as well as grilled asparagus, confit artichokes and grilled turnip tops and slices of pickled red onion and tiny game chips. There was nothing out of place and it was a course as good as I had hoped for.

  Finally for dessert, I chose Oat milk panna cotta with little juliennes of apple, a sweet and nicely cinnamon-spicy unctuous raisin sauce and a little crumble. This was tasty and very enjoyable.

  Apart from being served with the wrong main course, which didn’t bother me at all, there were a couple of irritations when my carafe of water was taken away three quarters of the way through the meal and was never to return and service gradually slowed to a glacial pace as the evening went by.

  And so, to bed. Perchance to dream.

  And then it was Shakespeare’s birthday. And St. George’s Day. The weather was very temperate, the celebratory procession through the town went very well and lunch was highly memorable. After two years of being denied the pleasure, and expense, of hosting the Shakespeare Birthday Lunch, local sponsors, the jewellers Pragnell, were pushing the boat out. The enormous marquee in the RSC gardens was decorated magnificently and right from the time of arrival it was impossible not to enter into the party spirit. Glitzy stars there were aplenty - Dame Judi Dench, Dame Joanna Lumley, Stephen Fry, Alexander Armstrong, Maureen Lipman, the author Howard Jacobson and possibly one or two others I may have forgotten and the Birmingham actor Adrian Lester was there to receive his Pragnell award for his contribution to the world of Shakespeare.

  With all the star spotting to be done the food itself may seem not all that important but it was very good and sensibly portioned which was good news as I was also due to go out to dinner in the evening, of which more later.

  The food was a pleasure and illustrated just how over the top some present trendy restaurants can be, Three simple but well executed courses which is a marvel as the kitchen was catering for 4-500 guests.

  Happily the starter was new season Vale of Evesham asparagus, grilled beautifully and served with fresh goat’s curd, crème fraiche, lemon dressing and charmingly locally foraged chive flowers.so simple and yet so enjoyable.

  Then the main course of rump of excellent, nicely flavoured Cotswolds lamb with sand carrot purée, grilled Calcot onion and wild garlic oil. The dish was cooked beautifully. There were little pieces of mint leaves but I should have liked the flavour of mint to have been a little more intrusive.

  

  Unfortunately, as I was busy photographing celebrities, I forgot to photograph the delightful dessert of pavlova with rhubarb, blood orange and grated chocolate but it was very good and pleasingly light and was an excellent end to a memorable meal

  And just who was at the lunch? Well, a few A list celebrities without a doubt - Dame Judi Dench, Dame Joanna Lumley, Stephen Fry, Howard Jacobson, Alexander Armstrong, Maureen Lipman, Adrian Lester and probably one or two others. Little wonder I forgot to photograph the dessert. The day before Judi Dench and Kenneth Branagh had been awarded the Freemanship of the town and so one may expect one day to see Dame Judi driving her flock of sheep down, er, Sheep Street I assume.

  In the evening I went to a reunion of elderly doctors at some overpriced hotel on the outskirts of Stratford. While it was entertaining to try to guess who were these much changed people I had known in my youth the meal was a perfect illustration of just how awful English catering can still be. After a promising starter of smoked salmon (which the kitchen would have had little chance to maul to death) a vile main course of gruesome beef accompanied by an Aunt Bettie’s Yorkshire pudding, claggy mashed potato which had an air of inauthenticity about it, a barely-cooked carrot and mildly unpleasant green beans closed my meal as I was denied my preordered panna cotta dessert because I had visited “the facilities” while it was being served. I was offered a sticky toffee pudding which was the last thing I wanted after a day of dining out and as I declined that option the waiter in charge moved on unapologetically and unconcerned. Sometimes, away from our high flying restaurants, it is quite easy to relive the gastronomic and service horrors of the 1950s and 60s. And at a rather higher price than those horrors cost back then.

235. Dining At The Grand.

  

  There’s no doubt that cocktails in Madeleine and dining in Isaac’s at The Grand Hotel in Birmingham are rather special whether or not the food is any good. I’ve thought that Isaac’s is a missed opportunity in its New York-diner guise rather than in a classic, rather stately English alter ego persona but that’s just me I suppose; I’ve just read too much of the writing of Nathanial Newnham-Davis whose time has long passed and I have visions of grand dining rooms full of smart people dining off Escoffier-inspired cuisine rather than early 2020s casualness, American scoff, noisy music, tattooed arms and upmarket burgers, hot dogs and, er, lobster Newburg. I am forced to acknowledge that the Newnham Davis experience is not really for this present age. And yet…..

  But for decor and atmosphere Madeleine and Isaac’s are not to be missed even on a slow Wednesday evening when everyone’s dashed off to Europe to catch up on their continental experiences which they have missed for the past two-and-a-bit years, leaving the second city’s centre to its denizens who have only just arrived in the country and hardly want to be on their way out of it again. First an excellent Margarita in the soothing comfort of Madeleine. Such pleasure.

  Then, down a floor to Isaac’s. It really is very good (see photograph at head of this Blog). I start off with a generous portion of excellent house-cured lox served with tomato and onion on excellent rye bread with a generous layer of cream cheese. This was a grand dish. Then one of my great loves, hot dog - one of the finest frankfurters I recall eating - with sauerkraut, red cabbage coleslaw, sorry, slaw, ketchup (I declined the mustard) and really excellent thin chips, nicely salted and acceptably crispy. Such fun! 

  Finally for dessert, a mildly bitter New York cheesecake with splendidly sour macerated cherries though a little more sweetness might have been helpful in addition to the vanilla ice cream. Still, not bad. 

 Return visits to The Mount by Glynn Purnell in Henley in Arden and Toff’s in Solihull. In fact it has been two return trips to The Mount, both not quite up to that heady first day when Glynn Purnell was on site and it was all very exciting. The second visit, as mentioned in Blog 234, involved a pleasurable Atlantic prawn first course, a satisfactory but rather dull chicken main course and missed crème caramel as recounted previously. On the third visit I was determined to relive the great pleasure of my first visit - I ordered once more the truly delicious cheese custard starter (my lunch companion was delighted with his scotch egg), I gluttonised on the very generously portioned and optimally rustic pork cutlet and finally got my teeth around the long awaited crème caramel. My dining companion chose the cod and chips which was remarkably unimpressive with mediocre batter covering the admittedly nicely cooked cod and middling chips and a tiny helping of unsensational mushy peas. 

  The Mount quite naturally raises great expectations as part of the Glynn Purnell brand but does not quite live up to them. These are early days and the restaurant is full and the short term looks promising for Purnell’s latest enterprise but given the prices, it will need to raise its game in the medium term if the punters are going to keep coming back. And present commodity prices and the yoke of inflation could pose a major threat to any restaurant’s future.

  And so, a return visit also to Rob Palmer’s Toff’s in Solihull, this time accompanied by my dining companion who had ordered the disappointing cod and chips at The Mount. The menu was largely unchanged from my previous visit which is not surprising given how recently I had dined there. It was a damp spring Tuesday evening but most of the tables were occupied and later Chef Aktar Islam of Opheem fame and two of his team came in to sit at the Chef’s table and dine and to chat with Palmer.

  It’s not surprising that I should report that most of the dishes were exemplary on this second visit - my dining companion agreed with me - and while I derived least pleasure from the monkfish (not because of its cooking but just because it was monkfish) we were both mesmerised by the perfection of the cooking of the duck. The weakest course was undoubtedly the duck ragu (which itself was delicious) in a brioche ‘doughnut’ which was far too heavy. I thought that the dish would be improved by serving it in choux pastry and my companion thought it would be better in something crispy - no matter, we really did not enjoy the brioche. The other courses are described in Blog 231. The splendid scallop had been substituted by a mackeral ceviche (presumably a sign of the financial times but this was a truly fabulous dish and what had been lost in the luxuriousness of the ingredient has been substituted by the brilliance of the dish’s preparation.

  Just as for The Mount, these are very early days for Toff’s. Some honing and fine tuning is needed but given that Solihull needs a high quality fine dining restaurant and it has a captive well-off local residential population it should prosper..

  Wednesday 20 April - The Michelin Guide announced the latest additions to its list of recommended restaurants - it is no surprise to find that no West Midlands restaurants feature in it - none at all have received a mention since the Guide began this monthly exercise last summer. The five restaurants receiving recognition equally unsurprisingly are located in London (2), Scotland (1), the Michelin inspectors’ much loved Republic of Ireland (1) and Liverpool (1, presumably to irritate Mancunians as they fume in their gastronomic wilderness).

  Finally, a photograph taken from a Twitter posting of a recently opened and already locally respected restaurant in Harborne. I am being curmudgeonly here but is it really necessary to put a garnish of blood-veined sorrel, coriander and other herbage on what I take to be breakfast? Aren’t chefs just going a little bit mad with this plague of green stuff? I really don’t want a herb garden on my fried egg. And I certainly don’t want to see any more peashoots (see Blog 228). Honestly, I don’t.

234. Oyster Club And The Mount Revisited.

 

  Quick reports on repeat visits to a couple of restaurants which have given me much pleasure in the past, one last September and the other only days after my first fabulous experience there.

  Firstly, lunch at The Oyster Club by Adam Stokes. In Blog 181 I reported an excellent meal of fish charcuterie platter followed by a stupendous roast sole on the bone. So much had I enjoyed myself that I could not fight back the need to revisit these two lovely dishes. Alas both courses were shadows of their former selves. The food at the restaurant is far from cheap which is forgivable if the food measures up to the price. The charcuterie, while being as tasty as before, was served with no generosity - as can be seen in the ‘then’ and ‘now’ photographs above - compared with last year the fish was sliced so thinly that flavour was barely discernible. This was appallingly poor value for £15.

  Then the sole with razor clams, grapes and verjus sauce (£34.50). This might be described as a less impressive specimen than that I adored back in 2021 (see ‘then’ and ‘now’ photograph below). The texture of the fish was less firm and the presentation of the dish seemed somewhat disorderly in comparison with the first time I ate it. The fish was certainly tasty and succulent but remarkably unremarkable. There was not the degree of consistency between the two dishes that I should have liked to have enjoyed. My lunch companion and I shared some unremarkable chips which would have been fine had they not cost £2.50p per half dozen and some leeks (with Calcot onion and pancetta) which were ridiculously overpriced for what they were (also £5). Things were not going well.

  However we battled on, choosing with a certain amount of thrilled anticipation, to share a tarte tatin served with vanilla ice cream (£24). I failed to photograph the dessert but it was not a happy creation. Instead of slices of apple a large lump was placed in the centre of the pastry which was a little flabby and the whole had not the unctuous stickiness to which I had so looked forward.

  There’s little more to say. This had been a meal riven through with disappointment for which we paid a not inconsiderable sum.

  As a footnote it’s worth noting that a couple of days afterwards there was a rare tweet from the West Midlands by a Michelin inspector who must have lost his way to Dublin where you would normally expect Michelin inspectors to be enjoying themselves and that individual had clearly been at the Oyster Club shortly after us. From the comment, I must conclude that I chose the wrong dishes. To be fair, my companion had thoroughly enjoyed his starter of whole roasted king prawns with spiced lobster bisque (£18.50).

  The next day, again with pleasurable anticipation, I returned to Henley-in-Arden to pay a second visit to Glynn Purnell’s new country version of his former bistro in Newhall Street which is labelled ‘a pub’ but is really a very nice, quite large modern restaurant off a small olde worlde bar (see Blog 230).

  While quaffing a couple of the old Ginger’s Bar classic cocktails, I studied the menu and badly needed to relive the joy of consuming the Cheddar custard and sweet and sour tomatoes followed by the Wiltshire pork cutlet but girding up my inner strength I decided I really must try some other dishes and therefore chose a pleasing starter of Atlantic prawns with caviar, little cubes of apple and croutons. Then I chose perhaps slightly over-cooked but generously portioned roast chicken with a lovely side dish of tubetti pasta with a generous covering of pecorino, wild garlic and a deliciously sweet scorched pickled lettuce. Chicken is chicken and this was not the most exciting of chicken dishes I have had but it was very pleasing.

  I requested crème caramel for dessert but I was informed that chef was not happy with how they had turned out that evening and with time running short before the next hourly train back to Birmingham I thought it best regretfully to pass on the course and head uphill to Henley Station.

  Henley has a lovely old station and is a bit of tourist sight in its own right. It presently has a series of posters on display, one for every station on the line, and the Small Heath Station poster is fun depicting as it does the theme of Peaky Blinders.

  The present series of the BBC television programme Great British Menu 2022 has finally come to an end with chefs from Wales, London, Scotland and Northern Ireland winning to cook dishes at the banquet which was this year mainly to indulge a number of BBC luvvies on the occasion of the Corporation’s centenary. 

  The new panel of judges has been disastrous with the chef Tom Kerridge dominating the other judges with his opinions which are of course a chef’s opinion which, as we know from previous years, is a completely different viewpoint from that of the people who eat the food. While Nisha Katona has made some useful contributions that is something that can not be said of the ninny who is there to tell jokes (and little more of him is expected) and who should go the way of the previous comedian who hosted the programme and was seen for one season and never seen again. Andi Oliver on the other hand has been an excellent host and it was warming to see her great the two previous long-running judges, Oliver Peyton and Matthew Forte, who knew what they were talking about and made watching the programme worthwhile.

  It is pleasing to note that the Central region finalist (though an East Midlander), Sally Abé, as runner-up, did prepare food at the banquet in the food of the canapés and pre-desserts and rather good they looked too. She carried out her tasks calmly, charmingly and pleasantly and was it a delight to watch her work surrounded as she was by the broiling gallons of competitive testosterone put out by the male competitors.

Sally Abé.