Stirchley and Kings Heath are fashionable and Bohemian in a calculated, scruffy sort of way; Harborne, no more attractive than a suburban high street might be expected to be but looking plainly prosperous from just looking at its well-heeled denizens and Edgbaston, all regency and nicely spoken and populated by the less common of Birmingham’s wealthy citizens such as the nouveau riche of Four Oaks or Solihull. There’s the Jewellery Quarter, populated by the Bohemian middle aged and elderly with a lot of money to spend and then there are all those ghastly flats scattered around Ladywood and the innermost city where the well off young will pay a packet to live in boxes but have easy access to bars and restaurants and possibly the view of a canal and a bit of status imbued by the location of their accommodation.
Then there’s a different city - that where the less well off live generally comfortably in far less overpriced housing sometimes with extensive gardens, the fresh air blowing briskly from the neighbouring countryside. I think particularly of south west Birmingham, on the edge of Worcestershire, where Longbridge has risen from the ashes of Herbert Austin’s now long closed motor factory to supply the locals whose families have lived in the area since the 1950s and 1960s and never felt the need to move elsewhere with a neo-brutalist town centre with a Marks and Spencer’s - far better than the store in town - and Herbert’s Yard, the site where street food salesmen bring their food for the locals to enjoy and for hipsters from Harborne to visit and praise and feel uncomfortable about because they are surrounded by so many non-diverse common people whom they view as having very little food knowledge.
West Heath is part of the city ward which includes Longbridge - until 1911 it was not part of Birmingham but home to farmers, agricultural workers and nailers and it really only began to grow in the 1950’s when the monstrous Manzoni devised a plan to rehouse thousands of poor inner city dwellers on new estates there which swept away the countryside and inflicted concrete and multi-storey flats on what had once been farmland and beauty. At the heart of this most rural suburb the original small village remained and still does - a sort of downmarket Barnt Green. And even there on the edge, green fields and grazing cattle, soaring buzzards and wild roe deer, and public footpaths that head off across the countryside, the residents like to eat out and from time to time a new restaurant springs up.
The advantage of the location and the restaurant’s large window was that the place felt spacious and light and appealing, unlike some of the boutique dining establishments in Stirchley for instance which are dark and crowded. There was a nice bar, not obviously heavily laden with a choice of drinks but actually quite appropriate for this particular restaurant. I did not particularly crave any alcohol but instead ordered a tasty, soothing mango lassi which was nicely presented and so enjoyable that I had a second later in the meal.
There was a good choice of dishes featured on the menu but not so many as one might find on a good old Indian restaurant menu and this was quite pleasing, I thought. For starters I chose the nicely crispy pani puri served with a well judged spicy tamarind sauce and spiced water with puffed rice. This was excellent. The presentation was very pleasing and the dish itself had an air of rusticity about it, like home cooking.
I then opted for a very fair priced ‘Chef’s special thali’ which again conjured up the homely rusticity of the first course. At just over ten pounds it’s hard to expect too much but this seemed very fair. The dish highlighted Malvani cuisine from Maharashstra, the chef being from Mumbai, and there was a very real air of authenticity about it. There was a spicy small bowl of chicken curry with the chicken being served on the bone. This was a problem as it seemed there was more bone than meat but what chicken there was was moist and tasty. There was a separate bowl containing a curry sauce which seemed to be a rather thin broth but it soaked up the rice which came with the meal and the bread was also of use in the eating of it. Other accompaniments included a pappadom, slices of onion and a mango pickle about as aggressively sour as one would want it to be.
There was no need to order a dessert as the thali came with an excellent gulab jamun which was not oversweet having not been doused in syrup and was therefore not horribly sickly as this dessert may often be.
I enjoyed my first visit to this delightful restaurant which still has some way to go in its development but it’s good to see Birmingham’s less fashionable suburbs serving as home to some interesting and stylistically less familiar dining establishments especially when they avoid a clichéd image and strive to bring a different approach to what by now has become a tired south Asian cuisine. I left the restaurant feeling that if it had been located on Stirchley’s high street then it would already be another hipster niche favourite.
Rating:- 🌛🌛.
29 May 2025.
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