30. Lunch At Maribel.

  In Blog 22 I mentioned how much I and my dining companions enjoyed the 7 course dinner at the recently opened Maribel in Brindley Place which is the restaurant where Richard Turner has chosen to continue his career after closing his own restaurant in Harborne at the beginning of the year.

  What a great relief he did decide to continue to delight the diners of Birmingham with his impeccable cooking which can be appreciated as much through his brilliantly good value £30 lunch as through his longer lasting multi-course meals. In fact the dishes available for the set lunch are to be found in his longer menus and in themselves showcase very nicely Turner's cooking. Each dish is enormously and profoundly tasty - no chef could be expected to do any better in providing wondrous flavours in a meal.

  The dishes prove by themselves that Richard Turner is a truly great chef who knows not just how to cook excellent food but always adds something over and above what would be expected in flavour and deliciousness.

  Starter - Heritage tomatoes with goats cheese and an exemplary tomato pressé with as powerful and scintillating a flavour as any tomato could render up to the human feeding on it. The stuff that dreams are made of. Preceded by 4 excellent to fabulous appetisers - the forever memorable 36 month aged gruyère gougère (a meal consisting entirely of these taste bombs would make one a happy person), the almost as immensely enjoyable smoked eel with horseradish, apple and nasturtium, the pleasurable raw scallop with wasabi, cucumber and oyster leaf and finally the very happy poached quail egg with anchovy, chicken and Berkswell cheese served on a small cos lettuce leaf all followed by a generous slice of sour dough bread with yeast butter.

  Main course - I do not usually choose veal but that was the main course prescribed on the lunch menu. And very fine it was too served with an excellent sweetbread, profoundly tasting veal tongue and a lovely little kidney. I'm not an offal man and I would not have opted to have these little savouries but if I must have offal, even the finest, then this is how you can get me to eat it. Alongside the main veal dish a little dish of veal hotpot was served which was again immensely tasty though I did have a tiny splinter of bone in one of my pieces of meat.

  Dessert - Much to my great pleasure the prescribed pudding was the wonderful dish of Mara des bois strawberries with meringue and gorgeous rice pudding lurking like a temptress in the base of the dessert.

  The petit four which accompanied the coffee was the immensely pleasurable mini-cornet indulgence containing a beetroot sorbet with a raspberry cream. A different type of petit four but up there among the best as a delight to accompany the coffee.

  Clearly Maribel is offering superb good value with its lunchtime menu and a couple of hours of great pleasure to boot. Such is the excellent value of the meal that the lack of choice for the set menu is perfectly understandable but I wish that there was a choice from 2 different dishes for the main course at least. Nevertheless Birmingham cuisine marches on with Richard Turner piloting Maribel among the highest fliers for diners in the city.