534. The (Starry) Wilderness.

 

  It is not unknown for me to dine at The Wilderness. My first visit was shortly after it opened in Dudley Street back in 2016 if I remember rightly, or was it perhaps the end of 2015. Time passes and one forgets details. I remember the shock of the moss covered walls, an exquisite lamb dish and those citric tasting ants lining up to get at the cheese tart. The rest, they say, is history. Ten years or so later, Alex Claridge now has his well-deserved Michelin star. It’s fair to say, I think, as an interested eyewitness, that the ten years leading up to the award have been ten years of relentless struggle but finally the walls of Chateau Michelin have been scaled and the starry flag carried off to be flown at Wilderness Castle. I was happy to be dining at The Wilderness, just a week and two days after the memorable ceremony in Dublin where Claridge’s skill was awarded the recognition it deserved and much celebrating, apparently, took place.

  I was pleased to congratulate Chef and his excellent crew and have a brief chat and then to settle down and be cosseted and regaled with the dishes from the full dining menu - £150 - yes, I know but it was a special occasion  - which was as full of luxurious items, almost all finely cooked, as one might expect - unimpeachable A5 wagyu with an astonishing crab velouté and alive with tamarind, excellent, gorgeously flavoured saddle of lamb and perfectly cooked, gorgeous venison perfectly matched with beetroot and sweet plum. Unfortunately the preceding halibut was served cold and undercooked which was embarrassing for everybody given the so very recent award of the Michelin Star but the problem was quickly rectified and another dish was served, appropriately hot and nicely cooked. Mistakes happen sometimes.

  The pre-dessert was great fun with jalapeno and sorrel combined with the sudden sweet sting of grape and the dessert was mildly challenging as rocket elbowed its way in to a dish of nicely cooked rhubarb and pistachio. Fortunately the rocket did not elbow its way in too much as I really couldn’t taste it and so all was well that ended well at this newly starry but long-established Jewellery Quarter restaurant with Alex Claridge remains uncompromising in his drive to bring his dinners the good,the inventive and the sometimes challenging. No ants though, thank heavens.

Rating:- 🌞🌞

535. Pho.

 

  I was in Birmingham city centre having successfully completed a task which I had been putting off for a couple weeks. Feeling rather pleased with myself and being in Grand Central station en route home, and feeling peckish I was suddenly seized by the idea of taking the elevator up to the food hall and eating lunch there. I don’t like food halls - they are rarely peaceful locations allowing a tranquil digestion and a peaceful pleasurable meal. But fortunately it was a school day and so there were no out-of-control children running around and screaming and adding to the pervading oppressive noise. And it was interesting to see just how many different ‘restaurants’ there were there and the wide array of faux cuisines there were on offer.

I had not dabbled in Vietnamese cuisine for a long time and many of the other restaurants looked unappealing and so I opted for the Vietnamese-style, ‘street food’ chain restaurant Pho. I have to stay that I thought the front of house staff were very good -polite but friendly, very helpful and generally likeable.

One of them presented me with the very long menu. I have eaten Vietnamese food in North and South Vietnam but I needed a jolt to my memory to help me to decide what to eat. Though almost all the other diners were having various pho variations, I have rarely derived any great degree of pleasure from the thin soups of east and south east Asia and noodles have never stirred any real enthusiasm in my gastronomic soul and so I eschewed the phos and chose other items to remind me of Vietnamese cuisine. I launched myself into lunch with a plate of what might be politely described as ‘subtley’ flavoured prawn crackers with an excellent spicy sweet chilli dip which I thought was probably the tastiest item served to me that day.

As a starter I chose what turned out to be a large plate of ‘crispy’ pork spring rolls garnished inappropriately, I would have thought, by a big sprig of mint and some dull looking lettuce leaves. The rolls were vaguely ‘crispy’ and the pork inside was unidentifiable. There was no greasiness to the spring rolls but equally they were dry and gave little pleasure. I did not eat them all. The accompanying dip lacked the pleasurable heat of that served with the prawn crackers. The spring rolls were really quite tasty, which was something at least.

  I then had a ‘rice bowl’ served with yet another watery sweet chilli dip. This was described as “ crispy beef” in betel leaf. There was certainly nothing to suggest the beef element was in any way “crispy”. Some of the elements of the dish were nice - I liked the sweet pickled vegetables but the rice was dry though generously portioned I suppose.

For dessert I had a ‘Vietnamese affogato’. What ingredient of it made it ‘Vietnamese’I am not sure but it was enjoyable.

Pho is a chain restaurant. It is clearly very popular. But the food has a number of faults and is there as something to eat rather than something to lyricist about. My advice woukdbe to get on a 45 bus and head for Eat Vietnam in Stirchley - a whole different ballgame.

26 February 2026.

🌛

529. Folium New Menu In 2026. Then It Snowed.

 

  Ben Tesh’s Folium remains my favourite restaurant in Birmingham. Somehow it seems like a refuge. A refuge from the madding crowd. A refuge where I feel like I am among friends and where the food served is not bettered anywhere else in Birmingham. A restaurant which is included in the Michelin Guide but which has so far been denied a macaron - a star - which says more about the Michelin inspectors than it does about Folium. Ben Tesh’s cooking is meticulous and inventive and totally consistent and Lucy Hanson’s front of house management is deceptively relaxed but as spot on as the number of knives, forks and spoons nestled in the wooden utensil holder.

  A good friend who had recently moved from the fleshpots of Birmingham (well, Four Oaks actually) to the elysium of Saffron Walden, already nostalgically panting for a good curry and a fine dining meal, had returned for a two day stay at The Grand Hotel where myself and the dog were also taking up residence for a couple of nights. His, and therefore my, timing was not good. As the day of our reunion drew near, growing threats of one of those tiresomely named storms, and then the increasingly menacing neologism of a ‘snow bomb’, featured more and more in the weather reports for Birmingham. And the snow bomb landed as we enjoyed our very fine dinner at Folium.

  New year, new Folium. Ben Tesh had changed his menu to make it somewhat more affordable - to some extent - and introduced new, interesting, even exciting, new dishes while retaining a few old friends which never fail to give the greatest pleasure.

  There was a new amuse gueule - a supremely crispy and delicious Pink Fir potato rosti with three delightful tiny blobs of smoked cod roe sitting on it. Also new was a tartlet of spot on Marie Rose acting as a little home to lobster and of course, to my great relief, retained and still there, the signature chicken liver parfait served in a burnt onion pastry which must be what is served to those chosen few who have just arrived in Heaven, having bypassed Purgatory, their earthbound gastronomic life at an end.

  And so to the starters on this new menu. Tesh’s uniquely admirable homemade sourdough with his cultured butter was served first. Again this would be what is served in Paradise on one’s arrival there. Give us this day our daily Ben Tesh sourdough bread, O Lord. Then a bowl of toothsome noodles made from biodynamic grain in a gorgeous broth prepared using aged beef fat and mushroom with nice firm textures provided by Merit mushrooms (Merit is a brand of mushroom suppliers not a species of fungus) and puffed grains with added flavour from mildly pickled shitake followed by possibly my least favourite dish (on the grounds that I do not like poached egg rather than because of any failure on chef’s part), slow cooked hen’s egg in sauerkraut beurre blanc with textures provided by pickled kohlrabi, chicken skin and a range of dehydrated winter brassicas which were rather good and made a case that in the hands of a talented chef, brassicas can indeed be something rather special.

  Next came exquisitely and excruciatingly accurately prepared smoked trout with an alluring brown crab butter and then to a dish of fine salt marsh lamb, rich with a full flavour of lamb which for a while seemed to be lost to us but which has now come bursting back in great restaurant such as Folium. This was served with a delightful lamb sauce and well cooked grilled chicory which brought with it contrasts of sweetness and bitterness to work successfully with the rich lamb. A lovely dish.

  And then, already, we had arrived at the predessert and the dessert. I rather fancied the cheese selection but my friend did not and in retrospect perhaps that was just as well as the snow started to come down in earnest and smother the city and paralysed transport and if we had dined any longer a half hour’s walk on treacherously slippery pavements would have been necessary, all Uber drivers having wisely headed for home.

  The pre- and definitive desserts brought much pleasure with them - precisely cooked Yorkshire rhubarb with preserved  cherry blossom and slow cooked cox apple with a toasted hay cream (I first encountered dishes using toasted hay at Winteringham Fields in north-east Lincolnshire where Ben Tesh once worked and he usually manages to incorporate the flavour in a dish whenever a new menu comes along) and wafers - a hit a palpable hit!

  As the snow fell, we enjoyed our mignardises, a salted caramel and seed crisp and a cep tart.We thanked Lucy for her as always wonderful service, thanked Chef for his food, thanked God that we had managed to bag ourselves a Uber and with some and sliding, made it back to the Grand Hotel in one piece.

Rating:- 🌞🌞🌞.

8 January 2026

530. Snow And Ice And A Purple Sky And Dinner At Asha’s.

 

  I was meeting an old friend who last year moved from Birmingham to Saffron Walden where, he had discovered, dining out establishments are not as he had been used to here in Birmingham. He has the tastes and physique of a true gourmand, and unlike myself, is a lover of game and more impressively, is always able to sink a piece of rare purple wood pigeon from which I shrink away, the ferric flavour of it, like that of that offensive vegetable rocket, too much for my poor tastebuds. 

  We had arranged to stay in The Grand Hotel for two nights and as recounted in the previous Blog dined at Folium on our first evening in town only to be assailed by an irksome snow storm which made our journey from the Jewellery Quarter back to Temple Row somewhat thrilling as our Uber, possibly the last running that evening, slithered on the slushy, slide mean streets.

  I awoke the next morning to a snow-covered panorama looking from my window in room 503, the city paralysed with no effort having been put in by the council overnight to make either the roads or pavements safe. We passed the day quietly and resolved to dine at Asha’s, close by and no further far away than one would wish given the horrific icy state of the pavements. We made it to Asha’s without tumbling to the floor on the compacted snow and ice and heaved a sigh of relief and uttered a silent prayer in thanks for our survival.

  Unusually but hardly surprisingly, Asha’s was as empty as you would probably ever expect to see it on a Friday evening, unless perhaps Christmas Day had fallen on a Friday - I think that we were at one of only three occupied tables. We started inevitably as old campaigners with poppadoms served with some moderately interesting pickles and then we moved on to our starters - my friend judged his Prawn 65 (“batter fried prawns tossed with curry leaves, ginger and onions” to be agreeable and I enjoyed my Fish Amritsari (“Crispy fried fish pakoras seasoned with mint and aromatic carom seeds”) - they were generously portioned, certainly crispy, the unspecified fish nicely cooked but in any real flavour rendering them somewhat dull.

  I chose the again generously portioned chicken dharma curry which had satisfactorily cooked chicken in a nice thick, moderately spicy sauce. This was fine and there was some subtlety in the spicing but there was nothing astounding about it, no sparks of excitement, no evidence that going out for a curry, even at a glitzy, expensive place as Asha’s is, has moved on in any way, since the 1980s when I would often sit in Nirmal’s on West Street while working in Sheffield, being firmly guided to a more expensive dish than I really wanted by that redoubtable woman, Nirmal, herself. We know that “going out for a curry” has indeed moved on as evidenced by Opheem, ten minutes walk from Asha’s, but the latter has not - it lives on its glitziness rather than the excitement of its often quite expensive dishes. My friend enjoyed his chicken jhalfrezi and the accompanying rice, fragrant and tender was very good as was the soft cushion of the  Peshwari naan which was tasty and toothsome.

  I would have liked some kulfi but my friend was too full for dessert and so we settled up our bill and once more waddled out penguin-like on the dangerous pavements in the direction of the Grand Hotel and with a high degree of caution eventually arrived there without fatality or injury.

Rating:- 🌛🌛🌛.

January 2026.

  The next morning, I opened my bedroom curtains to the sight of a weirdly pink dawn - the shade of pink never seen by me before in the sky in all my seventy plus years. It emerged that the lights at the Birmingham City football ground had affected the clouds as a result of the snowfall but I certainly had never experienced anything like that before.

  I met my friend for breakfast in The Grand’s Isaac’s restaurant and enjoyed my Full English quite considerably. The ingredients were good quality and well cooked - the black pudding was not dry due to being overcooked though my scrambled egg may have benefitted from a few seconds less cooking and certainly did not need a clump of the omnipresent pea shoot garnish which by now really should have gone out of fashion. I like the spacious side room where guests can chose many different elements of the uncooked part of the breakfast. In all the breakfast was very satisfactory and eating it in the splendour of Isaac’s adds an extra element to it all.

  Lucy the Labrador enjoyed her stay at The Grand as did I. Of course Lucy never got to sit in Madeleine bar as I and my friend did where for lunch we both indulged ourselves in a good hot bowl of sweet French onion soup with large cheesy croutons floating on the surface. And in the evening, after dinner, we relaxed for a pre-bed drink -  a nerve-soothing Old fashioned for me.

    Finally, an interesting photograph, one of very many on display in Isaac’s, of the renovations underway, or about to be started perhaps, of The Grand’s magnificent staircase which led eventually to the hotel being reopened in 2020 in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis and where I and my much loved Lucy II were among the first guests.

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.

6 February - Chef Angelina Adamo and Charlotte Carter open Vieni in the Goodsyard in the Jewellery Quarter and serve Sicilian-style cuisine.

8 February - The Michelin awards ceremony is held in Dublin and Alex Claridge’s The Wilderness and Liam Dillon’s The Boat (Lichfield), each are awarded a Michelin star for the first time. Opheem retains its two star status and Adam’s, Grace and Savour (Hampton in Arden), Le Champignon Sauvage and Lumière (Cheltenham), Upstairs by Tom Shepherd (Lichfield), The Cross (Kenilworth), The Royal Oak (Whatcote) and The Homeend (Ledbury) retain their single stars. Bibs Gourmands are retained by Tropea, Riverine Rabbit, Duncombe Arms (Ellastone) and The Inn at Welland (Welland). Plates by Purnell in Birmingham and Forelles (Ludlow) are removed from the Guide.

16 February - It is announced that The Mount by Glynn Purnell in Henley-in-Arden will close on the Ides of March (15 March) after 4 years serving diners.