472. South West Birmingham And North East Worcestershire.

 

Kings Norton from Bilberry Hill by JRR Tolkien, 8 July 1913.

  To the south and west of the city, Birmingham gradually dissolves into Worcestershire. New Frankley becomes Old Frankley, Rednal becomes Lickey End, West Heath tails off to Hopwood, Kings Norton to Wythall and Rubery to, er, Rubery. In short, suburban Birmingham becomes (mainly) rural Bromsgrove with the Lickey Hills looking down on the surrounding countryside from where JRR Tolkien painted a watercolour on Bilberry Hill looking away towards Kings Norton, the then city distant and brooding, its industry every day threatening to encroach on and overwhelm the agricultural, green lands across the border. 

  In those southwest suburbs when Tolkien was living in Rednal, Herbert Austin was busy establishing his motor car factory at Longbridge and the Cadbury family had established their chocolate factory and had built a model village in which their workers might live very pleasantly unless they wished to consume alcohol which was banned within the boundaries of Bournville village by the Quaker Cadburys.

  Southwest Birmingham is barely recognisable as what we think of as Modern Birmingham. The population is dominated by white people, many of whom arrived there in the nineteen fifties and sixties as the old buildings of the inner city were demolished, in contrast to the population of much of the inner city. It is a mixture of former council estates (many of the houses on those estates were bought by their tenants when Margaret Thatcher introduced the right to buy) and upmarket houses where savvy members of the Birmingham middle class live in houses priced at a fraction of the cost of a similar home in the north of the city at Sutton Coldfield. The residents have all the advantages of living in the city while being close to rural landscapes, just a short walk from home in many cases, as well as cheaper housing. And now those residents of south west Birmingham also have the benefit of being close to some pleasing eateries.

  Recently I had lunch at Kafenion facing Bournville green. It is a busy, sizeable, shabby chic, rustic establishment full, when I went, of the sort of affluent middle class women in early middle age who make up the dominant species in well off-but-socialist Bournville (long gone are the female factory workers who now live in council houses towards the edges of the city). They either had their infants with them, the sort born to ‘elderly primips’, or were luxuriating in their children’s absence at school. It was like a scene from the hilarious BBC comedy, Amandaland. The image of Ladies who lunch has evolved to this new generation of Women who do coffee - with their intensively worked on casual image and their devotion to their mobile phones with much scrolling and texting going on in between the exchange of gossip and oneupwomanship. This certainly is a city of diversity.

    My dining companion, a frequent visitor to Kafenion, and I, who had never eaten there before, were soon settled and studying the paper menu and the blackboard which also listed the dishes on offer. The cuisine is Anglicised Greek or just plain English (with perhaps a little unEnglish spice added). This, in theory, was to be a light lunch and I was very drawn to the spicy (I was warned that it was very spicy by at least a brace of serving staff) curried butternut squash soup which was not only hot in the spicy sense but extremely hot in the temperature meaning of the word. It was very good and the spiciness was not just easily tolerable but also very enjoyable.To accompany the soup I ordered a bowl of excellent chips - crispy outside and soft and digestible inside and made interestingly pleasurable by being sprinkled with sage. There were also a couple of slices of toasted sourdough to mop up the soup.

  My lunch companion ordered an old favourite of hers - Turkish eggs - well poached and spicy and served with an appealing flatbread and she reported that they were very good.

I will have no hesitation to visit Kafenion again when the opportunity arises.

26 March 2025.

Rating:- 🌛🌛🌛.

  In the past twelve to eighteen months, north Worcestershire has gained the excruciatingly excellent Wildmoor Oak Inn (see Blog 454) and in Barnt Green, Andrew Sheridan and his Open Restaurants Group who already have the Michelin-listed Black and Green on the  main street through the village, have opened Cofton on the Green across the road from Black and Green. 

  This is similar to Kafenion in many ways - it acts as a bar for locals and diners with reservations for Black and Green who are waiting for the restaurant to open and serves all-day breakfasts and, an odd pairing, a variety of homemade pizzas. The clientele is similar to that of Kafenion though probably even more well-heeled as Barnt Green is exceedingly affluent (mere mortals in south Birmingham refer to it wondrously as the place where “the footballers live”).

  Regardless, when I and the same lunch companion with whom I visited Kafenion, pitched up at Cofton on the Green, we noted that it was busy, not very sizeable but with outdoors seating, shabby chic, rustic and full of the same sort of clientele as those we encountered in Kafenion, only this being a Saturday, they also had their gaggle of offspring with them though this did not prevent them from paying intense attention to their mobile phones and allowing their next generation to make feral noises or wander around while chewing on some sort of healthy option piece of carbohydrate or the other.

  A young woman, somewhat inarticulate, dropped off a pair of menus at our table and we agreed outr choices and waited for one of the several staff standing at the bar to come and take our order. Eventually, after some minutes, the penny dropped on all sides, and it was revealed to us that one must order at the bar and that way one’s interest in any particular would be registered and in time brought to the table.

  I had a cocktail and we both failed to resist ordering the all day breakfast though I was pulled towards trying one of the pizzas on offer as I suspected they were probably rather good. The breakfast/brunch was very good even at 1.30PM. By the time it reached us, most of the feral children had moved on with their mobile phone-clutching parents and there was only one table left occupied by three women-who-do-coffee  whose cackling was only barely above the level of tolerance. These factors made for a more relaxing lunch than we might otherwise have hoped for half an hour previous.

  These were fine ingredients. The Lashfords sausage, of very good size, was delicious and nicely cooked though the fried egg was cooked so that there was no runniness in the yolk whatsoever. The bacon and hash brown were very tasty but the highlight was the black pudding even if it came at an added price. The cooking of the pudding was perfect, helped, no doubt, by the pudding having plenty of fat in it; it had a  moist but firm texture - too often black pudding is overcooked and cloyingly dry. The twist to this Full English breakfast was that it was served not with toast (which made a truly pleasant change) but with the exoticism of middle eastern flatbread which was also very good. I should not forget to mention that the chopped mushrooms were also delicious and some of the tastiest I have eaten for a long time.

  The choice of dessert is limited and amusingly quirky - a variety of doughnuts - my lunch companion chose the lemon meringue doughnut and said that she enjoyed it. I thought that a milk shake might make a nice way to end the meal and opted for the alluring Malteser flavoured variety. I was disappointed with it - the flavour of chocolate masked the flavour of malt and the milk shake was not anywhere cold enough. 

  My companion and I had enjoyed our visit to Cofton on the Green and again, like Kafenion, I should be happy to return perhaps next time to sample one of the pizzas though a repeat of the Full English, especially if the chef can reproduce the excellent cooking of the black pudding and the mushrooms, would also be very tempting. 

  Cofton on the Green is dog friendly which makes much more sense than letting in a load of feral middle class children spreading which ever virus they have just picked up at school or nursery.

Rating:- 🌛🌛.

12 April 2025.

  In addition to Black and Green in Barnt Green (Blogs 250 and 285), south west Birmingham dwellers also have the opportunity of selecting their choice of fast food at the popular Herbert’s Yard in Longbridge (Blog 201) and the fleshpots of Stirchley and, now trending, Cotteridge which are both just a few minutes away.