Having enjoyed my final chateaubriand roast Sunday lunch just a few days before (see Blog 546) at The Oyster Club by Adam Stokes, to give this fine Michelin-listed restaurant its full name, I was determined to enjoy one final seafood meal - the usually splendid Dover sole served for a very reasonable £40 - as the respected restaurant was due to close for good on Saturday 11 June.
The outgoing prime minister and his chancellor had achieved nothing good in the two years they were allowed to oversee the nation’s finances but they had done much harm with their policies and that included wilfully destroying the hospitality industry and reigning over the closure of many fine restaurants. Starmer might easily be viewed as Britain’s worse prime minister of recent times and such a view of him would be quite correct. He will be a footnote in English history but a looming black shadow in the social history of dining out.
Get though behind me, Starmer. Let me return to the joy of sitting in The Oyster Club.
And so, for a final time, I descended the stairs to the dining area - as always, stylish and comfortable and soon to have no more customers. But let’s live in the moment and have a Cotswold gin and tonic and tempura king prawns with gochujang. This ‘snack’ which was as bountiful as any ‘starter’ was excellent - the batter excellent though to be honest there was, perhaps, a little too much salt used somewhere in the dish.. The prawns were firm and tasty.
My much anticipated sole arrived - cooked magnificently - the texture moist but firm - and served in a ‘warm tartare sauce’, clad in samphire and sharp with pickled capers in a silky brown butter with sweet little brown shrimps. This was an excellent dish, alive with the pleasure of fine fish cookery. The opportunity to order it again will be greatly missed. I washed it down, by the way, with a nice glass of white wine Rioja - from Bodegas Muga - and it paired very nicely with the sole.
For the dessert, not for the first time, vanilla panna cotta, nicely set though not absolutely perfectly wobbly, and a mocktail which though I ordered ‘Bakewell tart’ was rather more like ‘Black Forest gateau’
I will miss The Oyster Club. Birmingham bad,y needs a fish restaurant of quality. You can say of course that we do have Albatross Death Cult but for many it is too esoteric, too clever, too experimental, too challenging. We need a fine restaurant where fish is cooked as close to perfect as we might hope it to be - baked, fried, roasted, steamed, en papillote and where lobster is as good as that served on Mount Olympus and where crab is exploding with flavour and where nouvelle cuisine never happened and sous vide cooking went undiscovered. Fish, simply cooked, enhanced by the most apt accompaniments. The Oyster Club was a good part of the way there and so I say, Adieu!
10 July 2026
Rating:- 🌞
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