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 time

  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 persevere 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:- 🌞🌞🌞

573. Wilson’s (Redland, Bristol)

 

  Previous editions of this blog will show how when I am on holiday in the West Country, I like to board the train for Bristol and lunch at one of the city’s Michelin listed/starred restaurants. I would rather like to go to one of the profusion of well-thought of restaurants in the more southerly part of Gloucestershire, not - you understand - South Gloucestershire which is certainly part of the West Country region rather than the West Midlands, perhaps to Stroud or Cirencester, but using public transport as I do the journeys are too complicated or too long and my dog, left in my Weston super Mare hotel would be abandoned for far too long. So the destination is Bristol, just 20 minutes by train from Weston though journeying to one of the city’s suburbs can take much longer.

  I chose, this time, to visit Michelin-starred Wilson's (one of two starred restaurants in Bristol) in the quite distant suburb of Redland but the hourly train from Weston was a direct one and in all it was a journey of about fifty minutes from one station to the other. I arrived an hour early to ensure a timely presentation of myself at the restaurant and this gave me chance to explore Redland itself which was everything I might have expected it to be. If ever a place oozed middle class affluence this was it. Extravagant, large, sometimes quirky three storey Victorian houses which would not have been out of place in Edgbaston were everywhere you looked - admittedly many of them were probably houses in multiple occupation with young people, students, offspring of the well-heeled socialist middle class, the heirs to Blair - and a carefully scruffy high street which declaimed its role as the centre of a Bristol Bohemia, home to a vast nest of hipsters, with more micro-coffee shops, small independent restaurants, an artisan bread shop (belonging to Wilson’s) and other independent businesses not necessarily selling anything useful. The people looked like I would have expected - scruffy bearded men and thin, dowdy women all dressed organically as though they were throwbacks to the Bronze Age. 

  It is not surprising that Redland Ward has two Green councillors with large majorities, sitting in Bristol council and the ward is part of Bristol Central which returned a Green MP at the last election. It was all very cosy, smug , complacent and mildly nauseating. Little wonder therefore that the suburb looks the way it does and is home to so many independent micro-businesses - it’s a sort of very upmarket version of Stirchley or Kings Heath, neither of which of course have a Michelin-starred restaurant though the former does of course have Riverine Rabbit which has a Bib Gourmand and is one of those independent micro-businesses with its quirks which could so easily be relocated to Redland high street without anyone noticing anything different.

  Wilson’s itself is run by its Chef Patron, Jan Ostle, on an intense ethical basis, the ethics covering all sorts of aspects of running a food establishment. The ethical approach, on which I will not enlarge, fits in nicely with the suburb in which the restaurant is located and I am sure the locals eat there with unworried consciences. In practical terms, the result of all these ethics is that the restaurant uses only vegetables and fruit obtained from its own farm run by Mary Ostle, Jan Ostle’s partner, in the nearby village of Barrow Gurney and menus are put together on the basis of what is available from the farm. Meat, fish and other elements of the menu are obtained from close suppliers who share the Ostles’ ethics and while Michelin was awarding green stars, Wilson’s was the recipient of one.

Jan Ostle,Chef Patron

  

  I had booked an early lunch. The restaurant was almost empty when I arrived but as lunch proceeded, served in good time by the enthusiastic and helpful front-of-house staff, more and more diners piled in, many in their hipster uniforms, presumably mostly denizens of the neighbourhood. After taking my seat I was given a short explanation of the way the restaurant is run particularly on how much of the food originates at the Ostles’s farm.

 There was choice of a five or seven course tasting menu and, if one wished, a wine flight or even a non-alcoholic drink flight which seemed to me to be pushing the idea a bit too far but, I noted, something that quite a number of these Bronze Age diners were choosing to indulge themselves in. The menu was only written on a blackboard at the other end of the restaurant which meant I could not read it without going and scrutinising it immediately next to a pair at a table who were already eating and who, I am sure, would have loved me towering over them squinting at the blackboard while they nibbled at their amuses gueules and quaffed their kombucha. For Heaven’s Sake, restaurateurs, if you are going to itemise your menu on a blackboard and on nothing else at least make it accessible to all diners without causing any awkwardness.

  In all events, I chose the seven course menu; I was particularly lured by the red mullet for some reason, and besides, if you’re somewhere special and may never have the opportunity to return, it’s a pity not to try everything that is on offer though I drew the line at the non-alcohol drink flight and opted to start with a local, somewhat pleasurable Bristol gin. 

  Soup seemed like a good idea to start off an autumn menu, especially a creamy squash soup enlivened with lemon verbena and fermented squash and fish. It was a good idea but it would have been an even better one if it had been hot rather than lukewarm.

  After the soup came the amuses gueules. These were rather good - there was a remarkably delicious liver parfait with a crunchy texture and a sweetness derived from beetroot powder alongside a wafer of trout tartare with trout roe. In addition there was an excellent homemade taramasalata and some very fresh inhouse baked sourdough with homemade butter.

  

  The red mullet which had made me choose the seven course menu came next. This was a small square of the nicely cooked white fish which had just the right texture. Unfortunately I was not really aware of the flavour of the mullet because there was such a lot else going on in the dish.There was yet another foamy, creamy sauce with musqée de Provence squash and a welcome chilli spiciness which lingered on the front of my tongue. There was chard which added little more than colour to at least make it a pretty dish I very much enjoyed the flavours - it was very tasty - but the fish had been rendered irrelevant by the extra work performed on this dish and that, alas, was vaguely disastrous.

  The main fish course wbich was part of the five course menu was an impressively sized piece of dry aged Chalkstream trout which was well prepared and accompanied by celeriac, the flavour of which was indiscernible, of sweetly pickled celeriac, and a Florence onion broth which was also sweet. The broth was very enjoyable but I thought there was too much sweetness being offered up to the trout and to which the fish was not anywhere near being accepting of. 

  The course of fallow deer, cooked exquisitely, returned a sane simplicity to the meal. The gorgeous, almost dreamlike, perfectly tender venison was served with a slice of moreish offal sausage as well as the excellent smoky flavour of charred cabbage, beetroot and a beetroot purée. A very admirable dish.

  But time was moving on. The intermediate course of farm herbs (chervil, a strong and welcome hit of tarragon) and dill icecream with soft Italian meringue was a delight which I wished to savour for the rest of the day but the dessert itself was less satisfactory being a rather confused mixture of all sorts of elements bringing in ‘yesterday’s bread’, the crispiness of buckwheat and the flavours of thyme and apple cider vinegar. Oh for a simple and perfectly produced crisp and fresh tarte citron or an autumn apple tarte tatin. I like a restaurant that employs a pastry chef to produce … pastry.

  And so back to Weston, walking once more through the green and leafy streets of Redland to the railway station, observing the green and leafy residents of the place. The restaurant had rendered up some fine food with many enjoyable flavours but had shown a regrettable tendency to overdo things so that the principle elements of one or two dishes were almost an irrelevance.

29 October 2026

Rating:- 🌛🌛🌛🌛

The mean streets of well-heeled Bohemia -

Redland high street -

A pre-lunch latte at the cosy Ruby Jeans cafe where the colour of the cake matched the decor -

More cafes and independent dining establishments -

Wilson’s’ bakery shop -

Interesting domestic architecture - 

 

575. The Old Thatched Cottage, Weston super Mare.

 

  An autumn holiday with the dog in Weston super Mare brought me back to the Old Thatched Cottage on the sea front for three early evening dinners and a Saturday lunch. There are not too many places in the seaside resort which score above the middling but this particular restaurant, in my experience, rises above the crowd and serves up some delicious grills along with somec authentic Greek dishes in generous, almost Trencherman portions. The chefs and front of house staff did not disappoint me on this visit to Weston.

  The bar serves up an array of well made cocktails and I took the opportunity, more than once, to avail myself of the restaurant’s really rather delicious piña colada which replaced the English autumn with summer in the Caribbean. Many of the dishes which I chose this time had been eaten by me during my stay in Weston in spring but they were so good it seemed foolish to deny oneself the pleasure of revisiting them.

  A starter of chicken liver pâté, for instance, was delicious, smooth, no hint of bitterness and with a rim of butter ideal for spreading on the sourdough which accompanied it. There was of course the slight irritation of the ubiquitous pea shoot garnish but this was easily overlooked. A main of grilled pork was very edible and tasty and generously sized. The pork was accompanied by passable, full-bodied chips, onion rings which though in a successfully crispy batter had no real flavour - certainly none of the onion sweetness for which one might have hoped and a heap of rocket which I loath but no blame could be placed on the chef for that. A pleasingly filling and tasty meal was rounded off by affogato which combines so conveniently the dessert course with the post prandial coffee.

  Dinner on the second evening started off with a bountiful and generously portioned prawn cocktail which was made up of a vast number of really flavoursome crustaceans bathed in a toothsome Marie Rose sauce which was not excessively oily and a crispy, fresh salad made up mainly of cucumber and lettuce. The main was again remarkably generously portioned and this souvlaki was made up of lovely moist pieces of chicken thighs on skewers and a continent-sized Greek salad, a convincing tsatsiki and, one must admit, unremarkable flat bread.

  My trio of evenings of dining at The Old Thatched Cottage was rounded off the next night when I had a main of grilled marinated chicken, again presented as an ample and hearty portion, deliciously flavoured with herbs and citrus, and cooked to render the meat perfectly moist and nicely textured. The accompanying chips were again very edible although the onion rings while being pleasingly crispy were once more lacking in any real flavour. I rounded off the meal this time with a satisfying though not particularly distinguished tiramisu which was tasty enough but the cake was in great need of a greater degree of soaking with coffee.

  I do like the Old Thatched Cottage. It is very simpatico (or more appropriately sympathitikos given the Greek character of the restaurant) with personable and helpful staff, a good atmosphere and some delicious, very well-cooked grills. 

26, 27 and 28 November 2026.

Rating:-🌛🌛🌛🌛

574. An Autumn Week In Weston.

 

  The dog and I were taking our usual autumnal break in what once may have been reasonably and accurately called Birmingham-on-Sea viz Weston-super-Mare (or any combination of hyphens or capital letters you may wish to use) and having braved ferocious winds and torrential rain blowing in from the Bristol Channel caused by one of those named storms which are so trendy now, for the first couple of days of our visit, were now relaxed and comfortable in the milder, kinder state of weather which had settled in the town. Having dined for two or three days at the very pleasing Old Thatched Cottage on excellent grills and Greek dishes and also having visited Bristol to lunch at Michelin-starred Wilson’s it was time for a change of dining venue back in Weston.

  And so, at the end of the week, a Friday evening visit to what has long been my favourite modest little dining spot in modest, little Weston super Mare - The Ginger Pig Kitchen. I had tried to make a reservation the week before and been told in a somewhat irritatingly phrased e-mail that none was available but subsequently another e-mail revealed a reversed decision and so off I trotted the short distance to the usually busy restaurant. It was early evening and it was getting busy.

  All the front of house staff appeared new and so did the diners - they all looked, judging by their clothes, very middle class and local whereas in the past there had been a good number of holidaying West Midlands and Welsh workers tucking into their pork belly starters and generously portioned pies and fish and chips. Hipsters had penetrated the place I noted and the menu had changed - some of the eternal former dishes were still there but suddenly French cuisine was getting a look in and I was lured into ordering ‘French onion soup’ from the main menu and coq au vin which the waitress determinedly pronounced as cock o’ VIN as though she had never heard the pronunciation of cock o’VAN. I thought, perhaps patronisingly with the benefit of hindsight, that this was rather sweet and charming  and therefore pronounced it Cock o’VIN to save embarrassment and afterwards, when I discovered that the dish was definitely NOT coq au vin, I conceded that the unusual pronunciation of the dish had in fact been appropriate.

  It was a fairly disastrous meal about as Gallic as a plate of faggots and peas or cheeseburger and fries. It had the air of having been prepared by a chef who knew nothing about peasant French cuisine or who was cynically just trying to use an exotic name to push some English dishes with a mild twist on to an ignorant collection of diners.

  The French onion soup was pretty awful and suffered from a relative dearth of onion in it. The scanty onion slices were not tender enough and there was no real onion sweetness to it. There was a moderately sized crouton floating on the surface of the thin liquid which had a little too much oil swishing about and of course there was the inevitable garnish of the ubiquitous pea shoot to ensure at least one element of predictability.

  The coq au vin was probably illegal as a contravention of the Trade Descriptions Act, if that law is still in force. This was not an alluring piece of braised chicken, the lovely meat falling off the bone, the flavour robust and hearty, bursting with the taste of shallots and mushrooms and vin, but nothing more than a supreme of roast chicken only mildly over cooked and perfectly edible if it had been sold as roast chicken rather than as an exotic and Gallic coq au vin. As well as its again inevitable pea shoot garnish, it was accompanied by a good portion of green beans which I would have liked to have been a little more tender, a very toothsome potato gratin and a thin broth containing carrots in three ways - a Brunoise, baby carrots and large carrots - what was that all about? a parsnip and, outrageously, silver skin pickled onions substituting for the shallots, there being no hint of bacon nor mushrooms. This was an outrageous spoof and I can only conclude that Chef was ‘havin’ a larf’. The limited wine menu offered nothing fully relevant to coq au vin but I did have a glass of a nice Merlot and this was about as good as it got.

  I finished with an affogato as I so often do - it’s hard to do anything too bad to a cup of espresso and a bit of vanilla ice cream though the dish is always served at the Ginger Pig Kitchen alongside a lonely strawberry be it seasonal or not.

  What’s in a name? Quite a lot I think. Let’s call this main course, Mock Coq Au Vin.

  A couple of days later I gave The Ginger Pig’s chef the opportunity to restore the restaurant’s reputation with me by having Sunday lunch there. I chose the fine local Chew Valley beef on offer and this was very good and cooked well done as is my preference though others may well have wished it to be rarer. The accompanying vegetables were generally satisfactory - the roast potatoes had been well cooked though not crispy, and the carrots, red cabbage and broccoli were cooked to my taste - it’s so pleasing to find somewhere that broccoli is served tender - but the red cabbage would have benefitted from more oomph, cooked with autumn apple and a little spice perhaps and the cauliflower cheese was generously portioned and tasty. The Yorkshire pudding was good and there was a particularly toothsome stuffing - crispy and tasty - which added a great deal of flavour to the meal although I still find it hard to understand why stuffing is now provided almost everywhere with a Sunday roast whether or not the showcased meat is pork or poultry.

  As inevitably as finding a garnish of pea shoots on the roast I chose the combined dessert and coffee to complete the meal. 

30 October and 1 November 2026.

Rating:-🌛🌛.