578. The Wilderness.

 

 Eleven years have passed since Alex Claridge first opened Nomad, soon after to be called The Wilderness, in Dudley Street after a series of pop-ups. As we know, he moved his set up to a temporary spot down an alley way off Warstone Lane in the Jewellery Quarter in 2018 and has been there ever since.

   The address itself has a firm spot in Birmingham dining out history having previously been home to Nick Astley’s Two Cats, Veda Sampson’s Big Nanny’s Caribbean Restaurant, the Nepalese restaurant Choolo, Didier Philpott’s Toque D’Or, Paul Gilmore’s Gilmore (1997 - 2003) and the Vale family’s Silverside restaurant (which was run by Nigel Bishop the son of Michelle Vale who founded the notable La Copper Kettle and Michelle’s in Harborne in 1970 and 1978 respectively). 

 And so, Alex had managed to open his restaurant in a place of note and he rose to it by transforming the old factory with stained glass windows into a dark brooding, noisy, gothic hallucination of a place where he cooked rather good food, worked to ensure his business survived the pandemic and then everything else this decade has thrown at him and eventually, at the eleventh hour when he was about to sell up and move to Leeds to open an unintimidating small bistro (or so he says) where he could eke out his days quietly away from the current horrors of the hospitality industry and without the thrill that is The Wilderness, he was awarded a Michelin Star.

  More than that, on the very day I had my reservation to revisit The Wilderness, the BBC featured Alex as the guest chef judge in the 2026 series of Masterchef The Professionals. Here he was a respected - indeed Marcus Waring almost looked in awe of him - Michelin chef setting a difficult task for the aspiring cooks to perform and then judging them - not unkindy but firmly. This was a long way from his own unsuccessful appearance in The Great British Menu where he was sent home by Paul Ainsworth at the end of the first day of competition having somewhat bemused the comedienne host with ingredients such as grasshoppers and mealworms.

  Claridge will have an 11th birthday dinner party at The Wilderness for twelve diners all sitting together at a large table later this month but unfortunately I have a ticket for a Bellowhead concert at Symphony Hall (booked a year ago to make sure of a very good seat) and will be unable to attend. Excellent events are like buses, you wait for ages and then two come along together. A shame but we must live with our disappointments.

  And so to my latest visit to The Wilderness. There was a choice of two Tasting Menus - one with six courses at £145 and the other with two additional courses at a robust £175. I felt that paying an extra £30 for a tuna sashimi and another fish dish, both I’m sure, excellent was somewhat strong and so I opted to dine from the cheaper menu. This proved to be an excellent move as I was more than satiated by the end of the meal and retrospectively two more dishes would have been too much for me.

  There was an excellent start with some delicious and clever amuses gueules. Oyster served with rivetingly sweet nashi pear and the texture and pleasingly infiltrating flavours of walnuts and celery was very good. So too was the umami orgy of celeriac, compressed apple, and chicken skin blanketed with katsuobushi and the fabulous third amuse bouche of crab with a Brunoise of sweet, sweet apple and kohlrabi and a remarkable sorrel and jalapeno sorbet. What a start!

  Next came a delicious course of very nicely textured Chalkstream trout in a gorgeous, silky langoustine bisque with cubes of peppery daikon combined with popping balls of trout roe and the tongue tingling heat of XO on top - another great dish of immense flavour and pleasing textures.

  More admirable fish followed on in the form of perfectly cooked John Dory. Ah! Gorgeous. The accompanying mussels were equally perfectly textured and sweet and brought with them to this epicurean party a splendidly toothsome mussel and fennel sauce with a kick of chilli, striking in its viridity patterned with individual raw samphire leaves and bejewelled with tiny fennel flowers and made particularly delightful by dabs of sweet orange gel and bursts of the aniseed flavour of fennel. As I write this, I lust to eat the dish again.

  Though not a pigeon lover, the next course of Anjou pigeon was again cooked perfectly. The milder pigeon meat was as enjoyable as a pigeon unenthusiast could ever hope to find it. The grilled hispi cabbage was very successful and flavoursome and while the walnut and fig added very pleasing texture the sweet fig chutney brought a darling sweetness to balance the pigeon.

  And as for the predessert - well, what can one say? There was the potent hit of the taste of plum in the sorbet, the colour of which was as vibrant as the flavour was. The nest of cream cheese snow underlined that the dish was Chef’s play on a cheesecake, as it was described to me. There was pistachio, the flavour of which was discernible and then there was nori which almost brutally moved this plate of pleasure from being a happy dessert to an innovative and striking intermediate. Such fun!

  How lovely it is to dine in a restaurant in this present day and age where the pastry chef presents the diner with, er …. pastry. The dessert was just that - a slice of fine tart made of delicious crispy pastry and dulce chocolate and brooding bay leaf with a full-bodied blood orange sorbet - well, it’s coming up to Christmas and chocolate orange is probably just what we want. Again, an excellent dish. Mesmerising.

  And then, with a parting coffee and petit four, time to pay the bill, enuberise, head home and reflect that it was all made possible by the timing of the Michelin star award or else Alex might now be running some little bistro in Leeds, I would never have eaten this triumphant meal and someone else - who, I wonder, might be serving food at historic number 27 Warstone Lane.

11 November 2026

Rating:- 🌞🌞🌞

Alex Claridge - guest judge in Masterchef The Professionals (11 November 2026), scenes from the programme - 

576. A Quick Return To Upstairs.

 

  Autumn advances. It’s chilly but dry if cloudy. Chilly it may be outside in the quiet mean streets of Lichfield city but I feel a thrill and warmness as I once more haul myself up the stairs of Upstairs by Tom Shepherd. There’s a frisson of delight as the excellent front of house staff, who’ve done their homework and greet me by name without me giving it, ask about the dog and ‘remember’ the cocktail I had three or four weeks ago. This is a very professional front of house brigade, on par with the staff of Opheem, on par, I’m sure with other two Michelin starred restaurants except of course those blinking Michelin inspectors have not yet upgraded Upstairs from a single star.

  I was seated comfortably as was my bag on its own little bag stool, and I ordered this time a cocktail which sounded right for a chilly day - a twist on an Old Fashioned - and we were off. Head Chef Michael Blades was in the kitchen but so, too, was the Chef Patron, Tom Shepherd, dressed stylishly for the kitchen in a collarless shirt the colour of mushroom duxelles and a lighter grey sleeved waistcoat, and he looked like he was doing his share of the work. I had the feeling that this was going to be good. And it was good. Good enough, surely, for two astral bodies to come and reside in this house of pleasure.

  The menu was largely unchanged (see Blog 570), not surprisingly since I had only recently visited Upstairs but I took the opportunity this time to order the alternative main course of dry aged Aberdeen Angus from Herefordshire and instead of the previous apple-based dessert of my last visit, and choosing not to have the chocolate dessert - chocolate desserts are rarely my preference - I opted for Tom Shepherd’s Bananaman dessert which won him praise when he appeared in The Great British Menu though to be fair, Alex Claridge had served up a similar convincing banana-shaped white chocolate dessert several years before at Nocturnal Animals and afterwards at The Wilderness.  

  The amuses gueules were again a delight; this time it was hard to pick a favourite. The clever beetroot gazpacho was of course also delicious though I again did wonder whether or not a cold soup was quite the thing for these increasingly colder autumn days as they trail into winter. The signature sourdough pikelets with gorgeous cultured butter.were again a great pleasure though I should have preferred larger portions and then to the excellent fish course, this time instead of scallops, robust, meaty monkfish, cooked with the utmost accuracy delivering the fish with a perfect texture. It was accompanied very nicely with the citrus of calamansi and a pleasing champagne sauce.

  I have no explanation as to why I enjoyed the dainty little quail more than on my last visit - it must have been me - but it was delicious, so moist and delicate and subtle in flavour and once more happily accompanied by a toothsome sausage roll of its offal.

    The Aberdeen Angus was a beautiful dish, the meat of fine quality and cooked accurately; the photograph below makes the point that a picture tells more than a thousand words do. The additional braised short rib was a flavour bomb and the autumnicity of it all sprang to life through the girolles.

  The intermediate ‘Thai green curry’ dish was as mesmerising and successful as before but, for me, the iconic chocolate banana was a great disappointment. Its flavour was far too strong and seemed to have a very artificial taste. I will go as far as saying that I didn’t like it which seems somewhat heretical but there we are, chefs just can not please all the people all the time and they must live with that fact. After an original - so original one hardly dares use the word mignardise - coffee accompaniment,  it was off back home on the slowest train in the Empire, or so it seemed, to be sure I was back with the dog as the evening crept it and the Bonfire night fireworks kicked off.

  Thoughts swirled through my mind which said that Upstairs could be the best restaurant in the West Midlands but it has some strong competition for that title. But it’s certainly time for Michelin to raise the restaurantstatus but then again, those pesky inspectors have their own agendas, so let’s face it - anything could happen.

5 November 2026

Rating:- 🌞🌞🌞.

577. Saturday Lunch At Sæl.

 

  Going into town at lunchtime suits me much more than doing so in the evening because nighttime public transport in Birmingham is, in a word, dreadful for all sorts of reasons which I will not expand upon here as life is too short to detail them. This is one of the reasons I was pleased that Jonny Mills was starting a Saturday lunchtime service at Sæl in the Goodsyard in the Jewellery Quarter and when I became aware of the fact I rushed to book a place and found one on the very first Saturday one o’clock service. 

    I arrived early unlike the other diners who arrived remarkably late - a full twenty minutes or so for a service with a set starting time and they had no real excuse for being so discourteous - they were not delayed by traffic for instance - because they openly admitted that they had been drinking just around the corner at Passing Fancies. Still, it gave me time to have a nice relaxed chat with Jonny and Asher Beardsmore, sommelier and mixologist. It seemed that they had already had a visit from a Michelin inspector and the vibes from that, they felt, were …. promising. But who can ever be sure what is going on in the mind of a Michelin inspector? Well, if that individual had been present at this first Saturday lunch then a case was once more being soundly made for Sæl’s inclusion in the vaunted tome.

  Quite reasonably, some of the Saturday lunch dishes were familiar from my two previous visits for dinner and in this case, familiarity did not breed contempt. This was a shorter, simpler, pared down menu of six courses at a very attractive price. It really was very good.

  To start, the now familiar beetroot croustade as detailed in Blog 561. This, once more, was delicious - infact, I asked myself was it actually better than before - I loved the joyous minor sting of the ‘hot sauce’ on the front of my tongue which I masochistically allowed to perversely linger for a while till I assuaged it with a glass of the first of the three wines featured on the mini-flight menu - a clean sparkling Tasmanian wine. This was all very delightful as was the subsequent leek and potato course, also detailed in Blog 561, which conjured up classic leek and potato soup and then lifted it up to the world of fine dining where old combinations become new, exciting and inventive and, most importantly, retain their long established tastiness.

  Then, sticking to a classic meal format where amuses gueles open and desserts close and the steps in between are long laid down, to the fish course of mackerel. For a man who has his reservations about mackerel this was the way to serve it and there was texture from thinly sliced turnip and a nice balancing bitterness of chicory. But the highlight of the meal was the quite superb venison dish. Straightforward, perfect cooking - the venison possibly the best I have been served this year - just the right amount of bite to it and the flavour wonderful. There were appealing little cubes of quince, radicchio de castelfranco - a mild and unusual chicory unusually light green in colour with burgundy-coloured spots(grown in chef’s allotment) - and cobnut to add texture. This was the work of a master. I am itching to return for Saturday lunch just to enjoy the venison a second time.

  Dessert took the form of an autumnal damson sorbet with fig leaf - very good if perhaps outwardly a little unambitious. To be fair, my attention was taken away from it by hearing what the retired businessman who was entitled to arrive unapologetically twenty minutes or so late for the meal and who professed himself a supporter of independent hospitality, had to say. Of course, he was a expert on Birmingham restaurants, he loved to come into the city centre from his home in an affluent village outside the city and dine here but would never dine at Adam’s because, he said, it was the only major restaurant which would “serve Tories” attending the recent Conservative Party Conference at the National Exhibition Centre, a three day conference which brought large amounts of money to the city’s cash strapped businesses. Another hypocritical ‘negroni socialist’ was my diagnosis. After thirty years in the medical profession I seem to recall that my diagnoses were more than usually correct. I bit my tongue and got on with my dessert and took out my hearing aid so I did not have to listen to the droning of the self-regarding socialist bore. 

  And so it was that after a very decent cup of coffee and ignoring the one man cabaret from Whitlocks End, I departed and headed home, sure that Jonny Mills had got something special there at Sæl and was heading for greatness.

7 November 2026.

Rating:- 🌞🌞🌞