571. So It Wasn’t To Be A Bistro In Leeds After All.

 

  Alex Claridge, Chef Patron of The Wilderness and one of the most cerebral chefs known to man, published one of his very infrequent personal blogs on 19 October 2026, musing at last on the award of a Michelin star to The Wilderness at the beginning of the year. When the award was made, an event which caused him some degree of surprise since he had long concluded that the Michelin men had decided he would never receive such recognition (but who knows what they will decide and why they will decide it; Michelin men, like God, move in mysterious ways) the decision had more or less been made to close The Wilderness and, horribile dictu, that he and Rach, his partner would move to Leeds and run a bistro - such heresy. But the award of the macaron changed everything and Birmingham did not lose one of its greatest and most original chefs and restaurateurs but gained a Michelin star. In the nick of time, you might say.

 Below, I presume to post screenshots of Claridge’s whole blog - I don’t expect he will mind. In my opinion, with its reflection on the present state of the restaurant industry at present and all the events which were happening at The Wilderness during 2025 and early 2026, it is a seminal piece to be retained for history’s sake and to provide a contemporary report of the present problems of our local dining out scene and to get a feel of whether we are all doomed or may yet be saved.

570. Upstairs By Tom Shepherd.

 

See also Blogs 188, 194, 205.

  Obtaining a reservation for a single diner at Upstairs by Tom Shepherd in the centre of Lichfield is a task so difficult that Hercules might have decided to give up on this particular labour were he ordered to carry it out. However, earlier this year I did indeed manage to make a reservation at this one Michelin star establishment - infact, much to my surprise I managed to grab two, one for November in addition to today’s booking, so I was finally able to return to this highly thought of restaurant after a very long time away.

  I arrived a little early in Lichfield so I went off to pay my compliments to the late Dr Samuel Johnson, he of dictionary fame and who was something of an epicurean of his time, and visited his statue (and that of his mate Boswell, both situated near Johnson’s former residence on the market square) before making my way the short distance to Upstairs. I noted before entering that Tom Shepherd’s father’s jewellers shop - the downstairs to the restaurant’s upstairs - was now closed which made the little door to the stairs to the restaurant seem even more discreet than previously. I climbed up the stairs to find the restaurant’s decor to be altogether more jazzy than previously but very fresh and light and appealing. The staff, dressed in white collarless shirts and waistcoats looked casually smartly central European like Austrians and it did not take long to work out that the front of house staff are among the most capable and professional I have  come across for a long time - absolutely first rate and delivering impeccable and faultless service.

   The food started off in the way in which it intended to go - unimpeachable deliciousness and excellence or certainly as close to that description as one might wish it to be. A trio of dainty amuses gueles arrived together and were explained in detail though not to the point of exhaustion. The waiter admitted that his favourite, and I was inclined to agree when I had worked my way through them, was a lovely, nicely textured pecorino sable biscuit with toothsome Tunworth cheese mousse under a generously sized roof of winter truffle shavings and this was too good to down in one bite, rather it needed to be nibbled in murine fashion to lengthen the time that I was savouring the little gem for as long as possible. But the other amuses bouches were also rather good - a beef fat micromuffin topped with nicely textured beef tartare and a wafer-thin slice of gherkin to balance the richness and a crispy croustade containing pleasing chalk stream trout and a splendid citric hit of Amalfi lemon.

   The signature red cabbage gazpacho, returned to the menu by popular acclaim having been ‘rested’, more than justified its place among West Midlands restaurants’ special dishes though as the weather was changing to have a cooler autumnal feel to it, I did wonder about serving gazpacho now the leaves are turning yellow and brown.

  Then a bread course to ease one in from the tempting tidbits to the courses proper and this took the form of a determinedly West Midlands pikelet, jazzed up by being a sourdough pikelet, served with delightful cultured butter (my lipidologist will be cringing if reading this, we having had a long discussion about my serum triglycerides which resulted in me making a promise to cut back on butter - a promise I made with my fingers only half-crossed behind my back. But butter of all things, what sort of dreary existence would it be without the pleasure of butter?, I ask you - I didn’t ask my lipidologist that question - I didn’t think he’d understand the agonising torture of une vie sans beurre, after all man can not live by bread alone. As regards the pikelet - which was very good especially with the generous amount of tasty butter heaped on it - I felt, and he did not seem to mind - that I might mention to my excellent waiter that if we were emphasising the West Midlands heritage of it, then perhaps he should introduce as a poyklit which would be quite the right pronunction to enable the achievement of west midlands authenticity.

   An so on to what I suppose should be called the fish course - sliced Orkney scallop beautifully cooked and alive - not in the literal sense, you understand - with scallopy flavour and bathed in a champagne sauce with the richness cut through with the citric hit of calamansi.

  Next, mildly flavoured Anjou quail, accurately cooked in supreme style, served in the presence of vadouvan, a French curry spice, and the sweet and sour of kumquat. This was possibly my least favourite dish - quail, even when this nicely cooked has a flavour too subtle for me though I know for others it is the best of flavours. And it’s so small, poor little thing. It never seems reasonable to kill such a small bird for so little gain. Here too the vadouvan did not really enhance the bird and, though appreciating the beauty and preciseness of the cooking, I could have missed this course and felt no regret. Served separately with it was a much tastier small quail sausage roll and that was a hit, being bold in flavour.

  For the main I had a choice of two dishes - aged Aberdeen Angus beef with girolles or that which I opted for, Wild Shetland halibut served with a nice little pile of Cornish crab, green and yellow courgettes and nasturtium leaves. This was a fine piece of fish, it’s outer flesh cooked beautifully golden though I thought in achieving such beauty,  it was probably ten to twenty seconds over. The nasturtium leaves were, as they usually are, lost on me - I just don’t get the alleged pepperiness of them but I enjoyed the accompanying chimichurri which was full of the warming and reassuring flavour of cumin, my favourite, along with fenugreek, spice. More bread accompanied the fish, a small but lovely Japanese-style milk loaf though to be fair I did not really need it and thought that a good solid root vegetable might have happily taken its place to make more sense of the dish.

   Next, another supremely successful signature dish which I was told, had never been off the menu - Thai green curry ice cream with coconut and mango. This was a very witty and successful intermediate dish, the flavours working beautifully together and the ice cream evoking Thai green curry very effectively. Intermediate dishes are often a failure but this was delightful.

    For dessert proper, apple eclair. This again was very enjoyable though I wasn’t completely convinced by the choux but the dish worked very well, the pink lady apple sorbet was delightful and the lemon verbena leaves worked here where the nasturtium leaves did not work for me in the main course.

  Despite my few mentioned reservations this was still an extremely enjoyable meal and I look forward to a rematch in November.

14 October 2026

Rating:- 🌞🌞.

569. Kibou - Soft Launch.

  This was the first of Kibou’s two soft launch days. The restaurant which serves Japanese-style food is a branch of a chain which trades elsewhere in good, well-off socialist locales in London, Cheltenham, Bristol, Cambridge, Oxford and Solihull (well-off but decidedly non-socialist). Hence, opening in Temple Row in the very centre of Birmingham which presently can’t make up its mind whether it’s politics is fascist extreme left (Green) or fascist extreme right (Reform) or just decently moderate (Conservative), Kibou is dealing with a new sort of dining public.

  I arrived an hour into the first service. It is an impressive establishment - its size extended since the last on site resident business closed and now serves 208 covers. The decor is colourful and exciting and on this first day the front of house staff were charming, enthusiastic in a quiet way and very welcoming.

  I was seated downstairs which has its own bar and I ordered a Singapore sling to start while my excellent waitress placed before me some crunchy wasabi nibbles which hit the right spot. I looked around me at my fellow diners - at the nearest table the types I had expected - a middle class, hipster, male gay couple who looked like they had escaped from Kings Heath for the day. But as the dining room began to fill there was a surprising change as the rest of the diners appeared to be from a different class - a nouvelle bourgeoisie - a working class with loads of money - plumbers, plasterers, scaffolders, builders - people, who unlike the old socialist soft middle class - health workers, university types, teachers, those linked with the arts - do physical work which, though despised by the vieille bourgeoisie, rake in the cash and aren’t embarrassed to flash it - and that appears to now extend to dining out on exotic cuisines. The nouvelle bourgeoisie - to a man - were dressed - nay, uniformed - in expensive hoodies, sports bottoms, back-to-front baseball caps (often not taken off while eating) and trainers. Unlike the hipster vieille bourgeoisie, they looked clean and decent allowing for the sheer horribleness of contemporary casual fashion and their beards were trimmed more neatly than those of the Stirchley/Kings Heath/Moseley hipsters.

  I was surprised by how many children had been brought along by the members of the nouvelle bourgeoisie to eat Japanese fare - surely it would not appeal to the enfants who had been brought along to Kibou. I asked my waitress about this phenomenon. Kibou, she told me, had a special children’s menu to interest les enfants of the ‘working people’ (as politicians now like to call the former working class) and she showed one to me and I noticed katsu curry to be among the dishes on offer to the pups and kittens (the menu also included puzzles for them to solve which I suppose might distract them from running amok in the restaurant as the entitled wealthy old middle class always seem to feel is quite permissible for their nicely spoken little darlings to do so). Well, English society has moved on, and diners must put up with marauding, bored children while eating despite paying a very high price to do so.

  But enough of social commentary. What about the food which is the reason I was there? I have eaten Japanese food quite a few times now but my knowledge of the cuisine is scanty and my attitude to it would probably be considered to be naïve by those who know themselves to be experts. My problem is that I am too old to learn a new language and continue to fail to remember just what each dish is when I see it on a menu - -ase this and -ake that - and no matter what you say, Japan and Japanese things are remarkably alien to the English especially the old English like me. I once spent a few days in Japan - in Kyoto and Tokyo - and ate the food and saw the scenes and rode aboard public transport and ambled along the streets and I did indeed find it both alien and in some ways similar to England.

  After all the English and the Japanese are both island peoples, previously imperial, polite (once upon a time in England, still in Japan) and nestled in our own traditions. Our islands both sit at about the same northern latitude and we both feel superior to those who live on our neighbouring continents (or at least the English once did but the all pervading though now fading  nouvelle culture de la gauche has for the present at least ensured we feel inferior to everyone). The French long made us feel inferior in our cuisine - for two centuries at least even though their greatest chefs had to come to England to really make their mark - Escoffier at the Savoy and then the Ritz Carlton for instance and Soyer innovating the kitchen at the Reform Club, Ude at Crockford’s and even Carème who worked for George IV though for a very short time - and I suppose now in the post-Modern British era, when Japanese ingredients play such an important role in English dishes and Japanese restaurants serving Japanese-style food are springing up all over the place, the question arises as to whether English cuisine is now once more subordinated to a foreign style of food - Japanese and whether or not English food is inferior to Japanese, as British roast beef and pies were once considered inferior to French casseroles, sauces and patisserie. 

 So the children of English working people, the offspring of George the Plumber and Harry the Plasterer, modern-day mechanicals, are lunching at Japanese restaurants on katsu curry, as exciting and interesting to them as Birds Eye fish fingers were to children of my generation. Where’s all that going to lead?

 Anyway, as I said, back to the food. This was a large menu and some of the dishes as described seemed rather large for a single diner but after some discussion with the waitress, who was very professional and helpful and politely friendly, it was agreed that I would order a cold dish and a hot dish. The cold dish  was a quite large platter of sushi - eight pieces of duck and cucumber uramaki (in which the nori is on the outside, wrapped around the rice) with avocado, fresh ginger and, if one chose to use it, the pleasantly scathing assault of wasabi. This was thoroughly enjoyable, the duck perhaps was a little bland but brought with it the nice meaty texture an old Englishman might like (and did like) and the nori was full of maritime flavour.

  My hot dish was a platter of steamed and pan-fried gyoza filled with tasty pork mince served with a dipping sauce. This was so tasty I wolfed it down and felt I really should have another savoury dish which took the form of tempura prawns (ebi) which I again enjoyed very much. Perhaps the prawns were not bursting with the unique flavour of prawns but the tempura was excellent - delicate and crispy and the crustaceans were happily accompanied by a tasty sriracha mayonnaise.

    I could not resist a dessert and again in consultation with my charming waitress I settled on the wonderful apple gyoza - cinnamon and apple dumplings - the cinnamon pleasingly not overpowering and the apple very toothsome. The pastry was deep-fried to lovely crispiness and the accompanying vanilla ice cream really was very good - much superior to some of the vanilla ice creams I have had in some other restaurants.

  I rounded off the meal with some smoky-flavoured toasted rice green tea which was as good as any digestif, as was the bill when it arrived as 50% had been taken off because I was there for the soft launch. Even if it had been full price, for the pleasure it gave, the meal would have represented good value. I feel an urge to return in the near future to experience again the pleasure of that particular lunch. I hope standards do not slide as time goes by.

10 October 2026.

Rating:- 🌛🌛🌛🌛