528. Events Dear Boy Events - January To June 2026.

 

See also Blogs 400, 416, 452 and 492.

12 January 2026 - Aktar Islam, Chef Patron of Opheem, announces that he intends to open a new restaurant, Oudh 1722, in Borough in London during spring 2026.

15 January - Harborne Kitchen announces that it is to close permanently and will not reopen after the Christmas holiday break.

527. Christmas At Hotel du Vin Stratford Upon Avon.

  In recent years, the beloved and greatly missed Lucy II and I have passed our Christmases in Ludlow at Fishmore Hall. In early 2024, the owner, the remarkable Laura Penman sold the boutique hotel with its Michelin listed restaurant, Forelles, to a businessmen based, I think, in West Bromwich and immediately large cuts were made to the quality of service in the hotel (while the room rates and food prices remained high) and the quality of the food served in Forelles. The service was often chaotic despite the efforts of one or two loyal staff and chefs came and went (I was told one stayed just a couple of hours) and last Christmas everything came to a head with a restaurant full of annoyed customers there for Christmas lunch for which they had paid a very large amount of money.

  I had still hoped to visit Fishmore during 2025:but my dear old dog died in March and little Lucy III, then aged 9 weeks, came to stay with me on 21 May and really was not ready to stay in other people’s property for a few months though I hoped to take her to the Ludlow Food Festival in the second weekend of September and stay at Fishmore then but I was told there were no vacancies and that was why Lucy and I passed the Food Festival weekend at The Feathers in Ludlow town. I contacted the hotel about staying for Christmas but I was told that Christmas 2024 had been such a disaster that it had been decided to close for three days. And so it was that Lucy and I had a change of location for Christmas 2025 and chose the Christmas package being offered by a hotel we regularly stay in whenever we are in Stratford upon Avon, the very dog (and human) friendly Hotel du Vin located in Rother Street. As for poor Fishmore Hall, it is up for sale again. Let us hope it finds a buyer who will treat it (and its staff and customers) with a lot of love and respect after the disgraceful way the present owner has abused the whole idea of hospitality.Bizarrely, Forelles remains in the Michelin Guide. I suspect this provides evidence that Michelin inspectors do not visit the restaurants that are included in the guide on a yearly basis or even on a two yearly basis because if that were the case, Forelles would certainly and sadly not find a place as a recommended restaurant in that particular book at present.

  The welcome to the Hotel Dublin was lovely, the room was familiarly spacious and we settled in instantly after opening the rather nice gifts left for us in our room, of which more later. Because this Blog is mainly about dining out, let us proceed straight to the food, after all this was Christmas and first there was Christmas Eve. Christmas Eve dinner allowed a spending of £35 as part of the Christmas package and this went a nice way to paying for my starter of prawn cocktail (it surprised me when it arrived at the table as I had ordered coquilles St Jacques en croute. I queried the order and I was told that I had definitely ordered prawn cocktail - the confusion was not easy to explain because although ‘coquilles’ sounds, I suppose, rather like ‘cocktail’, the word ‘scallop’ had been used more than once during the ordering process. The prawn cocktail itself was unremarkable - the salad only made up of lettuce and nothing else but the Marie Rose sauce was passable & the prawns plentiful. Still, I was rather lusting after the coquilles.

  The main course was an extremely well cooked piece of pan fried cod (pavé de cabillaud) with a nice crispy skin served with a accurately spiced curried cauliflower and absolutely delicious vinaigrette of pomegranate, golden raisins, red onion and lime. This was a great success and my disappointment about the coquilles was rapidly dissipating. Four dessert I had a somewhat disappointing trifle - there was hardly any fruit in it and no sherry. Trifles need sherry and in generous amounts. So a very good main but not somewhat unsatisfactory bookend dishes.

  Lucy the Labrador settled in for the night, happily comfortable and quite tired. In the morning on leaving the room, I saw that each room had been visited by Father Christmas during the night and little individual knitted socks were hanging from the door handle filled with a tiny candy walking stick and three chocolate gold coins. How sweet and what fun. On arrival, on the previous day, gifts of a bottle of champagne and a container of bath salts awaited me on my arrival along with a packet of toothsome chocolate praline Christmas trees.

  And so to Christmas Day lunch and I arrived in the restaurant to find a charmingly laid table had been allocated to me. There was a splendidly sized, pleasingly cheesy gougère as an amusement gueule and then I had chosen a very good starter of chicken liver terrine with a sweet fig and plum chutney, cornichons and toasted brioche. Things were going stingingly and the dog found her first Christmas lunch (as an observer up until then) to be a gripping and fascinating experience.

But the proof of the Christmas lunch lies in the turkey. This was really very, very good. The turkey was full of flavour and absolutely perfectly cooked - it was unimpeachable and the best Christmas Turkey I have had for years. It came with a good stuffing and a marvellously phallic pig-in-blanket and tge vegetables were generally well cooked - the red cabbage tender and not oversweet, the roast parsnips and carrots tender and tasty and the roast potatoes reasonably well done. The only disappointment for me were  the Brussels sprouts - sprouts, like Christmas, come but once a year and should celebrated by perfect cooking. I have been presented with some real stinkers in my time - boiled to a soggy pulp or served as hard, and bitter, as bullets. I do like my sprouts to be tender and not al dente  which is how many chefs seem to serve them. The texture of these sprouts, for me, erred too far towards the latter but others, no doubt would have praised them for the restraint applied to cooking them. Such is life.

  I had preordered my dessert and had chosen trifle again. It was similar to the first dish that I previously bred served but had more flaked almonds which made it a little more interesting. 

  Boxing Day dinner was somewhat disappointing though it started very well as I was able to pay 50p for a £14 glass of Kir Royale in the cosy bar due to a couple of offers the hotel was making. And very good it was too. For my starter I had a very satisfactory pâté de foies de volaille, an enjoyably not over-rich chicken liver parfait again with a nicely complementary chutney and toasted brioche.

  I was not happy with my main which seemed to be the leftovers from Christmas Day. It was suggested that I might like the roast beef - which sounded highly tempting and looked good but had the feel of being reheated meat from the day before and the accompanying vegetables had the same look about them. There was a nicely puffed up Yorkshire pudding but it was dry and unexciting and gave little of the pleasure that Yorkshire pudding should give.. There was the ane unctious gravy, which was needed, as at Christmas lunch. This was not a good main course. If I had wanted the Christmas Day leftovers then I could have stayed at home and served them myself.

  I had ice cream and a sorbet for dessert. 

   My final evening at the Hotel du Vin was altogether more enjoyable. After two heavily discounted kir royales in the bar, I had a hot, warming, bowl of sweet French onion soup with its cheesy lid - splendid - then I continued with the French theme by choosing roulette de ratatouille en galette des pois chiches gratinée au four (ratatouille in chickpea pancakes baked until golden). This was a great pleasure after all the heavily traditional English meat-based fare of the preceding days. The ratatouille was delicious with a toothsome sweetness to it and the pancakes were crispy and gave a necessary texture to it all. French and vegetarian - what is happening to me?

  I coukd not resist a class of splendid Royal Hungarian Tokaji to accompany my dessert. It was a great priblem - there were two new desserts on the menu. Firstly there was rum baba for which I always have and had then, a great longing but there was also galette des rois, the famous French dessert served at Epiphany and made from puff pastry and filled with frangipan and here served with an excellent vanilla ice cream . It was too good an opportunity to miss and I opted for the galette and was overwhelmed by the pleasure of it - it had the correct swirling patterns in the pastry which was perfectly cooked and was an inviting golden brown. The frangipani was delicious and the whole extremely memorable. A perfect dish to round off Christmas.

   The next morning, the dog and I once more enubered after an initial crisis in which  the driver who had taken on the job as a uber pet job suddenly decided he could not take Lucy because he had a allergy to dogs. Luckily, another driver appeared to be just seconds away and whisked us away from Stratford to bring us back to Birmingham and a necessary rest.

Rating:- 🌛🌛🌛🌛

After thought - as above - Christmas comes but once a year. Just like sprouts do. 

The painting below is titled ‘Seven Brussels sprouts’ and was painted by Eliot Hodgkin (1905 - 1987), a well-known painter of still life’s, in 1955

526. Wilderness Tenth Anniversary Dinner.

  The Wilderness has been located down a side alley off Warstone Lane in the Jewellery Quarter for longer than was ever intended. After its move there, an old former factory and previous home to Two Cats, Big Nanny’s Jamaican Kitchen, Choolo, Toque D’Or and Restaurant Gilmore which first opened in 1997, Alex Claridge had planned to make it a temporary site for his dining establishment before moving it after a short period to somewhere more permanent. Plans fell through and The Wilderness settled in to its present site very comfortably. The restaurant had been born under another name - Nomad - on 15 November 2025 at the Urban Coffee Co. in 1 Dudley Street, close to New Street Station but was necessarily renamed as The Wilderness shortly after opening in April 2016  because of the extraordinary pressure put on Alex by a New York hotel, NoMad, which threatened to take legal action because it claimed that Claridge had taken on the hotel’s name which of course was pure nonsense.

  Right from the word ‘go’, The Wilderness caught the local press’ attention with some of the ingredients used in some of his dishes - ants, for instance, in place of citric fruits because Claridge wished to source hyper-locally and ants were readily available while lemons were not a recognised feature of West Midlands agriculture - it all got rather farcical when a friend I was dining with there asked for some lemon with his glass of tonic and was offered the only source of citrus at hand - ants - which he politely declined. Despite this extreme idiosyncrasy, now long an eccentricity of the past, the food that Claridge was serving in Dudley Street was remarkably good and a sublime lamb dish I had there remains forever in my memory.

  And so, just before Christmas 2025, I wandered through the vaguely festive streets of the Jewellery Quarter in the direction of the alley in Warstone Lane. The welcome was warm and the kitchen alight with activity. This was The Wilderness’ 10th birthday dinner and a worthy celebration it was. The theme of the dinner was old favourites reimagined and there was a surprise in the kitchen with Jonny Mills working there while he waits for his own Sāēl to be open for business. This was a tasting menu costing £150 but rather oddly called Requiem, though unusual and vaguely morbid names never come as a surprise from Alex Claridge. So Requiem it was and the meal began.

Menu signed by Ediz Engin and Alex Claridge

  Firstly, two pleasing amuses bouches - as often at The Wilderness, a croustade and a tartlet. And then Claridge’s Big Mac, a fine beef tartare dating back, according to the menu, to 2019, and delivered by Jonny Mills. Then another ever evolving Wilderness dish, the Carrot 2025, which originated in its first primitive form in 2015 and I presume, may well have been served when The Wilderness was still Nomad and also harked back to when Alex had been a chef until 2013 at the now long closed vegetarian restaurant, the Warehouse Cafe in Digbeth where I remember eating a languid and somewhat glum pak choi (I would be sure that anything so dreary had not been cooked by Alex) and resolved to loath the useless vegetable for the rest of my life. Alex had then moved on to be Development Chef at another vegetarian dining establishment, Bistro 1847 in the Great Western Arcade, before starting to do pop ups of his own food at the Kitchen Garden Cafe in Kings Heath. Presumably by the time Carrot 2015 made its first appearance, Alex had worked out just the right thing to do with a carrot.

  Then came a brilliant dish - witty, hilarious, original, delicious - Trout - Truffle - inspired by the 2016 dish, Trout & Soil. Overlying a piece of finely prepared trout lying on a bed of truffle was a pastry fish one which gave a dish of trout some great visual characterisation and on it, more truffle. This was a highlight dish of 2025.

  Next some very nicely cooked quail with a brilliantly tasty crab curry sauce. This was based on the dish NAFB which dated back to 2018 and afterwards a piece of venison as I like it - a nice pink slice with  a wholly agreeable bite to it - paired with plum and beetroot and based on Alex’s 2015 Venison and beetroot. This worked very well and shows that despite years of cooking vegetarian food by the time 2025 came around he was already a master of meat and the precise matching of ingredients.

  Next there was a small but delightful version of his 2019 white chocolate banana filled with mango which, to the best of my recall, he first served at his then other restaurant, Nocturnal Animals in Bennetts Hill (what an ingenious and fantastic surprise it was when it first made an appearance) although the menu dates it to the dish Banana 2023 which suggests that Tom Shepherd served a version of it first on The Great British Menu which is not correct. This remained a clever, meticulously prepared and delicious item to boost anyone’s spirits, even Alex’s.

  We were in the home straight. The predessert was titled sorrel and jalapeño ”cheesecake”, inspired by Claridge’s White chocolate and wasabi from 2017. The hit of heat from the jalapeño was fun though I think the description of a cheesecake even in quotes was stretching things a bit - it mildly scruffy and removed from Claridge’s usual meticulously arranged plates. But we went on and arrived at the dessert proper of Chocolate-cherry-cep inspired by the 2016 Cherry and mushroom.

This was a reflection of a former more radical Alex Claridge and was very edible though very filling and it took some to get to the end of it but the process of ingesting had been very pleasurable.

  I took my petit fours home with me, bid my Christmas farewells and happy new years and, of course, happy birthdays, enubered and was whisked home while I wondered what Alex Claridge would be presenting us with in the next 10 years.

Rating:- 🌞🌞

20 December 2025.

  Meanwhile the faces in the kitchens of Birmingham’s fine restaurants continue to shift around like tectonic plates. No sooner than they were first spotted in the kitchens of The Wilderness a few months ago, Messrs Lewis Perks, the talented pastry chef, Jordan Johnson and Evan Holliday, all late of Simpsons where the latter two were working when they appeared on Masterchef The Professionals and before they worked at Claridge’s restaurant, are now to be found working at The Fountain gastropub in Clent. That should be interesting.

Perks, Holliday and Johnson at The Fountain.

  Meanwhile at Simpsons, where a friend dines regularly, I am told by him that the restaurant manager, Steve Locklin, has now left his post there after about a year and we have already reported that the sommelier, Thomas Moore, has moved from Simpsons to Glynn Purnell’s new glitzy restaurant in Snowhill, Trillium. All of this makes it more difficult for Luke Tipping to deliver the high standard of food we have come to expect at Simpsons in recent years. Presumably many of these departures are linked to the proposed sale of Simpsons which so far does not seem to have advanced to any degree. But for now, at least, Luke Tipping ploughs on and Simpsons remains.

524. Trillium And Namaste England Revisited

  It is not fair to judge anything on first acquaintance but I often find that first impressions are rarely far off the mark. I was not, shall we say, overly impressed by the food served on my opening minute’s visit to Glynn Purnell’s Trillium, though others visiting a few days after me were jumping in the air with exhilaration after their first meals in this glitzy, sparkling, energetic and expensive dining establishment.

  However, I had made reservations for a second visit the following week and the question was to be whether or not I was going to appreciate the food more than previously.

  I started off with the Trillium cocktail which had not been available the previous week. It was pleasant enough though in the future I would opt for something less sweet.

 I had resolved to order less food on this second visit as I had ordered far too much for me to handle the previous week. I ordered two snacks and no starters and once more enjoyed the extra large gougère (the menu still has the accent over the first e pointing in the wrong direction) and, this time, the battered potato scallop which, though rather lightweight, brought with it pleasure and a hint of Aktar Islam’s sophisticated aloo tuk..

  It was all very busy but the staff had time to chat passingly and the service was fine save that the food was coming out, as in the first week, a little cooler than one might have hoped. It was difficult to see why. It all came to a head with a dish of otherwise very good confit leeks which I had ordered for my main course of braised shoulder of lamb and which were almost inedibly cold. When I mentioned this, apologies were made and a very much better hot dish of leeks was quickly served but at these sort of prices, food should be being served hot. With so many distinguished chefs in the kitchen and with the high prices, Trillium must do better. No simple errors like that should happen at any time. I’m sure that placing cold sour cream on the leeks does not help them to retain a reasonable temperature. The lamb itself was excellent and a big improvement on the pork chop I had had the previous week. The meat was succulent and delightfully tender but best of all it tasted like lamb (this is not the case in a lot of restaurants) - perhaps because it was hogget - and its being matched with mint - the two always making the ideal combination (though you can add some redcurrant if you like and a sprig of rosemary). I thoroughly enjoyed my main apart from the misstart with the cold leeks and my confidence in this new restaurant was starting to build.

 

  For dessert I opted again for the very passable zabaglione made joyous by the two accompanying beignets and topped it all off with a very, very quaffable Old Fashioned.

  This was a distinct improvement compared with the opening day. In between my two visits, a gourmand friend whom I sometimes suspect of having a Stockholm Syndrome as regards restaurateurs, had pronounced that he’d had a very good meal centred on the £55 Creedy Carver duck dish and the photographs certainly looked very good but man can not live by duck alone and I remain to be convinced that apart from Trillium being the spot to be seen at, it lives up to expectations, and its prices.

Rating:- 🌛🌛🌛🌛.

17 December 2025.

  After all the glitz and bustle of Trillium, I paid another visit to a recently reopened Namaste England in West Heath. It really is a lovely place, sadly far too quiet but I hope that is just because I chose to dine there early lunchtime midweek, its decor bright with colourful elephants painted on the walls and a Christmas tree to bring seasonal pleasure; with a short and enticing menu which has a marked emphasis on vegetarian dishes while not proscribing meat and poultry. It’s all nicely presented but has a charming home-cooked and rustic air to it all. I like going there.

  This time I started with a pistachio lassi - very good - and then, as on my previous occasion, ordered the nice little onion bhajis which were perfectly spicy and matched by a nice yogurt dip though they were a little dark and looked as though they had been fried for longer than they should have been.

  As my main, this time I had the chicken biryani which was served nicely but there was no pastry cover over the biryani. The rice was well cooked and the little chipmunks of chicken incorporated in it were moist and pleasant. The rice was a little oily and I could not help wondering if this had been a stir fried pilau with added chicken rather than a steamed true biryani. The fried onion slices scattered on the top were also burnt and did not look good. It was certainly a very generous portion but after a number of mouthfuls I grew a little tired and bored with it and asked for the remainder to be boxed up for me to have for summer. Despite its faults the dish was aromatic and tasty and pleasant enough.

  Once again I had the excellent homemade pistachio kulfi served beautifully in a pretty little dish and thoroughly enjoyed it.

  This is a lovely place where a decent enough meal can be had. The prices are remarkably low (I paid about £27 for the three courses plus lassi and service which was added at just 5%). Tge service was, as before, charming. I hope that it succeeds.

Rating:- 🌛🌛🌛.

23 December 2025.