298. Salt. Tempest.

 

  It had been a while since I had last been able to visit Paul Foster’s Salt in Stratford upon Avon. I have paid fewer visits to the town because the number of Shakespeare plays being presented at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre has been considerably reduced in the last year or so and some of the plays have been terrifyingly bowdlerised by its thankfully outgoing ultra-woke production managers (let’s hope the next lot are not even worse) and also because the days on which I was to be in town Salt has been fully booked.

  But now I was back. After a friendly greeting I was sat comfortably at my table in the recently redecorated dining area which could be described as chic rustic. At the small pass area, the chefs were gearing up for the evening and while waiting for the main event to start I discussed what I was going to have to drink with Salt’s enthusiastic and knowledgeable sommelier and nibbled smoked almonds and olives. Two fine amuses gueules followed and then some delightful in-house produced sourdough and butter with yeast fermented now for ten years.

  The first course was a fabulously delicious mushroom consommé full of shimeji mushrooms floating like mermaids in a still sea of deeply flavoured but nuanced mushroom consommé which was so fine that one feels it should be gradually lapped up rather than scooped up in a spoon and bodily delivered to one’s mouth. On top were enjoyably crispy shreds of mushrooms but an egg yolk purée in the depths of the consommé contributed nothing for me at least to this otherwise very special dish. I am a little perplexed about how one purées an yolk but I leave the cooking up to chef and take responsibility for the eating - and the tasting - of it.

  

  The next course was cured Loch Duart salmon served in a very adult way with sea fennel, dill and the lash of kombu powder. Then I chose red emmalle potato mouse textured pleasingly with puffed rice and then a magnificent beef tartare enlivened by charcoal mayonnaise and the earthiness precise tiny cubes of swede. 

    For the main I chose a lovely piece of Isle of Gigha halibut over saddle of fallow deer (which looked magnificent in the cooking which I could view being carried out near the pass and on the plate when presented to the table next to me). The roast halibut was seared to golden, exquisitely accurately cooked and perfectly accompanied by fine plump St Austell mussels and sea vegetables with the most impressively successful piece of crispy fish skin I have been served for a long time. A gem of a dish.

   

  The intermediate course epitomised the sophistication of dishes served at Salt - this brought the clash and cooperation of sweet and savoury together beautifully - goat’s milk ice cream, the sweetness of mango and the dark flavours and crunch of a sesame seed crisp. Finally the meal took its leave of me with a delightful ‘sweet’, outwardly simple one would think, of a remarkable ball of duck egg custard with precisely cooked rhubarb, a tasty rhubarb ice cream and ludicrously indulgent lumps of aerated white chocolate.

  Salt is in the vanguard of sophisticated yet accessible cuisine in the West Midlands. The new decor and the more comfortable seating and even the approachability of the staff help to make a visit to the restaurant pleasurable but the ingenuity and quality of the food served there means that Salt has not only fulfilled its early promised but has  established it as one of the highlights of dining out in the West Midlands region.

Rating:- 🌞🌞🌞

  The day before - 

  Lucy The Labrador and I were in Stratford upon Avon so that I could go to see what I expected to be its RSC’s latest bowdlerised Shakespeare production, this time I expected a mangled version of The Tempest. This gave me the chance to try lunching in the recently opened Prospero Lounge in Bridge Street whose offerings on its enormous menu are drastically eclectic and include an international tapas section, a wide variety of full English breakfasts and a long list of various burgers. 

  The lure was that the dining establishment is dog friendly and Lucy could sit with me and try to tempt me to feed her tidbits from the food on my plate. She has developed this form of emotional blackmail to a fine art, nothing looks more appealing and persuasive than a Labrador’s face when it is in a give-me-your-dinner mode. But a dog is a man’s best friend so by extension a man must be a dog’s best friend and therefore share what is on his plate with his best mate.

  The Prospero Lounge is a large space filled with shabby chic furniture and its walls are lined with a vast number of paintings which are obviously there as some sort of in joke since they seem to have been bought as a job lot from some sort of dire flea market. This a decidedly hipster sort of place - though admittedly far too big in spatial terms - but I can’t think of any hipsters I’ve ever seen in Stratford; it’s the sort of place where scruffy young socialists who have just carried out a couple of hours of canvassing for the local Labour Party Constituency Association will gather after doing so to join in a self-congratulationary comradely latte. But on this particular late lunchtime the customers were none of those - the place was full of better-off pensioners most of whom would never welcome a socialist government no matter what degree of meltdown the Conservative Party descended into. Cost of living crisis - what cost of living crisis?

  As reported in previous Blogs I am not a burger enthusiast but for some reason I had it in my mind that that was what I should order and I was going to do it in style. There were in fact a remarkable and ambitious fifty dishes on the menu (not including side dishes, puddings and cakes) plus cocktails, smoothies, beers, wines milkshakes, coffees, teas and so on. This all looked like a recipe for disaster.

  When the dog and I arrived many of the tables needed to be cleared - it was not an attractive sight. Still we found a table in the pleasingly warm dining area near the large windows from where we could watch Stratford passing by. After a prolonged study of the Bible-length menu I went to the counter and ordered a vanilla milkshake and the most ambitious of the burgers - the so-called Smokey Joe. The milkshake arrived in a large milk bottle with a straw that was irritatingly not long enough to reach the bottom of that particular container but the drink was pleasingly tasty and the vanilla flavour was delightfully discernible.

  The Smokey Joe burger arrived not longed afterwards. The menu describes it as, “6oz beef patty, spiced beef brisket, chorizo, lettuce, tomato, red onion, American cheese, spicy chilli ketchup and burger sauce” served with brioche bun, fries and house slaw”. The chips were good, tasty and a little crispy and not dry inside as some dining establishments seem to serve up.

  The burger itself was inelegantly served.The brioch was sweetly tasty and the ketchup added flavour but the slivers of cheese on top were unmelted and unpleasantly cold, the ‘slaw’ was far too cold when eaten with the burger and was not a pleasure and as for the chorizo there were just 3 little slivers of it and equally there was an ungenerous portion of brisket. The patty while well-cooked on the outside was certainly very rare inside to the extent I began to wonder where rareness ends and rawness begins. It was not appetising though the Labrador, who enjoys a little helping of raw meat from time to time, had no objections to it so all was well that ended well, for Lucy at least.

  The staff were quite pleasant. 

  I left Prospero’s Lounge in doubt that I would visit it again even if the dog is allowed to accompany me. I was pleased at least that the name of the restaurant I had eaten in that day tied up nicely with the play I was to see that evening. I like coincidences. 

  And I enjoyed, against all the odds, this production of The Tempest once the director had allowed magic to seep into it (throughout, it strived to relate the play to the current concern about man’s abuse of the environment and the natural world - a sort of Shakespeare as Greta Thunberg; the printed programme was full of drivel including Prospero’s magical initiation of the tempest which strands many of the protagonists on Prospero’s island being attributed to ‘geo-engineering’ by Prospero[(no, it wasn’t, it was magic]). Alex Kingston, in the RSC’s now established and frequently tiresome gender switching, played Prospero and very well too. Her delivery of the immortal soliloquy, “We are such stuff as dreams are made of …” was powerful and tears transiently raced to my eyes. The director was finally unable to continue cutting out the magic in the play as the final scenes brought spirits and monsters and thrills which even the RSC and its world wise production staff could not suppress. 

  Magic then is what we want - in the world, in the theatre and in the restaurant.

297. Purnell’s In 2023; Sonal Clare - A Legend In His Own Lifetime.

 

  Think of Food Personalities/Celebrities in Birmingham, well, anywhere really, and you think of chefs and chefs and chefs - here we have Glynn Purnell obviously but there’s also Brad Carter, Alex Claridge, Kray Tredwell and others - they have all appeared on popular television programmes at some time or the other and each has there own distinctive personality. 

  But the restaurant business also has another side to it - apart from the kitchen where stars are born and emerge to prominence, there is also front of house. One hundred and twenty years ago or so, Birmingham could boast of its own celebrity Maître D’Hotel (Maître d’/restaurant manager in modern terms) - M Joseph, born in Birmingham of French parents in the 1860s but mostly brought up in France where his skills as Maître d’ were so admired that he was approached by Richard D’Oyley Carte in 1898 to restore the fortunes of the Savoy in the wake of the fraud scandal involving Escoffier, Ritz and Echenard. As recounted in Blog 146, M. Joseph did indeed take up D’Oyle Carte’s offer of employment and for a short time was the main draw for the hotel to customers choosing to dine there but he became homesick for France whither he returned after a relatively short time at The Savoy and died shortly afterwards.

  The popular media in general, and television in particular, especially the BBC, may centre its interest on the celebrity chefs but behind many a notable chef including those here in Birmingham there has to be an accomplished restaurant manager. Most stay in the background but know how to deal with their diners in ways professional but friendly and welcoming and chat to their customers with the appropriate and welcome degree of schmoozing which their diners will appreciate. Then there are some who are personalities in their own right though the media has largely not recognised this yet. One of Birmingham’s outstanding Maître d’s is Sonal Clare who works with Alex Claridge at The Wilderness where he employs his particular sommelier expertise which he sharpened up during his time as restaurant manager at Purnell’s. I will return to Mr Clare shortly, but on the subject of Purnell’s, I was delighted, a couple of days ago, to lunch at Birmingham’s doyen restaurant.

  While all the attention is on the brilliant new or newish West Midlands restaurants of the new high achievers such as David Taylor, Dan Lee and  Alex Claridge, Purnell’s is there continuing to serve up very fine food beautifully and artistically presented. This is food as art. True, sometimes one feels that there are rather more longtime dishes being served still after all these years even if they are presented in new formats and still with a great degree of wit but it is hard to find dishes there which have not been skilfully and artfully prepared. 

  Thus there was a new twist on the long-established cheese and pineapple amuse gueule otherwise known in a previous life as Emotions of Soixante dix as part of the Gifts From the Kitchen - as well as a glass of cheese and pineapple steaming with liquid carbon dioxide this time additionally there was a very pleasing gougère alongside cubes of grilled pineapple on sticks. This new version of an old favourite proved that Purnell, who sometimes does rather make a parody of himself, can still put a broad smile on his customers’ faces.

  The starter of ruby beetroot with grains, orange gel and leaves was excellent, served as it was with a little spiced brioche. Then came a thoroughly enjoyable dish of Cornish crab served on a bed of crushed almond and invigorated by sweetly pickled sea vegetables, mainly samphire, three happy little piles of caviar and a rather delicious lobster bisque which could only be bettered by having more of it. I liked this dish very much.

  How pleasing to see that the lunch menu was serving up poached cod rather than the skate that was being served on the very much more expensive tasting menu. The fish was exalted by the pickled hispi cabbage it was sitting on and the accompanying smoked eel Velouté was delicious punctuated by caviar and trout roe which made the dish very pretty.

  Fine too was the slow cooked daube, extremely tasty and tender, embellished with a duxelle, parsley gel and crispy shallots - winter confronted and put to flight by this very enjoyable dish. The meal closed with a thin slice of Gypsy tart, a malt-flavoured custard on extremely thin pastry which might have been a little crispier though it was such a pleasure to have real patisserie than yet more crumble scattered across the plate which is often the fashion elsewhere. A lesson to head chefs - if you’ve got a good pastry chef, hold on to them at all costs. The tart, by the way, was nicely balanced by frozen yogurt and date.

  Purnell’s continues to keep the punters coming with perfectly judged service and consistently admirable food. Soon to have notched up its sixteenth year Purnell’s continues to pass the test of time.

Rating:- 🌞🌞

  And so back to its former Maître d’, Sonal Clare. With Robert Wood away for a short time from his specialist Atelier cocktail establishment, Sonal used the time and space wisely by enjoyably holding several Sonal’s House Parties at Atelier which gave him an opportunity to get out his turntable and play some music, pleasingly unobtrusively, while his paying guests sat back in the comfortable chairs or at the serving counter, and quaffed in the most relaxed way, five wines of his choosing which were eclectic and pleasing.

  I went along in the evening after the lunch at Purnell’s earlier that day as recounted above. It was an excellent example of what Birmingham has to offer to those prepared to take up those offers presented to them by some of the city’s great culinary and drinks experts. Of course the experience was also enhanced by the best of hosts circulating around his guests and talking to them, without any oppressive or desperately intense gravity, about his choice of wines which he was presenting to them. It seemed quite apt that he rounded off the evening with a bottle of wine from Georgia, where wine in Europe began. 

296. Chung Ying Cantonese Restaurant.

 

I’m always a little suspicious of dining out at banquets with large numbers of people because usually I don’t get any choice in what I eat or by whom I sit and normally I can’t bear the level of noise. But somehow, Cantonese food, especially around the time of the lunar new year, seems to be more appropriate than most other cuisines for participation in a mass consumption event.

 Thus it was I found myself dining at the hoary, even venerable, old Birmingham restaurant, Chung Ying Cantonese, in the exotically named Chinatown district of the city centre (though how many people of East Asian heritage actually live there is a moot point) with a rather larger group of people than I would normally choose to do so. Chung Ying was first opened in 1981 by the married couple, Siu Chung and Yuk Ying Wong, and the running of it was taken over by their son, James Wong, in 2010. A sister restaurant, Chung Ying Central, was opened in Colmore Row but has since closed.

  It’s true to say that the restaurant has probably seen better days. Entrance to it is through a rather unlikely  small and uninviting door and the inside place looks very much as though the decor is desperately in need of complete refreshment and perhaps a little more needs to be spent on the lighting bill. But the service was good - despite the large number of people attending the banquet the food came out efficiently and swiftly and was pleasingly hot on arrival at the table.

  The servings were generous and generally comfortingly delicious - they represented the unchanging face of British style Chinese food with the same appearance as they would have had when Chung Ying first opened 41 years ago. This might have been depressing had not the food been really very enjoyable in an unsophisticated and unpretentious way.

  The dishes were clichéd but none the worse for that - as starters there were crispy spring rolls with sweet chilli dipping sauce, salt and chilli chicken wings and gorgeously succulent and meaty Peking style spare ribs. It was sticky finger time and the offer of a finger bowl might have been helpful. But gorging like a Labrador whose meal has arrived late, I and the rest of the diners ploughed on to the main courses. 

  The point is that they really were very good. Rustic in a Birmingham Cantonese restaurant sort of way but all essentially very tasty and a good balance of spicy and less hot dishes served with a very satisfactory fried rice. We did not wander far from the road of safe choices - sweet and sour chicken, crispy shredded  beef with chilli, a splendidly peppery black bean sauce dish with beautifully tender lamb and salt and chilli prawns. 

  This left me thinking why in these present times, do we go ou to eat rather than dine at home? The basic underlying reason of course is that so few younger people are taught anything about food and preparing it and so it is therefore necessary to consume food that someone else has prepared. Of course it was easy for men in the 1950s, they married women who were taught by their mothers and at school to be the preparers of food in the household. Now the British, male or female, often do not even know how to peel a potato.

  So reheatable food must be bought ready prepared from the supermarket or ordered from local food providers as ‘takeaways’ or, in the final instance, food must be eaten in restaurants and other dining establishments away from the home. 

  The main reasons to visit restaurants are -

1. To enjoy a special occasion social gathering often to commemorate notable personal or family events and anniversaries. The type of establishment dined in will still often depend on the social status and financial income of the host and participants.

Which brings us to -

2.  A division of choice of restaurant, once the diner’s social and financial status has been taken into account - is the diner going to a particular restaurant principally to -

  A. Eat and derive a sense of comfort and repletion from it (a worthy enough reason in itself)? or 

  B. To become a consumer of food as art which undoubtedly it is in the hands of a creative, imaginative chef? 

  This is where food guides go adrift. Many dining establishments serve good food though it may be pleasingly comforting and filling rather than artistically presented as though invented in the eye of a contemporary painter who additionally has paid attention to the textures of the items on his plate, as well the presence of enticing smells coming from it and, most important of all, the deliciousness and originality of the flavours. The achievement of pleasing so many senses rather than just the visual or the auditory which most artists set out to do really does raise the great chef to the heights of the great artist. Of course many chefs do not want to be thought of as great artists and many who do are not successful in doing so because they do not have the abilities or the dedication or the training or a sufficient gastronomic intelligence. The food of these unartistic chefs can still be good food even though food guides, certainly the more snooty, may decide not to recognise food which they do not see as art even though that food may be delightfully comforting and enjoyable.

  The food at Chung Ying Cantonese was certainly enjoyable though the restaurant is rather shabby. I enjoyed my evening at the banquet and would happily dive into another dish of any of the food presented to me at that meal. If not artistic in terms of delicacy of presentation perhaps it was artistic in terms of delivery of flavour.

Rating:- 🌛🌛🌛

295. Kray Tredwell-Ben Taylor Collaboration At Le Petit Bois.

 Taking pride of place at the head of this edition is a photograph of a gorgeous dish - possibly the most delicious I’ve had for ages - looking a little rustic but full of the most pleasing and happy flavours - a plate of wondrously moist and tender pork cheek Bourguignon with delightful duchess potatoes. This was a dish that memories are made of. It was the highlight of an extraordinary collaboration by two great Birmingham chefs - Kray Tredwell of 670 Grams cooking away from home at Le Petit Bois in Moseley where Ben Taylor was leading the home team. They are chefs of very contrasting styles and the outcome was an evening to remember.

  It really is so very nice at Le Petit Bois. It so comfortable and relaxed and yet the service is very good. I started off with a splendidly refreshingly bitter Bicyclette cocktail and then the riders were out of the stalls. The amuses gueules were an absolute hit. They arrived with a tiny little croustade perched in the lid of a dish which when the lid was removed, revealed a very happily tasting savoury Paris Brest, the crust of the choux being beautifully crispy and the interior a combination of gorgeously salty blue cheese and sweet finely chopped grape. A witty and delicious start to the meal.

  Then another exhilarating dish of perfectly seared scallop with celeriac remoulade, apple and the very recognisable and very welcome bursts of truffle on this dark, damp winter evening. To follow was a poached egg yolk with more admirable flavours - little crumbs of crunchy toasted brioche, fois gras and more truffle. It was enjoyable but the egg yolk was overcooked and not runny when cut into and if it had been it may have raised the dish to another level.

  I have already commented on the ecstatic pleasure of the remarkable main course of slow braised pig’s cheek Bourguignon (undoubtedly Ben Taylor’s dish I should think) and so to the fish course which had all the hallmarks of having been prepared by Chef Treadwell. This was a piece of very finely poached pollock served with an exquisite vanilla beurre blanc, fragments of Jersey Royal (I would not have minded a little more potato even though I had also had some with the Bourguignon) and a nice helping of Oscietra caviar. The two main courses - the beef and the fish - both excellent - managed to demonstrate the contrast in the styles of the two chefs and this was also evident in the two desserts. Firstly there was a freshly warm small vanilla Madeleine (perhaps the vanilla flavour was a little too subtle) served with a cheeky vanilla crême fraiche made saucy with a helping of marmalade and then, to round off, a triumphantly gooey tart tatin with calvados caramel and a miso ice Kray (no doubt about which of the chefs made that, I think).

  The evening was further livened up by spotting (not hard, he was only two tables away) Birmingham’s most recent Masterchef The Professionals winner Dan Lee (now working alongside that competition’s previous winner, Stuart Deeley, at Smoke at Hampton Manor) who was one of the diners. So then, three notable Birmingham chefs in the same restaurant all at the same time.

  It was quite an evening.

  The day before,  I had lunched at Orelle with an acquaintance who had travelled from South Yorkshire for the sole purpose of the experience of dining at Orelle to taste the food and take in the view from the 24th floor. It was not a pleasant day and when we stepped out of the lift that had whisked skywards we found that the view had all but disappeared, obscured by fog surrounding the tower. Still there was always the food. As usual the place looked very smart as did the front of house staff and the service was very good; pleasingly, perhaps because only half the tables were taken, service was not rushed and I was able to sip and enjoy my Orelle Sour cocktail in a relaxed and unhurried fashion.

  As it was lunch a three course meal was on offer for an extremely reasonable sum of £42 and comparing the lunch menu with what was on offer from the à la carte choice I felt perfectly satisfied to order from the lunch menu. We were brought an excellent sourdough loaf to share between us and I very much enjoyed it, having as it did, a good crispy crust and a fine interior texture, the flavour of the sourdough being not as brutally strong as some sourdough bread can be. And how lovely to have bread at the start of the meal, available to nibble while the rest is being prepared rather than having it suddenly turn up as a ‘bread course’ almost half way through the meal as seems to be happening with increasing frequency.

  The starter was satisfactory - Saumon - on the menu it was described as “barbecued Loch Duart salmon, pickled kohlrabi, calamansi and sourdough. I thought that fish was very accurately cooked and was nicely complemented by the pickled kohlrabi but the calamansi was the wrong sort of citrus for this dish, bringing in some sweetness which I did not want. My lunch companion in contrast was very pleased with the dish and liked the flavour of the calamansi (a fruit was is obviously now very much in vogue).

  For the main course I chose a very good and pleasingly flavoured and textured ballotine of chicken served with roast parsnips which were not adequately cooked and pear which, while accepting that a chicken-pear combination is an established pairing, did not, for me at least, contribute positively to the dish. There was some exquisitely delicious and perfectly prepared pomme purée with Dijon mustard 

underneath it all and I could have quite gladly eaten with relish at least five times the amount of that element served to me.

  There was something inauthentic about the desserts; they had the air of something that had not been prepared in the kitchens but had been brought in to serve. I chose ‘calamansi’ (yes, calamansi again) described as “calamansi mousseline, strawberry and mint jelly.  Perhaps it was because I was eating from the £42 set menu (and that would be a good enough reason) but the desserts were served on a plate rather than being presented from the wonderful dessert trolley, a pleasing bit of theatre, which had manifested itself on previous visits to Orelle (I do hope it hasn’t disappeared into history after such a happy, if short life. My dessert was not good - I don’t recall being aware of strawberry or mint and the gel was decidedly citric and excessively sharply flavoured to the point of being unpleasant. The body of the dessert was uninteresting and the plate was covered in crumble, a tiresome modern device used by chefs to bring a crunchy texture without having to work to provide a fine crispy pastry. 

  In conclusion, and I will not use the obvious cliché, this meal was good in parts. As an experience it was enjoyable even though the weather was doing its best to thwart one important element of dining at Orelle - the view. Rating:- 🌛🌛🌛

  Michelin has announced that the 2023 edition of the Michelin Guide Great Britain And Northern Ireland will be launched at a live event on Monday 27 March. Already you can feel various chefs’ pulse rates starting to quicken.

  Meanwhile, the Michelin inspectors on one of their apparent rare visits to the West Midlands, have included the vegetarian restaurant, Land (see Blog 180) in its January 2023 Guide update.

  Dishes eaten at Land in September 2021 -