432.Orelle.

 

  It was another murky day. The rain had not been heavy but had been mostly incessant. Dreary autumnj days merged one into the other. Good food was needed. The choice of restaurant was limited by the number prepared to open on Mondays. It seemed a relief to choose Orelle if only because it was a very short walk from the Grand Hotel where Lucy The Labrador and I were staying for four nights of pleasing comfort. Orelle was far from outstanding, I judged from previous experience, but was likely to deliver the goods.

  The murk hung about the city like a grey, damp tablecloth covering the urban table. But inside the cocoon at the top of the day the restaurant was rather pretty, lit up in the darkness.As always the front of house staff looked smart and performed their jobs very well woukd the food match the service? I was offered only an à la carte menu. The prices looked a little steep but I had high expectations that the food would justify the cost. Sadly, it did not.

  I started with Orelle’s version of the Sazerac which was a sad example of that superlative cocktail.

  My starter certainly sounded promising - “Crabe. Dressed Cornish crab, shredded gem hearts, apple gel, dil emulsion £19”. This was dismal and excruciatingly overpriced. The amount of crab was truly minimal and the dish was largely made up of the shredded lettuce. There was very little flavour, certainly not of crab. The price was outrageous. Rating - 2/10 and that’s generous.

  In contrast the main which I chose (Cabillaud. Roasted cod, mussels, pear, ratte potatoes and leek beurre Blanc) was very good. The fish was very well cooked and seasoned and the mussels were relatively plump and tasty. I enjoyed the beurre blanc and this would have been a very good dish had it not been served lukewarm. Still I ate it with a reasonable degree of pleasure but it’s clear this kitchen really does have a problem getting its dishes out with acceptable speed.

  The dessert (Noisette  chocolate madeleine, hazelnut, whipped pannacotta and salted caramel ice cream) failed on many levels. The icecream was lacking in flavour but the white chocolate which encased it was infinitely more tasteless. I had forgotten that the dish’s theme was nuts until, as I approached the end of the dish, I suddenly became aware of the flavour of hazelnut. The Madeleine was encased in the chocolate and was a cake of pleasing texture. But all in all this was a dessert that made me severely regret the £10 that I was going to have to pay for it.

  Orelle seems to have deteriorated in the food it provides and based on this particular experience there is only one reason to dine there and that is for the view of the city below it. But even that is not enough to justify the prices it charges for indifferent food.

Rating:- 🌛

431. Trentina.

  The Good Food Guide added Trentina, an Italian-style restaurant located in Mary Street in the Jewellery Quarter, to its list of recommended restaurants as a ‘local gem’ on 4 August 2024. It described the restaurant as, “a truly local diamond, a cheerfully informal addition to Birmingham’s Jewellert Quarter scene. Inside it looks and feels sparsely contemporary”. The Guide goes on to say that “Here you will find big flavours on a short menu that leans heavily on the pasta roller….”.

  It’s always difficult to find somewhere to eat on Sunday in the city centre but Trentina opens then and so, off I went. Autumn was well and truly entrenched and the continuing rain that had infested us for months coupled itself with a greyness worthy of Gandalf but Trentina was pleasingly easy to find, on the corner of Mary Street and Caroline Street, in the very heart of the Colmore family names system of roads, and was warm and welcoming on arrival, both from the front of house staff and the restaurant’s heating system.

  I sat opposite the bar on a not terribly comfortable wooden banquette but as my lower body gradually accustomed itself to the vaguely masochistic seating I had chosen, the discomfort was gradually dispelled by a pleasing gin and Sicilian lemon tonic and a perusal of the promising menu. I discussed the options with the helpful and pleasant front of house young lady and opted for nduja and mozzarella arancini and then the pleasingly decorous mafaldine ribbon pasta with pork shoulder, finely chopped leek all enlivened by sofrito.

  The arancini were magnificent - impressively large and even more impressively, gorgeously crispy and tasty with the rice being beautifully textured. The starter was a meal in itself.

  The freshly prepared pasta was excellent, irreproachably textured and accompanied admirably by the pulled pork and the perfectly pitched flavour of the sobrito. This was a generous portion to which I failed to do full justice but I enjoyed it very much.

  The desserts on offer were variants on the theme of soft icecream and I opted to have it as an affogato which closed the meal very nicely, especially with an accompanying limoncello. The Good Food Guide’s label of this restaurant as a Local Gem is very apt. If I lived in the Jewellery Quarter I can  see myself happily visiting there not infrequently.

Rating:- 🌛🌛🌛🌛

430. The Burlington.

  

The Burlington - that is - the restaurant in the Burlington Hotel in Stephenson Street, has the distinction of being the first Birmingham hotel to be mentioned in the newly revived Michelin Guide in 1974. Admittedly this was by virtue of its first letter’s  position in the alphabet as it was featured alongside Lorenzo, La Capanna, Lambert Court, the Danish Food Centre, Royal in Sutton Coldfield and Manor House which was actually in West Bromwich.

  I have never eaten at The Burlington but heard a good report of the food served there a few months ago and when I was invited to a dinner there I was pleased to accept mainly because I wanted to go to dine at this landmark restaurant in Birmingham’s dining out history.

  The Burlington was included in the Michelin Guide from 1974 to the 1979 edition and has not appeared in those august pages since then and so I was expecting to be eating in a fairly middle of the road, reasonably good quality location. This was a moderately priced banquet attended by a couple of hundred diners or so and so I could not expect dishes to be exhilaratingly original or finely presented to any great degree. My expectations by and large were met.

  The Burlington Hotel, long known as The Midland Hotel was bought by Isaac Horton in 1871 and developed in a style very similar to and predating his magnificent Grand Hotel which opened in 1875 on Colmore Row. The hotel was particularly attractive to travellers as it is located a few yards across Stephenson Street from New Street Station. A guidebook to Birmingham published in 1894 noted that the Midland Hotel’s restaurant served a “Hot luncheon 1 to 3PM 2/6d Table d’hôte 6 to 8PM 4/-“. Although the first series of Michelin Guides to Great Britain (1911-14 and 1922-31) with blue covers listed The Midland among its recommended hotels in Birmingham there were no details by which to judge the food on offer there.

  For almost 40 years (dating back to the roaring twenties when American-style cocktails were all the rage and Hollywood-made movies were gripping the post-war generation) until the 1960s, the Midland was home to the American Bar and Snack Bar but this dining facility was considered to be outdated and was replaced by the Peel Grill (after the Tamworth MP Sir Robert Peel who founded the Metropolitan Police and the Conservative Party - the hotel by then neighboured Burlington Arcade which previously had been Peel’s Passage used as a shortcut by the local police officers otherwise known as Peelers). A report in the Birmingham Post published 6 May 1963 described the opening of Peel’s Grill in detail and included the information that the 84 seater restaurant had what it called “a see-for-yourself kitchen” whereby the diners could dine and watch the activities taking place in the kitchen at the same time - clearly a modern equivalent of the now almost universal ‘open kitchen’.

  I assume that by 1974 the name of the dining room had been changed again - this time to ‘The Burlington’ which is how it was identified when The Michelin Guide included it in its first revived edition (the hotel was still known as ‘The Midland’ then).

  The photographs in The Post show a decor which was very much cutting edge Sixties - there was a cocktail bar at the entrance of which was a large ‘photo-mural’ of Sir Robert Peel and there were hunting scenes on the John Peel (no relation) theme “featured in the balustrade panel” (presumably someone had confused the two Peels and ordered artwork for the bar which just happened to feature both of them and it was question of using what had been bought). 

  The then general manager of both the Midland and The Grand, a Mr R Clemow, was quoted by The Post as saying,”We felt that the existing American Bar and snack bar - though they had served agoodpurpose for a number of years - were a little out of date in view of today’s trends in eating. The accent today seems to be more on grills and griddles rather than speciality dishes - we want to provide for people such as the businessman, the personal shopper or the younger people who want a satisfying meal at a reasonable charge. As the city centre develops and extends, we shall look to a wider clientele for evening patronage….”

  In its heyday The Midland was host to celebrities such as Laurel and Hardy, Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole and Annunzio Mantovani, the orchestra conductor and composer, started his career there in 1924 working in a string quartet. In 1968, Enoch Powell MP delivered his “Rivers of Blood” speech at the hotel. The Back Room bar, where these celebrities may have been seen, was the source of some wonderful menus such as the following from the 1920s -

  The Midland was renamed as The Burlington in 1996 after refurbishment had been carried out and its full name now is the McDonald Burlington.

  So, even if the food was going to be unremarkable, the location was thrilling bursting with exciting Birmingham gastronomic history.

  To be fair, the food was unremarkable - on par for a banquet meal in a restaurant with no present particularly distinguished culinary reputation. The service was excellent, the waiters smartly turned out, polite and efficient and the location itself spacious. The portions were generous and the food pleasing enough.

  I chose the mackeral paté starter. This was very pleasant and reasonably presented. The mackeral flavour was not too overpowering and the accompanying ribbons of pickled cucumber and sweet earthy baby beetroot balanced the fish nicely and the finely sliced crispy Melba toast gave the dish all the texture it needed. The mild horseradish cream split fashionably with a green oil of some sort or the other made it a well rounded dish.

  The main brought with it a generous, thick slice of roast pork which had acceptable moistness to it along with roast potatoes (the menu promised mash but the potatoes were well-cooked as were the carrots, and the somewhat incongruous red peppers) but the stars were sweet roasted slices of onions of which I should have liked more. The sauce was said to be apple jus though I would never have guessed that.  any of the fruit was contributing to the flavour of what would most appropriately be described as a gravy. This was a main course which any home cok might serve up as a Sunday lunch.

  The dessert (which I forgot to photograph) was a tasty but fairly run-of-the mill lemon meringue cheesecake served, so the menu said, with a fruit sorbet though I’m not sure I recall seeing the latter on my plate.

  That was it. A perfectly edible, generously portioned meal, comforting in its old fashioned way. But eaten in a historic location and that’s what really made it worthwhile.

427. Itaewon.

 I am not a Korean food aficionado; to be truthful my experience of the cuisine is ultraminimal though not entirely absent.

I saw some article or the other quite recently about Itaewon, a Korean restaurant in Station Street, opposite New Street Station, next door to the historic Old Repertory Theatre and two buildings down from the now closed but famous Electric Cinema. The Old Rep is said to have been the first repertory theatre to be opened in Britain and the Electric is said to have been the oldest surviving cinema in the UK. Venerable neighbours indeed. 

I had completed a 2 hour walking tour dedicated to the buildings of Station Street and Smallbrook Queensway and finding myself in Station Street once more I seized the day and opted to have an exotic late Sunday lunch at Itaewon. When I entered the restaurant I discovered a colourful, small dining area with seating for 18 people and a small bar at the end furthest from the door gayly decorated with a slogan in pink fluorescent lighting with the inscription, “Choose your own adventure”. I was greeted immediately on arrival and seated comfortably next to the bar and the extensive menu was handed to me. The very helpful and friendly East Asian waiter was delighted to answer my questions about the menu and I learned a lot about Korean dishes and drinks in a remarkably short time.

    I chose a Korean beer-soju cocktail, soemak, to accompany my meal. Soju is a clear, colourless alcoholic drink made from rice with a flavour akin to vodka. This, after all, was an opportunity to experiment. Soemak is a popular combination of beer and soju with varying alcohol content ranging from 12.5% to 53%. I enjoyed the drink - the overall impression was one of a lager and I did not experience any symptoms deriving from excessive alcohol content. 

The soemak is available with added fruit flavours but I shrank from that, recalling the ghastly fruit-flavoured ciders which were once in vogue. I wasn’t sure if the meal would be served in courses or as small plates. The waiter told me the dishes would arrive together which they did although those I chose were eminently suitable to have been served one after the other and indeed I think that would have been preferable. The ‘appetiser’ took the form of six pleasing fried pork dumplings which were very tasty with nice, light dumpling dough but they were a little more oily than they should have been (13/20)

  The ‘main’ was a robust and rustic Korean beef curry. The spiciness was moderate but pleasingly discernible and the beef was nicely tender and enjoyable. The cubes of adequately cooked potatoes and carrots gave a generous bulk to the dish though the onions might have been softened a little more. The steamed rice was well cooked. This was comforting, home-cooking style food and none the worse for that (13/20).

  The range of desserts was not large and I wanted something fairly light after my generously sized main. I opted for the ice cream flavoured by the infamously smelly durian fruit which I can not remember ever trying even though I have visited south east Asia and the Far East a number of times. The ice cream was not, I’m relieved to say, particularly malodourous to any degree but the flavour was unique - not really sweet at all, more, I thought, the flavour of meat and I concluded that it was probably an acquired taste.

  I had enjoyed my meal and looking around me I was surprised that a large percentage of the female diners - all of them under 30 years old - were wearing headscarves. I was not sure why the restaurant appeared to be so popular with young Muslims until the penny dropped and I noticed on the menu the indication that the food served was Halal. While respecting religious customs I have my reservations about the way animals are killed (not all are stunned for instance prior to being killed which means they die a slower death) to produce Halal meat and therefore, though I enjoyed my Korean dishes I do not feel I can eat at Itaewon again which I regret as I otherwise like the place very much.

  Having thought that this was a small ground floor, off the street restaurant, I discovered there to be at the top of a rather glitzy staircase a very large dining room where some of the diners had opted to eat. Itaewon proved to be full of surprises.

Rating - 🌛🌛🌛🌛 8 September 2024.

  The tour of Station Street and the probably doomed Smallbrook Queensway prior to lunch had been very interesting and the retired senior architect who accompanied the small group pointed out the merits of some old and modern buildings which the ordinary punter such as myself would never have noticed without his input. So here we have -

A view down Station Street with the former Shaftesbury Coffee House and Temperance Hotel (1890) next to the Crown public house  -

  The steps down from Grand Central and New Street Station to Station Street - 

  The Crown public house (built 1876, Grade II listed, on the corner of Station Streetvand Hill Street)  where the veteran popular music group Black Sabbath played regularly in the group’s early days. To be fair the pub has more merit attached to its musical heritage than to its architectural heritage) - 

The Electric Cinema, Britain’s earliest cinema building (1909) - 

The Market Hotel (1883) and further along The Old Rep Theatre (1912) -

  

The rear of the Old Rep Theatre (once The Tatler Theatre) in Hinckley Street -

Smallbrook Queensway (1962) probably soon to be demolished - 

 The Albany Hotel (1962) -

Norfolk House - 

News.

  On 28 August 2024 the Michelin Guide announced that Albatross Death Cult was one of six British dining establishments to be included in its August list of recommended restaurants. In my opinion this might be the surprise new Michelin star for Birmingham come next year’s announcements by Michelin but then again, who can predict what the Michelin inspectors will come up with given the as ever quirky nature of their astral donations?