With Christmas rapidly approaching and several sorts of Christmas lunches already consumed at various venues with various acquaintances, I was happy to be returning on a dark winter’s night to the atmospheric location of Kay Winwood’s GULP, heading from the tram station by Key Hill Cemetery, glancing at Banksy’s Father Christmas next to the Temple of Relief, and thence down quiet Victorian streets, past old pubs lit like lighthouses, the air of Dickens’ Christmas Carol about it all, though transported to the Jewellery Quarter. Through the front door and up the steep old factory stairs and into Kay’s warm and gorgeously decorated dining room where soon after I was joined by several strangers and one old familiar face whom I often bump into as we do our rounds of the restaurants of Birmingham. It’s Christmas and everyone is chatting and we’re off.
This is the Two Turtle Doves menu though I’m pretty sure that particular type of pigeon is a protected species and so I guess that the main might not precisely be the bird named on the menu. Anyway it’s delightful to be sitting in the candlelight in this fascinating room like a Christmas (long) past. Rusticity is matched with style.
There’s a lovely wintertime start with delicious smoked chicken consommé and winter herbs - warming, tasty, relaxing, soothing after the journey to GULP. Then a very pleasing truffled scotch egg nestled in a bed of fantastic, crispy, straw potatoes with parsnip apple purée and a delightful accompanying velouté. Cratchitt and his brood would have been very happy with this and there would have been no need for the prize turkey.
The main was roast pigeon. This was more cooked than pigeon aficionados woukd have wanted and rather tough but for one who is far from being an aficionado, the flavour was milder than much of the pigeon I have been served and therefore far more tolerable to me. The pigeon was very well matched by roasted golden beetroots, the smoke of charred hispi and the punch of celeriac needed to partner the brazenness of the pigeon.
As a worshipper of the clafoutis I spared not my pan of festive plum, pear and gingerbread clafoutis happily paired with mince pie ice cream and with a little, somewhat over dense brown butter cinnamon beignet. And finally, whilst supping coffee, some gorgeously textured pate de fruits and the extravagance of stollen truffle.
A merry Christmas seemed assured as I returned home, heading back to the station through the quiet streets of a Dickensian Jewellery Quarter. God bless us, everyone.
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