251. Take Three Chefs.

 

  A one off. Purnell’s hosting a rather promising evening of three courses (each cooked by a celebrity chef - Tom Kerridge (starter), Michel Roux Jr (main) and Glynn Purnell himself (dessert) with a range of ‘snacks’ to start provided by all three chefs. Actually it was not really a one off as a similar evening took place last year (Kerridge, Angela Hartnett and Purnell) and doubtless, from the clamour for a ticket and the adoring approval at the end, more will take place in the future.

  It was very soothing sitting amongst a group of really rather nice people all united by their love of, and knowledge of, fine food. It was rather like being a member of a secret society, exclusive of the gastronomically unwashed, all of us admittedly rather self-satisfied and mildly smug but when spending £250 on a three course meal such gratifying self-appreciation is very understandable and perhaps acceptable. “Good company maketh a meal” (Old Bloke, 2022).

  The cost included a Purnell’s original cocktail - a pleasing Rhubarb cocktail (rhubarb vodka) and some excellent wines, selected by Purnell’s’ sommelier, Adrien Garnier. Purnell’s’ triumphant pain de campagne always With the snacks came a very quaffable rare champagne (2008). The snacks were a delight - along with Glynn Purnell’s own faux black canary potatoes (presumably inspired by a temporally distant holiday in Tenerife) and his black charcoal, which is more puzzling to the uninitiated than the riddle of the Sphinx, there was Michel Roux’s exceptional tarte pissaladière (which even though I have what I believe to be a rather good French accent I find to be a single word tongue twister which despite hours of practice I have failed to conquer) and the ferociously delicious contribution by Tom Kerridge of black truffle sausage roll which is luxurious and comforting both at the same time.

 And Kerridge scored again with his starter of red mullet with deeply flavoured bouillabaisse glowing with saffron and tickled up with a mustard aïoli and a herb cracker which just maybe I might not have needed.

  And Roux lived up to his heritage by bringing to Birmingham his skills which brought to the table a generously portioned, fabulously tender and flavoured piece of Wagyu, cooked - as we might expect - to perfection and precisely, almost painfully perfectly, seasoned along with a delicious, crispy pomme Anna and a gorgeous Béarnaise sauce. 

  Meantime, the sommelier had been doing his work uncompromisingly satisfactorily- with the fish he had served Cloudy Bay 2020 and the pleasing Lirac 2016 with the beef course which it matched with very happily.

    Purnell served up a very fine dessert of chocolate parfait covered by a layer of passion fruit jelly served alongside a dark chocolate and cardamom sorbet with a cocoa meringue and a brightly shining mango coulée glowing like an egg yoke on the plate. The dish found a good companion in a glass of South African sweet red wine.

  Afterwards it was Question and Answer time when the three wise chefs faced their adoring audience and told anecdotes and quipped hilariously as we might have expected them to do with Glynn Purnell as the ringleader of this merry band. Roux was more serious but joined in with the air of general merriment. A good time was had by all.

  And so to bed at The Grand Hotel, a couple of minutes’ walk away from Purnell’s. I had been kindly upgraded to a suite on the special occasion of the dog’s 11th birthday. The hotel staff had all signed a birthday card for her and gifts in the form of packets of chews and a toy were awaiting her when we arrived in our bedroom. As I wrote, a good time was had by all.

 

  Apart from the luxury of it all, I naturally enjoyed the view looking down on the cathedral and St Phillip’s Square but I also derived pleasure from the little pieces of art in the room including a clever little collage depicting a view at Gas Street Basin and another showing The Floozie out of her jacuzzi and luxuriating instead in an old bubble-filled tin bath which is pleasingly ironic given how disastrous it was given that just in the last week or two a joker emptied detergent into the real ‘jacuzzi’ outside the Council House and wrecked at great expense the mechanism which allows the water to flow in the fountain. The Council called it ‘vandalism’ though it is no worse than what they have just allowed to be done to the nearby statue of Queen Victoria by some ‘artist’ they’ve found somewhere or the other who wants to harp on again about the evil British Empire. It was all I could do to stop my gastronomic dog who also has delicate artistic sensibilities from cocking her keg and micturating on it. Birmingham - more than great restaurants.

148. At Last. 17 May And We’re Off.

 

Soir Bleu by Edward Hopper (1914). Out to dinner again but with some unease?

Weeks of wet weather and suppressed social activity come to an end. Glum times indeed. In the background there’s a faint whiff of danger as everyone whispers the words, “Indian variant” (not a new recipe for chicken tikka masala). But, no matter what, restaurants reopen to indoor dining today and we can once more stay in hotels and generally feel as though the forces of liberation have moved in.

  And it’s my birthday week. As we can only dine out with five companions for the present I shall not be having my usual jolly dinner at Purnell’s but will be spreading the event over three days to enable all my usual guests to attend which gives us a chance to visit three Birmingham Michelin starred restaurants in three days but in smaller groups. What fun. But first, to Ludlow where last the dog and I were staying at Christmas. 

  Meanwhile, as we head for Shropshire, worrying news of what’s happening in Birmingham, with hospitality venues under assault from the combination of COVID-19 and an incomprehensibly incompetent city council. I have commented before on the Council’s determination to introduce a Clean Air Zone (CAZ) on 1 June which will involve motorists who drive into the city centre paying £12 per day if they choose to bring their vehicles with them when they dine in the city’s cherished restaurants. A fanatical Labour councillor, Waseem Zaffar, best summed up as a ravening, swivel-eyed zealot, has determined that he will push ahead with this within days  of the reopening of the city’s dining establishments which have survived the Coronavirus storm. Those who run hospitality businesses and anyone with more than one brain cell can see clearly that the extra costs of coming to the city centre and the inconvenience and dangers of using Birmingham’s lamentable public transport services are bound to severely affect the number of people prepared to use city centre businesses and will therefore be a further blow to the city centre’s future. But Zaffar and his mates who run the council are determined to run amok regardless of the consequences. It is therefore an important part of the unfolding story of dining out in Birmingham to record these events as they may have a profound effect on the future of many respected businesses.

Zaffar, who may be the man to kill off dining out in Birmingham.

  Restaurateurs are very worried about the possible developing disaster and the potential devastating effects on their businesses which they have worked hard at great personal costs to bring to the very peak of places to dine in England. We have previously mentioned that Opus will never reopen and Purnell’s Bistro and Ginger’s Bar is certainly remaining closed for the present with never ending road works and construction work going on outside it. 

  Glyn Purnell has expressed concerns about the future of city centre restaurants and urged the people of Birmingham to use them or else their future will be threatened. He has stated that he believes that city centre businesses should have “six or eight month’s grace” before the CAZ is introduced. This seems an entirely sensible request but one which Zaffar and his fanatical colleagues are hardly likely to listen to sadly.

  We hope it is not farewell to Ginger’s Bar; I and my fellow Old Blokes have enjoyed many a happy cocktail there prior to lunching or dining at Purnell’s Bistro or moving on to one of the city’s other restaurants. Personally, I’ve been looking forward to a glass of Ginger’s Penicillin and in the absence of a definitive announcement I hold on to my hope that I shall yet again get a shot at that bar.

Welcome back!

139. Street Food In Birmingham. Goodbye Digbeth, Hello Hockley. Goodbye Beefburgers, Hello Venisonburgers.

   I think I have made it clear before that I haven’t been caught up in the lemming-like plunge from cliffs into a sea of expensive, often somewhat unpleasant street food served on nasty cardboard trays that has become inexplicably popular in this city. Much of it just isn’t very nice. There are a couple of recent developments in this aspect of Birmingham dining that are worth mentioning here.

  Firstly Digbeth Dining Club is no more or at least not in the form in which those who like that sort of thing (mostly aged under 40 who have lead a life of whining and who are now prone to long-COVID) have come to know it. It has been based in Lower Trinity Street since it began almost ten years ago in venues such as Mama Roux’s and Spotlight but as the triumph of the government’s vaccination campaign enables the hospitality industry to be reborn imminently the DDC has revealed that it will open a new venue in the Jewellery Quarter in Hockley. DDC does say however that it is looking for its own venue in Digbeth, the charms of which remain lost on me to this day, and that the venue will be, “a place where we can grow, develop, champion independence and incubate the best food traders, musicians, DJs (I don’t think they’re referring to dinner jackets), artists and makers that the region has to offer”. So that’s alright then. The new location in Hockley will be in Great Hampton Street and it is said that the “Hockley Social Club will still feature a line-up of street food and DJs in a 10,000 square feet space” (really you’d think that cool street food-consuming dudes would have converted to metric measurements by now).

  Meanwhile Birmingham’s appalling City Council which is dominated by a Labour Party locked in perpetual civil war between the Corbynistas and Starmer’s Limp Left faction, which in itself does not give much hope for good governance, and made up of a lot of worthless inner city councillors who make no contribution to the progress of the city apart from claiming their £18000 annual ‘expenses’ (they’ve just voted themselves a substantial rise again) and anything else they can get their hands on along with councillors representing privileged members of the wealthy, self-satisfied left leaning-middle class who have swarmed in places like Moseley and Harborne, has taken it on itself to withhold licenses from long established street-traders unless the traders introduce an “innovative approach”to what they offer for sale. 

  In reply the traders have taken the council to court accusing it of wanting to “gentrify” the city centre which one expects is just the vision that the denizens of Moseley and Harborne and their council representatives probably do hope to see happen. In court the lawyer representing the Council was forced to deny that the Council wished to replace current stalls selling beefburgers with those selling chai lattes and Tibetan curries (I had to look up what a Tibetan curry is and had to conclude that it most certainly has a home in Moseley). The lawyer for the Council, one Jonathan Manning, said that an “innovative approach is what the council is looking for”. He continued that traders were not required to sell “something that no-one has ever heard of, that no-one knew existed” (not Tibetan curry then obviously). “if you are burger van (an interesting piece of transformation in itself) you can still innovate within the burger market by selling goods that are perhaps more diverse than you were previously selling,. An example could be perhaps a vegetarian line or a different kind of meat - one could have a venison burger”. Such drivel. Frankly I find most burgers to be pretty unpleasant but I do support the traders who have worked in this city through all sorts of weather over many years and resent the assault on them by those who represent the Tibetan curry-eaters who live in their million pound houses in Moseley and such suburbs. If they want a venison burger then you are bound to find one in B13 or B15 and you can wash it down with an over-priced  Côtes de Rhône at the same time.

What is a Tibetan curry? Well nothing special I wouldn’t think though it is said to be less oily than Indian curries and have a “cleaner, healthier feel” (that figures, I’m surprised Birmingham City Council has not already made it de rigeur in all Birmingham restaurants). Recipes on the internet seem to centre on bright yellow potato curries and while genuine Tibetans (I’m not sure how many there are in Moseley or Harborne) use a yerma peppercorn in their’s, western recipe variants seem to feature a lot of fenugreek. So now we know. I wonder how soon it will be before Birmingham city centre is full of Tibetan curry stalls and if one will find its way to the Hockley Social Club (actually to give myself an easy time I often make a potato curry and like to use a lot of fenugreek so I think I have been several years ahead of the denizens of Moseley on that one). However I haven’t yet made myself a venison burger.