521. Afternoon Tea And Street Food.

 

  By using the term ‘dining out’, I usually think of two meals, either lunch or dinner. Generally now however ‘dining out’ has extended itself in the casual culture of middle-class hipsters who presently seem to be about the only people who can afford to eat out in their frequently grubby little enclaves in trendy suburbs to anytime-of-the-day street food, expensive burgers and costly pizzas and ‘dirty fries’. Much of this stuff is over regarded by a social group which over regards itself in parallel but there are some purveyors of street food products which do indeed show a passion for their products and consequently bring great pleasure to those who consume them.

  ‘Dining out’ may now also encompass breakfasts & the ‘all-day breakfast’ has long been elevated from its greasy spoon origins to being partaken of in more rarified establishments and ‘afternoon teas’ are now immensely popular particularly with ladies who previously lunched but now settle for a teapot, a scone (whether or not the jam or perhaps the cream is layered on it first is up to them in this casual society - for me the only correct format is scone, butter, jam and cream (call it a Warwickshire tea if you like), sandwiches and dainty little cakes and, if they can get away with it, and long before the sun is below the yardarm, a glass of Prosecco. Why they are called Afternoon teas is perplexing as they are often not consumed at teatime but sometimes as early as 1PM which is silly. I have seen a fatuous article trying to explain the difference between afternoon tea and high tea but I remain to be convinced.

  So we have it - ‘dining out’ - what is it? Lunch and dinner and now also anytime Street food, anytime breakfast and afternoon tea which lasts from just after lunch to just before dinner. 

  Here are some of my recent new-style dining out experiences which I thoroughly enjoyed - 

Breakfast -

  On another stay at the Hotel du Vin in Stratford upon Avon I chose to eat breakfast at the hotel as I have done several times before. This of course was breakfast not all day breakfast. The Hotel du Vin in Stratford really does serve very good breakfasts. I always feel that the scrambled egg is key to judging the breakfast. Oh yes! And the humble slice of black pudding. The perfect scrambled egg is a rare and fabulous beast.mi like it butterfly and mildly baveuse. The HDV chefs so often succeed in sending out a very fine scrambled egg. On this occasion the scrambled egg was excellent though not perfect but well deserving of a 7.5 out of 10. As regards the black pudding, most hotels overcook it and the contents are dry and flag in the mouth. The HdV usually avoids this and retains a little moisture in its cooked pudding which makes it all very edible. On this occasion, the pudding was not wholly perfect but well deserving of a 7.5 out 10. I will just add that the tomato was excellent - sweet and juicy, the mushroom ver pleasing being moist and firm, the sausage tasty but the bacon somewhat overcooked and tending towards the mildly leathery.

The previous evening I had enjoyed a dinner of truly delicious, mildly spiced cauliflower soup and a well-cooked confit duck. This was a very pleasurable pre-theatre dinner before setting off for the Royal Shakespeare Theatre’s Other Place to see a clever production of Macbeth set in a splendidly authentic-looking working men’s club in 1970s Glasgow where Duncan is a gang boss and Macbeth one of his thuggish lieutenants.

Rating:- 🌛🌛🌛🌛

  And so to Afternoon Tea. 

  Kiss Me Cupcakes is a coffee and cake shop, now only open occasionally, in Alvechurch Road in West Heath. The owner is Mary Ashman, a skilled baker, whose main work is making attractive and spectacular occasion cakes which are bespoke in design and cleverly made and extraordinarily appealing. Whenever Mary is holding a special event - in this case a Christmas-themed afternoon tea - I try to go along and not only support a valiant local small business but also to simply enjoy myself. The exquisite, wood-panelled sitting area, full of atmosphere drawn from its eclectic, homely furniture and old ceramics such as Royal Albert tea cups, saucers and teapots, is immensely relaxing and dog friendly and no place seems a better spot to find a chilled-out black Labrador lounging in the hope of sharing in the food served than there at Kiss Me Cupcakes.

  The tea does not have the pretensions of that which is served at, say, The Grand Hotel. But Mary serves it all very nicely. Neat little sandwiches - seasonal turkey and cranberry, smoked salmon and cream cheese and cheese with a delightful sweet chutney. Mary’s scones served with whipped cream and strawberry jam are light and moist, as fresh as anything newly baked (which of course is precisely what they are) and a great pleasure to languidly consume whilst sitting in one of KMC’s very, very comfortable armchairs. There’s a toothsome mince tartlet, just as sweet as you need it to be, and the lightest of fairy cakes beautifully decorated in the style of a Christmas wreath. The meringue with raspberries and passion fruit seeds , is unimpeachable - crispy outside, gooily gorgeous inside and there’s a fine chocolate brownie as well as the cinnamon hit of a gingerbread man to round everything off. This is fine value for £19 which of course includes tea - I was served two pots of Tea Pigs tea and enjoyed the quality of it. 

  Rating:- 🌛🌛🌛🌛.

5 December 2015.

And food, a street food lunch.

  Another facility not far from my home is Herbert's Yard in Longbridge where the immaculate Greidy’s has been the outstanding stall over autumn and into winter. I had a lunch there on a cold grey day and was warmed very pleasurably by my Greidy’s sriracha Thai chicken strips, quite hot to be honest, but full of flavour from the sewer sriracha sauce. The tender, moist chicken strips were served with a necessary and excellent salad and some very well cooked, instantly addictive salted chips and Inconcluded that this was one of those dishes tgat everyone should eat at least once before they die.

Rating:- 🌛🌛🌛🌛.

 I had chosen all the above dishes wisely. Breakfasts/afternoon teas/street food. Yes, I think they are part of the dining out scene (when done well) in this age when men can’t be bothered to shave, scruffy is fashionable and going to work is an occasional day out.

  

522. Trillium.

 

  I passed many happy hours, many, many times in Purnell’s. It was luxurious in a Birmingham sort of way. It was both sophisticated and comfortable. It had with it a sense of humour running through it and it was so relaxing. The food of course, at its height, deserved another star.

  But Purnell’s is gone. Glynn Purnell, in his early middle age, has embraced change and the realities of the state of the hospitality business in the mid-2020s under Starmer and Reeves. First there came a country town pub and then a tapas bar and then an ephemeral bistro in Coventry. And now we have a full-on 90 minutes only sittings, bustling wine bar/restaurant in the depths of an always intriguing glass monster in Snowhill. Lots of coloured lights, a very crowded kitchen in the corner of the dining area where you can see quite closely the sweat on the brows of two Michelin-starred chefs working almost elbow to elbow and a clientele of comfortably off quite old lunchers side by side with besuited office men and quite chicly dressed younger women hoping to be noticed and all, like me, photographing their food.

  And there are so many familiar faces working there, some of whom had previously worked for Purnell or for Rob Palmer when he had been Head Chef at Hampton Manor where Peel’s Restaurant won a Michelin star while he was working there or for him when he had his own small Michelin-listed restaurant, Toff’s, in Solihull high street. There were two front of house staff from Simpsons including Thomas Moore who had been, for a few months, the sommelier there and a fine job he had been doing there, There was the former restaurant manager from Kray Tredwell’s 670 Grams and the former restaurant manager of the glitzy Gaucho in Church Street opposite the Grand Hotel. Quite a line up.

  I was the first customer served at 12 noon on the restaurant’s first day of opening. How did its galaxy of Birmingham restaurant figures do in the first 90 minutes of service? Did the food match up to the para-glitz?

  Well, let’s remember that this was the birth of Trillium and some births can be easier than others and I was dining there when the placenta was still waiting to be delivered though the child was giving its first shrieks of being brought into the world. It was a good welcome with Glynn Purnell doing his best to shake everyone’s hands as they arrived. Many of those there at this moment, I suspect were old fans of his and keen to relive their Purnell memories and share with him his vision of Birmingham’s culinary future. At the end of the first hour the place was full and buzzing, the multitude of chefs almost tripping over each other in the small cooking area and food coincidently getting colder than one might have expected. But let’s remember, this was hour one, day one and everything follows the rule that practice makes perfect.

  To start, I chose an eponymous Trillium cocktail - it seemed appropriate to start off with the restaurant’s own. However, for some reason, the Trillium was not available so I chose instead a pleasing Sour though the price seemed a little ambitious. I was beginning to feel I was lunching in London and Trillium reminded me of Fallow where I had dined a couple of Christmases ago prior to seeing another Shakespeare mangling in a West End theatre - bustle, noise, the rapid evaporation of money and middle class rusticity. 

  And so, en fin, to the food. I had a mild gasp when I saw the prices but settled down to see what Purnell and Parmer were going to serve up for that sort of cash. It was recommended that I have a snack to start, a couple of small plates and then a large plate. I broadly followed the guidelines.  Snackwise I opted for Trillium milk loaf, (£7.50) restfully lemon coloured with a tasty soft crust paired with a dip of balsamic vinegar, oil and chicken fat. This was good but in the back of my mind I longed for the halcyon days of Purnell’s pain de campagne with cultured butter.

    I also chose, and enjoyed, a single but large (“XXL”) gougère (on the menu “gougére”). The exterior was enjoyably crispy and the innards molten and full of flavour and, like everything else, not cheap at £6 per gourgère). I failed to photograph it. Then on to the roast Orkney scallop ‘small plate’ - it was well-cooked as one would hope it to be when paying £20 for a single and not enormous scallop and I felt I had had more enjoyable accompaniments with scallops than the not-overwarm dessert spoonful of oxtail Bolognaise ragu that lurked on the shell under the scallop like a diminutive Peeping Tom.

  My ‘large plate’ was grilled Tamworth pork chop (£35) served with salsa verde, olive and manchego. This was a bountiful pork chop, well-cooked but rendered vaguely unpleasant by the bitter salsa verde. This dish may have appealed to those who view themselves as having sophisticated palates which happily embrace bitterness but it did not appeal to me. And the chop was so large that I became bored with it by the time I had eaten half of it and there was nothing to do but to scrape the salsa off it, cut it up and take it back home for Lucy the Labrador who delightedly make short measure of it. The best part of the course was the really rather good gratin of baked potato, crispy skins and chive (the flavour of which was for me completely muted) though the portion was very small and severely overpriced at £6. I felt, on the whole, I could do an equally good job of cooking a pork chop and mashed potato at home, far more interesting than this, at a fraction of the price. 

   After the great lump of pork I wanted a light dessert and opted for zabaglione. This was good, possibly needing to be somewhat more robust with its coffee flavour but the figs were a fine addition and the tiny spiced doughnuts were something of a hit.

  

  All was done. The restaurant was full. The heat was rising. The micro-kitchen was where all the action was while the front of house staff were not looking too hard pressed. When paying the bill I was happy to pay the ‘optional’ service charge but not amused by then being asked if I would like to pay an additional ‘tip’ above and beyond the service charge. No I didn’t like. This is a trick which I think is oozing out of London and before that, I think, the United States. This is not appropriate in Birmingham. 

  Purnell has opted to withdraw from fine dining and to go the small plates/large plates route and to charge a lot of money for relatively simple dishes which appear to be largely unimpressive. Purnell’s strength was always in the ingenuity and humour of the fine, gorgeous-looking dishes that came out of his kitchen. ‘Rustic and expensive’ do not in any way attract me but I’m sure Purnell has an enthusiastic audience of diners ready to eat simply but pay the price for something which should have more flair, more thrill and more culinary ambition to it. Compared with what came before, there seems to be a laziness about it all. Money for old rope you might say. It’s early days (well, the earliest actually) but food needs to come out of the kitchen hot. I don’t think that this concept has any direction at present - is it a wine bar? Is it a restaurant worthy of being included in the Michelin Guide? Is it just a place for cool people to be seen and to draw attention to themselves? Time will tell. But time certainly did tell. My bill came to over £117 which included service (but not an additional tip) and that bought me 90 minutes of service. For that sort of money I expect not to be in a nervous state related to having to eat and drink up before I might be ejected (clearly the staff were far too polite to do that but who knows what will happen when one is sitting there hoping to relax over an expensively decent meal?).

Raring;-🌛🌛.

10 December 2025.

520. Sunday Lunch With Beef Wellington At Harborne Kitchen

Former Head Chef Tom Wells.

Head Chef Patrick White.

 

  The thought of a beef Wellington Sunday lunch at Harborne Kitchen was irresistible and so I indeed did not resist and went on unhesitatingly to reserve my table there. Since I last dined there, former sous chef, Patrick White, had replaced Tom Wells as Head Chef, the latter having gone on to be Executive Chef at Hogarth’s Hotel in Dorridge. The restaurant has been redecorated in a cooling, sophisticated, soothing grey with restrained boxes of healthy-looking green plants trailing from high up and positioned under them colourful and perfectly apt tiles. Music was perhaps mildly intrusive but Harborne-cool as REM and Michael Stipe slithered out across the ether. The Harborne Kitchen is aptly named as comfortably off Harbornites chatter away, imbibe and in the back of their mind shiver at the nagging fear of what Rachel Reeves will come up with next.

  A thrillingly warming Old Fashioned taste-alike cocktail made with Bourbon and called Honey and Wine proved to be a secret pleasure until it was whipped away unfinished and mourned. Sunday service does seem rather brisk. Regardless, there was a lovely amuse gueule to start, an inoffensively small portion of Hereford beef tartare sitting on a satisfactory chunk of beef fat potato terrine with a tiny hint of confit egg yolk and the pleasing acidic hit of pickled walnut.

  The starter was a pleasingly cooked Orkney scallop serving interestingly with Jerusalem artichoke, julienne of refreshing, tangy fresh apple and a buttermilk sauce. This was accompanied by an enjoyable slice of sourdough and whipped homemade butter both of which were very good.

  Then the Beef Wellington. This is why I had come to this particular Sunday lunchtime.

  The Wellington was very good and the beef excellent - in fact - I would say that it was absolutely perfectly cooked and the tenderness spot on - very good beef indeed.The surrounding duxelle was tasty and did its job and the pastry was pleasing  The accompanying horseradish sauce was too subtle in its heat but the beef fat roasted potatoes were particularly good and acceptably crispy with well cooked interiors. The roast parsnips were nice and sweet in a parsnip sort of way and the glazed turnip was well cooked but contributed very little. The creamed spinach was as interesting as spinach can aspire to be. 

  Then the great pleasure of a tarte tatin which in this case was made more interesting by using quince rather than apple or pear or even pineapple which has been unsatisfactory when I have been served it in the past. Then quince had an excellent texture and was tasty but less so than apple usually is. There was also a rapidly melting, somewhat unconvincing vanilla ice cream but it’s hard not to enjoy a well made tarte tatin as this dish was. Finally a familiar mignardise, a pair of lips, which is always welcome.

  I wound down after this fine Sunday lunch with another Honey and wine cocktail. I would have been happier if the service, while fully meeting my needs and being appropriately friendly, had been a little calmer and I do wish that on taking one’s seat one is not immediately told that, effectively, one is welcome but only for the next two hours after which one will be expected to settle up and make way for another group of temporarily welcome guests. Yes, I know the economics of running a restaurant necessitate the turning of tables and I accept that but does the announcement of the temporariness of one’s possession of the table at which one has just sat down have to be made immediately on arriving?

  One other trick which might have been pleasing would have been if one of the uncut Wellingtons had been brought to the table to show off the artistry of the complete item. But everything was just too busy,it seemed, for that open.

Rating:- 🌞

30 November 2025.

519. Banquets In Hotels - Middling At Best.

 

  Humans like - or perhaps do not like but have to - get together in large numbers over a meal for numerous and various reasons. I myself sometimes and more often than I wish have to - I have to spend money to dine with others, many of whom I don’t know (and some I can’t bear) -  sometimes large numbers of them, but I have to do it for various reasons. I may not want to but I pull myself together, gird up my loins and trek off to some hotel or the other usually in Birmingham’s city centre to shake hands with people I don’t recognise and sit down to what usually amounts to a mediocre to middling and occasionally awful series of three plates of, er, food. I rarely enjoy it. It’s not my scene. It’s not that I can not make small talk but sometimes it’s just such an effort. And often you have no idea beforehand by whom you will be sitting.

   I think of a dinner where every time I began a conversation with a chap next to me he would instantly break off to deal with another text that had landed on his mobile phone or alternatively he would see some important figure whom he thought could further his career and he would leap up, mid-conversation, and accost the esteemed figure and introduce himself. 

  I think of a dinner (well, more than one actually) where I was seated next to a garrulous fellow who wanted to tell me endlessly - and I mean endlessly - about the development of AI). For a while I thought he was talking about artificial insemination as opposed to artificial intelligence which did not help. Anyway I entered a sort of trancelike state and shut out his gabbling though he did not seem to notice and just ploughed on and I worried about how long this purgatory was going to last as I was keen not to leave the dog alone too long.

  And the really awful thing about large dining gatherings is one sees just how awfully many people eat. Dining etiquette died a long time ago, sacrificed to casualness and hipsterity,  and what we have now is a population whose eating habits stretch from the barely acceptable to the utterly revolting. I find it’s best not to look as some diners will easily put one off one’s food.

  And so to the food. Diversity is much lauded in England. Well, that may well be right, but it has made organising what to eat at a banquet, a remarkably difficult task. There are very few meats one can risk serving; beef is out if there are Hindus present, pork obviously a no-no if Muslim or Jewish guests are participating in the event, leaving lamb (which may be too expensive to serve to a collection of diners who may have variable amounts of wealth) or goat, which may not appeal to traditional English diners, or, obviously, poultry. Chicken would clearly be the primary choice, turkey may be viewed as seasonal, or perhaps something a little more exotic such as Guinea fowl. Fish probably would not win many votes among the alpha males who feel they must eat meat, though normally that would be a steak but that would be impractical in a banquet. If it were to be fish, then salmon would have a very high chance of being uninteresting and dull; sea bass is all the rage but it would it would not be well received by those men who like a nice slab of meat on their plate.

  Religion and cultures make the choosing of what to put on as a main course difficult enough before the challenges laid down by those who choose to be vegetarian or worse still vegan, those who have genuinely serious, life-threatening allergies, and those who do not like a particular ingredient and put it down to them being sensitive or even allergic to that ingredient. What a headache it all is for organisers and chefs.The advantage of serving a vegetarian alternative to the carnivorous main is that the vegetarian dish can be the dish on offer to those from various religious and cultural backgrounds. One rather fashionable dish is the vegetarian counter to beef Wellington - vegetable Wellington - and on balance that sounds just the right dish to serve as an alternative to meat - an extra bit of effort put in to remind the diner of a classic British dish and to enable the vegetarian not to feel neglected.

  So. I was dining at the Park Regis hotel at Five Ways in the company of about eighty people What would we be served and how good would it be? The dining room is at the top of the building on the 16th floor and there is a spectacular view of the city beneath it, the large dining area was smart and modern, the tables nicely laid and the staff efficient, smartly turned out, and polite. Who could ask for anything more? Well, of course we must not forget the food. I had dined before at the Park Regis when it had set up a chaotic Indian style restaurant, the Indus, in the restaurant where, I suspected, breakfast was served in the morning. It was one of the worst dining experiences I have had in the city either before or since. Hopefully, the meal in this rather more attractive and glamorous setting would be a considerable improvement on the defunct Hindus restaurant. It could hardly have been worse.

  The meal was pretty straightforward, appropriately lacking in ambition but decent enough. The word ‘middling’ comes to mind and the feeling that anything different should not have been expected. This is  not a criticism of the chef or the hotel, merely a statement of what one’s expectations should be when dining simultaneously with a group of such numbers.

  To start I chose pressed ham hock terrine which was splendidly bland which is also a reasonable description of the accompanying pickled shallots and ‘smooth pea mayonnaise’. There was the inevitable pea shoot garnish as we have come to expect.

  The main course was served rusticly and was made up of a supreme of chicken which was very satisfactory with the chicken being well cooked, only very slightly over, though not particularly exploding with flavour. There was a joyless (though described in the menu as ‘vibrant’) stalk of uncharismatic pak choi, a vegetable which God invented on one of his off days, reasonably well cooked carrot and middling but far from the worst I’ve been served mashed potato and a chicken gravy which did nothing to enhance the dish. There was no oomph to the dish, nothing to lift it from the average. Perhaps we got what we were paying for. Some stuffing with a bit of zinginess might have helped. This dish was decent enough but delivered little pleasure.

 The dessert was reasonably enjoyable - a William pear tart - the pear was soft and the pastry quite pleasant and the menu stated that it was served with a chocolate ganache (it wasn’t), a ginger crumble which I assume was the stuff on top of the tart though it was unrecognisable as having a crumble texture  and the flavour of ginger I found to be undetectable. There was a pink smear across the plate and a remarkably unseasonable half strawberry.

  This was a thoroughly edible meal though it brought nothing with it to excite the diner. It was certainly better than that served recently to me at a ‘banquet’ at the Hotel du Vin but these ‘banquet’ meals where large numbers are catered for are generally depressing affairs. Rule - if someone wants you to go one of these functions then find a reason to say no. Unless of course the quality of the food is of no concern to you.

Rating:- 🌛🌛.

21 November 2025.