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:- 🌞🌞🌞

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 -