545. Black And Green, Barnt Green.

 

  Barnt Green, an extremely affluent village just over the border from south west Birmingham at the northeast tip of Worcestershire has a remarkably modest high street when one disembarks from the train from Birmingham (or in my case, from Longbridge, just 4 minutes away by locomotive). It’s remarkably unassuming and has two or three coffee shops and mostly independent businesses with the exception of a Tesco Local across the road from the local church. It isn’t hard to find Andrew Sheridan’s Michelin-listed Black and Green as the visiting diner turns out of the station approach and it looks back at you from across the building - a narrow front sandwiched between a charity shop and a private house.

  I was there for Saturday lunch as were just four other people on what was a very pleasant and temperate early summers day. I discovered that Ben Taylor, former Chef Patron of Le Petit Bois in Moseley, had just started work there as its Head Chef having passed what sounded like a very memorable year driving around a large amount of Europe with his partner Zsofia Kisgergely enjoying themselves at leisure as well as visiting places of gastronomic importance and gaining knowledge there. I asked him about a future version of Le Petit Bois and he was noncommittal but it was by no means not on the cards.

  The menu of Black and Green, in its simplest form, was shown on the wall to my left very much in the way that the word of God appeared on the wall at Belshazzar’s feast but with a rather more pleasing message spelt out by the letters. “JERSEY ROYAL TROUT LAMB STRAWBERRY TREACLE” it shone out

 The meal started off with amuses bouches - a delicious, powerfully flavoured mushroom parfait with port jelly and a pleasingly robustly flavoured Cotswold Cruncher cheese mousse  on a delightfully crispy cracker with truffle.

 Then  sourdough, crusty and crunchy on the outside and freshly soft and tasty on the inside, with a gorgeous, lavishly garnished Cornish cruncher flavoured butter.

    The first course was nicely cooked Jersey Royal potato in a verdant pea velouté and this proved to be very toothsome.

   Then there came  trout with whey split with cucumber and coastal herbs oil. I thought perhaps there had been too much whey covering the fish with its delicate texture but the trout was certainly full of flavour.

   The main was  Staffordshire lamb loin and belly - the belly more tasty than the loin I thought, exquisitely tender but there was a lot of unrendered fat - it appeared to have been cooked sous vide and then finished off when Chef took a blow torch to it. It was accompanied by tenderstem broccoli and a pleasing hint of mint which a nice plate of lamb always deserves to be accompanied by.

  The intermediate course highlighted sweet seasonal Cheddar Valley strawberries on a strawberry panna cotta and with basil and black garlic and this led into the dessert proper.

  This ‘treacle tart’, seemed to be somewhat misnamed, it having rather more the texture of a sponge made, it seemed, from bread with treacle and with it was an excellent yogurt ice cream, the acidity of which nicely balanced the sweetness of the rest of the dish.

  At the end a surprise little cheese course of a good sized piece of strongly flavoured English Brie on a fruit bread and honey aptly piped across the top of it all.

  I enjoyed my Saturday lunch at Black and Green and my chat with Ben Taylor and ambled across the road back to Barnt Green station for my train home.

30 May 2026

Rating:- 🌞.

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.

371.Luke Butcher leaves Purnell’s.

 

2024 will usher in some changes in the restaurant scene in Birmingham. Notably Purnell’s will have a new Head Chef after the announcement just before Christmas that Head Chef, Luke Butcher, was leaving his post at the restaurant although his replacement has not yet been named.

  Butcher began to work with Glynn Purnell when he was appointed to be chef de Partie at Purnell’s in 2010, having started his career at Adlard’s Restaurant in Norwich and then moving on to be pastry chef at Tom Kerridge’s Hand and Flowers in 2006. He was appointed Head Chef at Purnell’s in April 2017.

  Regular diners at Purnell’s may have felt that in recent years, menus had become too repetitive with many of Purnell’s longtime signature dishes featuring constantly on the tasting menus and it will be interesting to see what role Butcher takes up elsewhere which might enable him to develop menus of his own with more freedom as well as seeing what direction Purnell’s’ menus travel in with the appointment of a new Head Chef.

  Bizarrely The Caterer initially reported Luke Butcher’s departure on its site and in a tweet and named  him as ‘Luke Batch’ and it was only after I commented on the tweet identifying his correct name that the tweet was deleted (and not replaced) and the name in the website article was corrected. It does seem vaguely insulting when a long-serving, well respected chef is wrongly named on a professional reporting site specifically designed to report on the hospitality industry. 

Corrected version on website - 

  Meanwhile, in the so-called Edgbaston Village, in Highfield Road near Simpsons, a restaurant describing  itself as ‘fine-dining’ and offering an opportunity to “celebrate the new year with a mesmerising eight-course fine dining experience inspired by the historic Silk Road” opens in January 2024. The publicity promises a “unique gastronomic adventure” with the menu taking the diner “on a journey through the rich and diverse food cultures of Turkey, Iran, Balochistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India - a true feast for the senses!”.

  There’s clearly a lot of hype around this new restaurant which is named Baloci and this term, ‘fine dining’ is bandied about rather a lot. Six by Nico (see Blog 364) is a good example of a restaurateur locating a restaurant in a smart dining room, plating up the ingredients attractively and calling it ‘fine dining’ but these are not necessarily a guarantee that what you get is actually ‘fine dining’. Fine dining needs a lot more than glitzy decor and the use of the term. We are approaching a stage where fine dining becomes a pastiche of itself just as nouveau cuisine suffered a similar fate. Still, I will give a Baloci a visit and report back but I go with a mild feeling of dread about what will happen when I go there. I’m also a little anxious about what the term “Electric Fine Dining” coukd possibly mean - some publicity expert seems to have gone a little bonkers. I hope Baloci does not turn out to be baloney.

  One of the less satisfactory dining experiences of recent years, allowing for the high price of the meal, was at the Bracebridge in Sutton Coldfield. This was another one of those restaurants with fine dining pretensions which failed to live up to what one was expecting (see Blog 59). Not before time, the restaurant closed in October 2023 but is now to be reopened, as reported by the BBC on 27 December 2023 by Andrew Sheridan and Sam and Emma Morgan’s Open Restaurant Group with some added investment from local residents in the well-heeled area. Sheridan himself of course, has decamped to reopen 8, previously located in the International Convention Centre, in his native Liverpool but retains his interest in the West Midlands with several enterprises including Black And Green in another affluent location - Barnt Green.

  It will be interesting to see if Sutton Coldfield, after a long absence, can finally find its way back into the pages of the Food Guides.

300. Purnell’s Plates. A New Bull In Town.

 

  When it comes to Mediterranean cuisine, unlike Greek and Italian food which I find to be, respectively, excruciatingly dull and extremely overrated, I do derive great pleasure from being presented with a plate on which almost any Spanish dish is presented. Spanish cuisine in Birmingham has been significantly unrepresented so I was thrilled that the Yummy Brummie had identified a hole in the market and realised that he was the man to fill it. Hence I found myself ambling along Edmund Street on the first day that Purnell’s Plates opened to the public. It was advertised as selling Spanish tapas which for me at least was highly alluring. 

  The interior is mildly claustrophobic, being a narrow ‘L’ shape opening up into a small square place at the rear, The decor is smart and the restaurant is littered with artefacts such as bull’s horns to remind the diner that this is a little piece of Spain in the city where bulls are embraced so enthusiastically. The walls have art which also generally, though not entirely, emphasise the theme of Iberia. The long bar is the first sight to greet the customer as they enter the restaurant and I was pleased to recognise some old faces there including Adrien Garnier, restaurant manager at the mother ship, Purnell’s, who said he was there for a couple of days to keep an eye on the opening.

  Seated comfortably at my table I noted that the opening lunchtime was a a little slow with a total of only six customers, including myself, there during the time I sat and lunched. I asked for a cocktail but the bar was not yet ready to serve them so instead I had a glass of Madri, a Spanish beer which was perfectly drinkable. I was rather excited about delving into the menu and getting on with the pleasing selection of dishes.  First to arrive was my Anchoas en tostada served with a generous helping of delicious pesto which nicely balanced the fish’s salty delightfulness and which I gobbled down with relish while I waited for my other dishes to arrive. 

  Then the main dishes came out, sauntering their way to the table with a self-assuredness that they were going to pleasure the diners who had ordered them in a comforting, full-bodied, rustic sort of way albeit with some sophistication that only came to the fore when the taste buds had got into gear. Naughty, spicy patatas bravas; very nicely cooked cod, bacalao al pil pil, in a pil pil sauce (garlic, paprika, parsley) and the most triumphant of them all, Chorizo al vino tinto, chunky pieces of spicy chorizo raised to a whole new level by the accompanying, remarkably delicious red wine sauce which was dark and shiny and unctious - I would eat that dish anytime.

  What came next was something of a surprise. I thought of finishing off with crema Catalona but what emerged from the kitchen appeared to be a dramatic genetic mutation of the dish I knew, recognised and loved. Perhaps Purnell’s chefs knew more about it than I (and the rest of the world) did. Ah yes! It was a deconstructed crema Catalana, that was it. There was a heavily whipped cream with shards of caramel emerging erect from it. It just didn’t seem right. In fact it seemed rather lazy. It was pleasant enough but my message would be - reconstruct your crema Catalana as soon as possible.

     The crema Catalana apart, this was an enjoyable meal. Reservations have already been made for a return visit. Rating:- 🌛🌛🌛

  The labrador and I have since passed a happy five days in Weston super Mare which gave me opportunity to visit the legendary Papa’s for some truly fine cod and chips, lovely chunks of cod meat in a pleasingly light batter and some very passable chips to accompany it, and The Ginger Pig Kitchen where the crema Catalana is a triumphant model example of what Purnell’s Plates should be turning out (and the accompanying sable pig is a pleasure too).

  Chef Andrew Sheridan has announced the closure of About 8. Perhaps this is wise. It was always a very personal project, just as Black And Green is also. Alas he could not clone himself and therefore divided his time between cooking at About 8 at the weekend and at Black And Green during the week. About 8 was excellent but possibly too self-indulgent and it was hampering what was taking place in Craft which had been divided up by net curtains suggestive of a harem rather than a restaurant and where the food was not  really to the standard it had previously been.

  Now Craft is being converted into a brasserie and reincluding the space previously occupied by About 8. At the same time the dining pods in the ‘garden area’, which I always thought looked rather tacky, though they did help to see Craft through the COVID-19 lockdown crisis, have been removed. It seems Craft is going upmarket in image at the very least and hopefully the food served there will return to its previous heights in parallel with the look. About 8 is relocating to Liverpool from where Sheridan originated and it is not clear in Sheridan’s announcement whether he himself is planning to return there which would obviously, even if unintentionally, affect the personality of the food served at Black And Green. Sheridan is also planning to open a new restaurant, Severn and Wye, at Newent in Gloucestershire, south of Malvern as well as opening a gastropub in Newent.