Co-incidentally I had lunch at Simpsons this week with a companion with whom I had visited the place about a year ago. It was pleasing that the service appeared to be far less chaotic than on our previous visit and the food was ofcourse cooked pleasingly though neither of us felt really excited by what we had been served. Perhaps more frissons of pleasure may have been experienced if we had ventured into menus over and above the basic lunch menu.
I found the Cornish mackerel starter to be perfectly satisfactory, the immaculately cooked sea bream main course to be enjoyable but the fermented Kenilworth plums to be rather lacking in, er, plums or pluminess at least. I was most excited by the delightful little cow-shaped milk jug brought with the coffee and the accompanying petits fours were very good but hardly original and at £7 startlingly expensive. I had overlooked the availability of a vegan menu but it's something to bear in mind for the future.
By another coincidence another friend had asked me to join him for dinner at the Acorn Restaurant in Bath a couple of days after my visit to Simpsons. This of course has nothing to do with Birmingham but if anyone in the city is going into vegan food in a big way then the Acorn is a signpost along the road of how to do it. It made for a wondrous couple of hours of great pleasure which make one emerge from the premises wondering why not eat vegan food all the time if it could always be like the wonderful prizes which are delivered to one's table at the Acorn.
I had a 'summer salad' of radish sorbet, charred cucumber (though really it doesn't seem to me that there's an awful lot you can do to cucumber to make it a valuable contributor to society except perhaps to pickle it), pickled lettuce, samphire (which made the dish achieve its goal) and pickled mustard seed), then a main course of One Whole Cauliflower broken down and cooked in various ways - roasted florets, truffled purée, molasses pickled core and sautéed leaf all served with a wondrous almond milk croquetta infused with fenugreek and onion, spelt grain in a smoked almond emulsion and tarragon oil. Perhaps the only thing that was not quite right with the main course was that there were so many wonderful flavours and textures in the dish that the usually robust, and I think wonderful, flavour of cauliflower had got itself rather lost.
I had a charming, happy little dessert of Strawberries and Cream which involved freshly juiced strawberry jelly with a strawberry duxelle, fennel bulb cream and a stupendous thyme and anise meringue. Very pleasurable and worth travelling all the way to Bath to indulge oneself in.
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