568. Beaujolais, Tartiflette, Pithivier And Men In Dresses.

 

  I was in Stratford again, this time to see As You Like It which had an all-male cast with a large, beefy, very self-aware American in early middle age and with a grating accent in the role of Rosalind. Well, you could see why Orlando thought she was a man. There were also a lot of Welshmen on stage presumably so they could belt out the exhausting number of songs in the play in a mellifluous way in which Welsh choirs are usually credited with though the gay angle and the Welsh angle probably had more to do with the fact that the play’s producer had worked for a long time in Wales and was also gay. Anyway, the actor who played Celia was very convincing as Rosalind’s wingman and the old bloke who played Phoebe breathed more life into the character than usually seems to happen. 

  Of course, it could be said that having an entire cast of men was being true to Shakespeare because, as we all know, all the female roles were played by men at the time when he wrote his plays but the casting here was more the sort you’d see in the BBC period comedy, Upstart Crow, and the problem with the bloke who played Rosalind was that he was never convincing in being a woman pretending to be a man which is really what the play is about and additionally his accent was very distracting and his physical appearance and costume suggested this was nothing more than a self-indulgent gay fantasy on the part of the director  and, as so often happens at the RSC in these present times, very little to do with Shakespeare. There were a lot of men in skirts including Orlando in the final wedding scene; this choice of garb seemed inappropriate and inexplicable.

  Well anyway, one must be prepared for anything to occur on the stage in Stratford these days including an occasional excellent production where the director seems determined to deliver a play by Shakespeare rather than to indulge her/his own vanity or personal obsessions. Clearly this did not occur on this particular occasion though much of the audience who clearly rarely go to the RSC (if at all) were wildly enthusiastic in their applause and gave it a standing ovation. I did enjoy the awed silence in the theatre as the anticipated Seven Ages of Man monologue was delivered by Jacques played by an actor who seemed just a bit too much man-about-town to my taste and despite the frissons that sparked in the audience I was irritated rather than infatuated by the speech.

  Nevertheless, it had not been a bad day. I was staying again at the Hotel du Vin where the dog and I had shared for lunch an enjoyable and relatively cheap cheese platter which quite surprisingly featured English cheeses rather than French - the ubiquitous Baron Bigod, Ashlynn from Worcestershire, Sparkenhoe Red Leicester from, er, Warwickshire and Barkham Blue from Berkshire served with sweet grapes, crunchy sticks of celery and a very pleasing chutney. It was an excellent combination of cheeses with the soft, creamy Baron Bigod being served in a perfect state and I enjoyed the localness of at least two of them but why, of all places, was the French-themed Hotel du Vin not serving French cheeses on its cheese platter?

  Dinner, however shifted the emphasis very firmly back across the Channel and I ate two marvellously rustic French paison dishes which are not otherwise easy to track down in the West Midlands region counties. As a very robust and generously portioned starter I kicked off with tartiflette which was really rather good especially after being served some excellent complementary, deliciously crusty bread with good butter which I nibbled away at like a contented rodent while the the tartiflette was being cooked. I was also very pleased with the  glass of fragrant Louis Tete Brouilly 2024 Beaujolais which I ordered, keeping in mind that I might drink it with my vegetable pithivier as well as the tartiflette.

  The tartiflette de Savoie which of course is more après ski than paysan, more Princess Diana than Mère Filloux, was very toothsome. The potatoes were quite thickly sliced and I expected them to have too much bite to them but indeed their texture was perfect and it was all golden brown with the crust crispy and moreish. The cheese which should have been reblochon if one were being obsessionally Gallic was in fact Yarlington from David Jowett’s King Stone dairy in Chedworth in Gloucestershire, another pretty local source, was melted deliciously and blanketed the creamy potatoes and thinly cut onions though the salty and quite gorgeous pieces of Alsacienne pancetta seemed to have all migrated to one end of the dish and eventually revealed themselves in a frenzied abundance as I worked outwards to the edges. Great stuff, Mère Française!

  My rather large vegetable pithivier arrived looking as though the pastry was somewhat in need of a sun tan but it did look magnificently rustic and when the vegetable gravy was poured over it, it emerged that it scrubbed up well, glistening and appealingly handsome. It was very large and at first I thought chef had failed to render it truly pithtivieux by omitting the rayage pattern on the pastry dome but on closer inspection I found the spiral lines, though not numerous, and I was quite satisfied with the approximation to authenticity presented on the plate.

  The pastry was very satisfactory, though not pâte feuilletée as one might have expected, but the pie was very large and entirely vegetarian (which, of course I had ordered) with a particular profusion of sweetish squash with caramelised onion and a thick under blanket of admittedly nicely cooked spinach, and it all became rather boring as I ate my way through it. That’s the problem with vegetarian dishes - if you start off enjoying them, they have become very wearing before you’ve cleaned the plate. I should have liked a more interesting pithivier but there we are, vegetarians must be catered for. The pie was accompanied by a tasty quenelle of celeriac purée. Chef had not been particularly enthusiastic with the quantity of seasoning in the dish and I was pleased that salt and pepper was available on my table.

    This had been a very filling meal and I could eat no dessert other than a couple of scoops of vanilla ice cream. All in all though I had enjoyed the meal and it built me up  to enable me to set off and face the upcoming men in skirts that the RSC was planning to entertain me with.

8 October 2026

Rating:- 🌛🌛🌛🌛.

  Returning to the subject of Beaujolais, I am feeling somewhat downcast at not being able to attend Samo’s Beaujolais Nouveau evening on 19 November as I will once more be in Stratford to see the revival of Dame Harriet Walter’s all-woman version of Julius Caesar. This would be too painful to miss and when I booked my seat I gave no thought to what else was happening that evening. Still, I will be staying again at the Hotel du Vin and I can’t imagine the managers there will let Beaujolais Nouveau day go by without laying something on.

   It seems that the English celebration of the release of Beaujolais Nouveau is undergoing something of a revival at present after it had its heyday back in the early 1980s when yuppies were enjoying the fruits of their bankers’ bonuses as Margaret Thatcher’s government set about repairing the national economy after the damage wrought by forty years of recurring socialist governments stretching from Attlee to Callaghan via Wilson. I suppose I was a yuppie on a minor scale - I was young and I was upwardly mobile albeit on a far more modest scale than the flashy young men who worked in the city of London.

  I recall one particular Beaujolais Nouveau evening in the very early 1980s when, after giving a lecture at King’s College Hospital, some friends took me out to dine at a Caribbean restaurant in Brixton where one of them lived, when the Brixton riots were still fresh in everyone’s minds, and we, glugging down the BN in true yuppie style, became extraordinarily drunk (one of my friends managed to smash a glass table - clearly those who dine from glass tables should not drink Beaujolais nouveau) and set off back to my friend’s flat where I awoke the next morning to find a red snapper bone lodged in my throat, of which I had previously been aware having been in my Beaujolais nouveau-induced coma of advanced intoxication. I have no idea how much wine we got through but we certainly made the best of it though there was the ever present nagging doubt that a riot might break out at any minute while we stumbled our way home. In any event, all was well that ended well; the fish bone dislodged itself and I was able to set off, my brain, like Withnail’s, feeling like a “pig had shat in it”, to meet another friend who lived in Greenwich and whose wife repaired my injured cerebral function with a stout meal prepared from good old M& S ingredients. 

  Failing all else, this year, I will, in remembrance, buy myself a bottle of Marks and Spencer Beaujolais nouveau and relive old memories (or lack of them). Cheers! Or, s’il vous plait, Santé!

  

567. Still Going To Banquets.

 

  In Blog 519 I bemoaned a dull evening in November 2025 of middling food at a fundraising banquet held at the second or third rank hotel, the Park Regis, on Broad Street at Five Ways. The food was not actually bad - for instance the chef had negotiated the difficulties of cooking chicken satisfactorily - but it was all so dull. I concluded that when asked to go along to a banquet - be it for a good cause or not - one should find a reason for not going but I failed to follow my own advice and once more I found myself heading for Five Ways with a sinking feeling in my heart and a general gloom in my mind.

  To steel myself for the upcoming ordeal, and having an hour to spare, I managed to obtain a bar stool place in the Grand Hotel’s Madeleine bar and I girded my loins with my new best friend, well at least it was my present favourite cocktail, the 1879, so named, or do I mean so numbered, after the year Isaac Horton opened the Grand Hotel and currently touted as the hotel’s signature cocktail. It is delicious and comes accompanied, appropriately, with a Madeleine wbich is the proverbial icing on the cake. Sadly, and I thought rather naughtily, my cocktail was served and I was told almost rather curtly, as the waiter disappeared into the distance among the milling throng of drinkers in the bar, that the madeleines had run out and so my 1879 was served nude and unadorned. Still, I enjoyed the liquid part enough to order a second glass, again demadeleined, before departing for my date with what I was expecting to be a less than exciting evening.

Nude - sans madeleine 

Fully clothed with madeleine 

  I joined about 140 other diners on the sixteenth floor of the Park Regis. Everyone was very chatty though they may not have had the benefit of two recently imbibed 1879s to get into the spirit as I had. Then into the large and spacious dining room where I found the seat plan did not match up to the allocated seats at the tables but, once a place for me had been tracked down, and all the better for having drunk most of a quite well made Cosmopolitan, I entered into the spirit of things, munched at a very edible bread roll and butter, and settled down to eat my starter which was actually rather good - a slice of a very tasty chicken and apricot terrine, the fruit in the terrine and the accompanying apricot chutney nice and sweet and well judged in its ability to cut through the pleasant richness of the terrine.

  Then on to the main. This was really very good. I had the supreme of chicken which I thought was excellent - pleasingly cooked - moist and meaty - and this was served with well cooked and well seasoned roast potato cubes, nicely cooked carrot and seasonal braised leeks which were fine and enjoyable. This was good old fashioned accurate cooking and as ambitious as one might hope for at a banquet serving 140 diners.

  The dessert was a chocolate brownie (the menu emphasised that the dish was vegan).I am not a chocolate brownie fan but I found this to be edible, moist and tasty enough. The raspberries and cream helped it along though some more cream would have been been even more helpful.

  As banquets go, the Park Regis served a good meal. The Head Chef is Manish Patel who was appointed to the role in November 2021 having worked there as senior sous chef since 2019. The question remains, just how much can the diner expect to obtain full satisfaction from a meal the contents of which they have no real say in choosing, served to over one hundred people all at the same time and in a hotel rather than a dedicated restaurant?

3 October 2026

Rating:- 🌛🌛🌛

565. GULP. Celebration And The Italian Futurists.

 

  I have dined at Kaye Winwood’s GULP, hidden deep in the heart of the Jewellery Quarter in Spencer Street, several times over the last few years (as reported in previous blogs) and most recently I dined there on the fifth anniversary of Kaye’s establishment of her business (see Blog 564). I returned just a couple of weeks later for a bespoke dinner with some old friends to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of our university graduation and themed on a favourite subject of Kaye’s - that of the cuisine of the Italian Futurists of the 1930s. Tony O’Callaghan and Kaye was front of house and it’s fair to say that a grand evening was had by all.

  Kaye’s interest in the Futurists is somewhat unexpected given the artists’ eventual association with Italian fascism after the rise of Mussolini - one expects Kaye certainly has no fascist sympathies whatsoever but their art is interesting, their cuisine quite mad and they are of their age - avant garde and heretical. The artistic movement was founded by the poet Fillippo Tommaso Marinetti in 1909 when he published his Manifesto of Futurism in which he demanded the destruction of museums and  libraries to liberate Italy from its classical past which he saw as oppressive and harmful to the growth of what was still then a ‘young country’ (modern Italy had finally been united just forty nine years previously in 1860) .

  Marinetti’s disciples joined him in attempting to celebrate a new era of energetic dynamism brought in by the machine age (remember Italy, as a country where agriculture was heavily dominant over industry was far behind Britain in its experience of the industrial revolution and therefore it is not surprising that there were those who were still thrilled at the start of the twentieth century by the triumph of industry and all they perceived it would bring to them including an acceleration of life itself, and with it, art.

  The Futurists subverted traditional ideas of beauty perceiving a flashy racing car as being more glorious than the work of Michelangelo (there are many now who still do here in England where parafascist Reform politicians often share the same opinion - it is therefore unsurprising that the Futurists themselves drifted into holding fascist beliefs. 

   The Futurist artists embraced a style of fragmented planes and fractured lines and evoked speed, motion and noise. Since gastronomy itself is an art it is therefore not surprising that the preparation, serving and consumption of food eventually became dragged into the Futurist world view. In 1930 Marinetti and the artist Fillia (Luigi Colombo) published the Manifesto of Futurist Cooking and then released The Futurist Cookbook in 1932 (a copy of which Kaye Winwood owns and regards with a degree of affection as any book reader does when they possess a much loved book - some of the recipes served at our meal were derived from Marinetti’s tome)

  The cook book highlighted the eccentricities of Futurist dining - an abhorrence of pasta which the Futurists blamed for causing sluggishness, pessimism and lack of national pride. The Futurists substituted rice in their meals instead. The Futurists cast away their traditional kitchen implements and instead turned to centrifuges, ultra violet ray sterilisers and ozonisers and gloried in the use of aluminium, the application of chemistry and the speed of both the preparation of food and the eating of it.

  Food was not just to be tasted but must be experienced in a multisensory fashion - there must be synchronised perfumes, bespoke music and tactile elements. This tactility was heightened by not using utensils and this increased the contact between the diner and the art. The atmosphere in which the meal was eaten was also of importance - there was to be no political discussion during the meal and the meal might be accompanied by the reading out of poetry and changes in the table settings with each course.

  And so it was, with Marinetti’s manifesto in mind and his cook book in the kitchen, my friends and I set about our Italian Futurist experience,

  I know, from my communications with her, that Kaye had spent a lot of time and put in much thought and effort into planning and preparing the event in general and the meal in particular. She was the perfect hostess, had prepared happily art deco menus, presented as folded airplanes as one might expect from the Futurists for us to read, and provided some splendid table decorations including strings of olives constructed to look like trees. The Campari-based aperitivo was served in Kaye’s glass bowls which were held by placing the five fingers each in an individual indentation in the glass, a talking point in itself and, I suppose, multisensory à la Futurism given that not only the senses of smell, taste and vision were involved but also touch associated with the contact of individual fingers with glass, and sound, as the 1930s music played in the background.

  And so on to the stuzzichini served as part of the aperitivo. No crab croustade or cheesy tartlets these. They were brutally Italian Futurist - Tricolore de Insalata Caprese ‘Towards food in pills’ - two pills each aggressively citric and flavoursome and then a syringe with the third stuzzichini to be emptied into the both and to elicit a little yelp of surprise.

  Next, following ‘Boarding’, came ‘Take off’ in the form of ‘rice oranges’ - a generously sized, crispy coated arancine with mozzarella and ragu which was not entirely successful, the dish Still, it was fun to eat. There was a little boat of salt available if I had noticed it before I ate the dish. It was a nice illustration of the Futurists’ rejection of pasta and their embrace of rice. This was accompanied by Intuitivo antipasto in the form of a hollowed out orange filled with olives and pieces of charcuterie.

  And so to the main, ‘In-flight’, and Kaye brought an alluring piece of beautifully cooked pork to the table. The meat had been rolled with some very pleasing chestnut stuffing, onion and sausages and powdered with chocolate. It was rusticly delicious.

  After a little demonstration of the relationship of texture to taste when eating which brought us all to having to wear masks for a few seconds we were experienced some ‘turbulence’ in our flight with a very toothsome Blind Boy sorbet (an exhilarating bay leaf sorbet) and then it was to the drama of the dessert that we all turned - ‘Cruising Like a Cloud’ which bright the divine joy of an extravaganza fantasy of Italian meringue, cream, strawberries and strawberry jam set alight with an almost eternal blue flame of Asti. Happy diners all round.

  While ‘descending’ we were served piccola pasticherria in the form of pert little Seni Italiani al sole/Italian breasts in the sunshine, an authentic Futurist mignardise invented by the artist Marisa Mori and made up of two mounds of marzipan topped by nipples of strawberry jam. There’s nothing like strawberry nipples with your coffee. Our evening with the futurists ended with a little slice of pannetone from which a balloon on a string drifted ceilingwards, the balloons then being popped synchronously to allow the perfumed gas inside to be released, once more intended to show how flavour may be affected as the perfumes filled the air.

  All agreed that this had been a splendid and memorable event,

  Buono notte! That’s if the Futurists allowed themselves to say goodnight to each other.

26 September 2026

566. Vieni. Sicily Beckons.

 

  After an evening of great fun and enjoyable rustic food in the style of Italian Futuristic cuisine at Kaye Winwood’s GULP in the Jewellery Quarter the night before, I returned to that particular area of the city for Sunday lunch and was comfortably seated in Vieni happily contemplating the pleasure of the Sicilian-style dishes which were to be presented to me while sipping a glass of Nyetimber Brut.

  As a starter I chose venison and ‘n’duja (kebab) tarongia (pizza-like bread, the dough of which includes red wine) with sumac yogurt and pickled chill. I was surprised by just how delicious this was - spicily hot but not excessively so. The soothing element of mint balanced the heat of the spices splendidly. This was a sort of mini-burger - burgers not being my usual first choice when dining out but I thought this particular genus of the burger family was delightful. 

  Next I had pappardelle basking in a toothsome short rib ragu.The pasta attractively had the right degree of bite to it and the ragu oozed flavour. The dish was dotted with green peppercorns and the whole was anointed with pecarino. Not perhaps the most elegant-looking dish but its edibility pleasure quotient was not in any way reduced for that.

  As a main, and bearing in mind that it was Sunday and beef seemed the most appropriate choice, I ordered Dunwood Farm chargrilled beef (Dunwood Farm is located in the Staffordshire Moorlands and has small herds of rare breed cattle and Herefords, Longhorns and Aberdeen Anguses) served with halved king prawns and king prawn butter. The outer crust, the bark, was deeply flavoured and delicious from the chargrilling while the inner meat was beautifully cooked and tender and nicely seasoned. The prawns bathed in prawn butter were delicious and perfectly textured. and the flavour of prawn was full and delightful. This surf-and-turf triumph was a real gem of a dish.

    My appetite was nicely satiated and so I chose to combine a very light desert with my coffee by choosing affogato and that was very satisfactory.

    Vieni seems to have got to where it probably wants to be - the food is robust and generous and tasty and thoroughly enjoyable. This visit to Vieni had proved to be a very happy way to eat Sunday lunch.

27 September 2026

Rating:- 🌞