547. The Oyster Club, Where Now I’ve Lost My Sole.

  Having enjoyed my final chateaubriand roast Sunday lunch just a few days before (see Blog 546) at The Oyster Club by Adam Stokes, to give this fine Michelin-listed restaurant its full name, I was determined to enjoy one final seafood meal - the usually splendid Dover sole served for a very reasonable £40 - as the respected restaurant was due to close for good on Saturday 11 June. 

  The outgoing prime minister and his chancellor had achieved nothing good in the two years they were allowed to oversee the nation’s finances but they had done much harm with their policies and that included wilfully destroying the hospitality industry and reigning over the closure of many fine restaurants. Starmer might easily be viewed as Britain’s worse prime minister of recent times and such a view of him would be quite correct. He will be a footnote in English history but a looming black shadow in the social history of dining out.

  Get though behind me, Starmer. Let me return to the joy of sitting in The  Oyster Club.

  And so, for a final time, I descended the stairs to the dining area - as always, stylish and comfortable and soon to have no more customers. But let’s live in the moment and have a Cotswold gin and tonic and tempura king prawns with gochujang. This ‘snack’ which was as bountiful as any ‘starter’ was excellent - the batter excellent though to be honest there was, perhaps, a little too much salt used somewhere in the dish.. The prawns were firm and tasty.

    My much anticipated sole arrived - cooked magnificently - the texture moist but firm - and served in a ‘warm tartare sauce’, clad in samphire and sharp with pickled capers in a silky brown butter with sweet little brown shrimps. This was an excellent dish, alive with the pleasure of fine fish cookery. The opportunity to order it again will be greatly missed. I washed it down, by the way, with a nice glass of white wine Rioja - from Bodegas Muga - and it paired very nicely with the sole.

  For the dessert, not for the first time, vanilla panna cotta, nicely set though not absolutely perfectly wobbly, and a mocktail which though I ordered ‘Bakewell tart’ was rather more like ‘Black Forest gateau’

    I will miss The Oyster Club. Birmingham bad,y needs a fish restaurant of quality. You can say of course that we do have Albatross Death Cult but for many it is too esoteric, too clever, too experimental, too challenging. We need a fine restaurant where fish is cooked as close to perfect as we might hope it to be - baked, fried, roasted, steamed, en papillote and where lobster is as good as that served on Mount Olympus and where crab is exploding with flavour and where nouvelle cuisine never happened and sous vide cooking went undiscovered. Fish, simply cooked, enhanced by the most apt accompaniments. The Oyster Club was a good part of the way there and so I say, Adieu! 

  One final glance back -

10 July 2026

Rating:- 🌞

546. The Oyster Club - The Final Sunday Lunch.

 

  On 27 June 2026, it was announced rather suddenly, and even shockingly, that The Oyster Club was to close permanently on Saturday 11 July. I have previously written that it served the best Sunday lunch in the city (absolutely true) with its Chateaubriand, cooked superbly, and multiple trimmings also all cooked irreproachably and its relaxed and comfortable atmosphere. The Chateaubriand lunch cost £32 which was remarkably good value and all in all the news came as a blow upon a bruise as I have enjoyed a good number of Oyster Club Sunday lunches and have hardly, if ever, experienced disappointment - infact, quite the opposite, I have usually been quite elated after the beautifully cooked and sourced Sunday repasts there. And so, I thought I would take the opportunity, while the restaurant was still open, to dine on one more Chateaubriand lunch - the restaurant’s final Sunday service - and savour once more the deliciousness of it all.

  I need not write about the experience in detail again - I have done so several times. But consider this - that’s me in the corner, that’s me in the spotlight, losing my favourite Sunday lunch restaurant (apologies to REM) - no more of this stunningly cooked Chateaubriand with crispy roast potatoes, perfectly cooked carrot, cavalo nero, a good crispy Yorkshire pudding, cauliflower in a cheese sauce and a beef sauce. It’s another case of “such stuff are dreams made on”.  Feast your eyes on the photographs, dream of that wonderful beef and mourn for The Oyster Club (and for Harborne Kitchem, Simpsons, Purnell’s and their ilk, murderously strangled by a malign Labour government led by the incompetent and inconsequential Starmer and his overpromoted chancellor, Reeves, in just two years of determined action to slaughter the hospitality industry) and mourn for the creators of these fine Birmingham restaurants and those who worked there and those of us who liked to dine there. We shall not see their like again.

  The food brought me great pleasure and I rounded off the meal with the Oyster Club’s always excellent vanilla panna cotta with candied fruit, a perfect light dish to close a generously portioned meal.

  I closed with the Bakewell tart mocktail. Lovely.

  

  A grand meal tinged with sadness and and a fear of what may yet come as Starmer skulks back to the shadows and another smirking nonentity prepares to enter stage left.

5 July 2026.

Rating:- 🌞

545. A Burger On 4 July.

 

  It was 4 July and therefore it was the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence by the rebel British colonials in North America. On a recently issued postage stamp, the United States Post Office identified the burger as a modern American icon. This seems reasonable enough.

  Therefore I thought I really should eat a good quality hamburger, as we used to call them, on the occasion of this notable anniversary. I’m not a fan of the burger. You can pay a lot of money for some of them and leave the table feeling very disappointed. After all they’re just meat pressed together on a bun and jazzed up with various ingredients and glamourised by the people who are prepared to pay to eat them - middle-aged hipsters who think they know a lot about food and think street food is cool. It isn’t - cool - it’s overpriced, served in horrible containers with useless wooden utensils in uncomfortable, often cold locations.

  That said, I was determined to have a hamburger on this special date and living near Longbridge, it did seem likely that I would get a very edible burger at Herbert’s Yard (which has gradually been improved since it first opened) without too much travelling being involved. Every time I have visited there, there has been a stall or a wagon selling hamburgers so I was somewhat surprised, and mildly irritated, when I arrived there, on 4 July in particular, to find there were indeed no purveyors of burgers on site. Herbert’s Yard on Independence Day was definitely not selling burgers. Harrumph!

   I have a sense of occasion and my mind raced to try to think of an alternative source of quality hamburger. I could call a Uber and head for the Wildmoor Oak Inn not too far away. There was bound to be a good burger there but I was lacking the drive to do so. Then I resolved to have my burger and eat it by buying and sampling Marks and Spencer’s burgers - they should be good and the shop and food hall was just a short distance away, across the car park.

  And that is how I found myself sitting in my garden on the terrace eating an excellently cooked, very nicely tasting M & S burger, with a subtly flavoured coronation coleslaw (M &S) and caramelised onions (rather good even if I say so myself), all on an appealingly sweet and fresh brioche bun (M & S again), served with a very well cooked, pleasingly sweet and large corn on the cob, generously buttered. Oh! AI added the tiny US flag flying from a cocktail stick. 

  The dog sat close by enjoying the tidbits which she managed to scrounge and a glass of Pimms No 1 rounded off a fine meal wherein I discovered that I could enjoy a hamburger after all, if it was done just right and on the right occasion. And for dessert, a slice of M & S Sicilian lemon cheesecake with cream - the lemon curd on top was nicely sharp and packed full of as much zing as one could hope for. No doubt about it, some of these M & S products really are very good.

Home cooked 4 July .

Rating:- 🌞🌞🌞 (well, I cooked it didn’t I?)

544. Grace And Savour And Champagne.

 Who could resist the suggestion of a high summer evening at Grace and Savour where champagne is the centre piece paired with David Taylor’s fine cuisine? And what a summer’s evening - the sun perfectly warm but not overbearing, the sky blue, the breeze soothing, the setting gorgeous, the service charming.

Answer - certainly not I.

  This was a collaboration with Billecourt Salmon and included a serving of the company’s prestige cuvée, Elisabeth Salmon Rose vintage 2012 which was remarkable and retails for £179 though I very much enjoyed the non vintage Billecourt Salmon Demi-Sec which retails for £58.50 (in a gift box) and proved to be very quaffable when served with the dessert.

  After a sharply priced gin and tonic (£16) in the lovely, sunny sitting area, watching the arrival of the other diners, on to the dining area-proper for a nicely appointed table where I could enjoy the formal cabaret of David Taylor conducting his troops, front of house and kitchen, all smartly dressed, and the whole giving the impression of being a single organism, each part working in unison with the rest,  knowing precisely its role and carrying it out without falter.

  We started with a little bowl of Lavington lamb bone broth, precisely intensely flavoured, clear as a cloudless day and served with a delightful Parker House bread roll shaped like a mushroom and scintillating with the fresh summer flavour of sorrel vinegar. Did the sorrel mildly overwhelm the lamb? - possibly - but this was an enjoyable opening to the pleasure that lay ahead.

  Next came a little gem, modest in size but enormous in flavour - said to be a “celebration of carrot”,  it was far more exciting that its description sounds - a slice of white carrot under carrot tops with a gorgeous carrot and magnolia purée and buckwheat.

  Then the excitement continued to build with perfectly cooked, tender lobster with a sauce of roasted lobster shells and peach leaf - formidable - and a little salad of nasturtium and Isle of Wight tomatoes. There followed a delightful bread course - a slice of sourdough, like the previous Parker House loaf, baked on the estate, and served with a fine butter infused with the same grain from which the bread is made as well as a butter dip seasoned with fava bean miso and estate garden herbs.

  There followed an immaculately cooked piece of line-caught Cornish cod - as perfect a piece of cod as one might hope for - with a mussel and oyster cream sauce and pickled herb stems and caramelised onions. 

  Then, a very fine dish indeed - Lavinton lamb from Lincolnshire* meticulously cooked to the point of sublimity. Tender and sweet - the best lamb I have had this year beyond a doubt and I have had some great lamb so far in 2026. The lamb was served with a fine lamb sauce and the “first lettuce of the year”. Oh, the joy of early summer.

  Dessert was excellent and took the form of a slice of cream cheese with “last year’s blueberries” picked in the estate as well as blueberry icecream and brown butter. This was a thoroughly enjoyable dessert and the meal was rounded off with an unusual mignardise in the form of an icecream sandwich which was a blackcurrant parfait contained by two wafers.

  This has been an excellent evening and I ambled back to the manor so that my uber driver would have somewhere easily identifiable to pick me up from. The sun was just sinking towards the horizon and there was an orange light in the sky. I sat inside the reception area while awaiting my transport and reflected that this had been almost memorable early summer evening,

 * Lavinton lamb is raised by Sophie Arlott of Lavinton Farm in Lincolnshire. She crosses the Hebridean breed, an ancient breed dating back to when the Vikings brought sheep to these islands, with the Southdown - the former produces rich dark meat and the latter gives marbling and a sweetness to the meat.

2  July 2026.

Rating:- 🌞🌞🌞.