447. Kurry Kingdom Cotteridge.

 

  Kurry Kingdom opened four years ago on 19 November 2020, squeezing its launch in between the series of lockdowns related to the COVID-19 pandemic which were assaulting the viability of many hospitality businesses at that time, at the site of a former Italian restaurant Bank which was named from its location in a former branch of one of the banks.

  The Bangladeshi restaurant seems to have been remarkably popular since it opened, attracting satisfied reviews on the dreaded Tripadvisor and, even better, managing to stay open despite the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune which the hospitality industry continues to be hit by right up to the Starmer government’s recent antibusiness measures announced in its November budget. 

  Its Facebook page tells us that, “Continuing the legacy of one of the founding pioneers of the Curry Trade in Birmingham. We are here to bring you back a master class in the art of a fine cuisine from our ancestors across Bangladesh, India, South west Asia”. That’s interesting. Prior to my visit to Kurry Kingdom, I was intrigued to know who this “founding pioneer” was and was optimistic I might find out because this apparently notable figure is not identified on the website despite being hinted at. The other discovery I wished to make was of course, whether or not I was going to experience “a master class in the art of a fine cuisine”.

  Prior to doing so, on a historical note, I found a menu first introduced when the restaurant opened in 2020. It was extremely long and full of almost every south Asian dish one could imagine. This did not seem like good news.

  It has to be said that it was not really possible to indulge in a relaxed meal as I found that my elderly dining companions had no intention of eating Indian food and had mostly never tried it. Now they felt it was too late to do so as they believed the effects on their gastrointestinal system would be too devastating at least in terms of severe nocturnal indigestion - no fault of the food, rather the result of aging. They had been hoping to be served steak and chips which was on the menu but alas we were told that there was no steak at least until tomorrow.

  It was best, I thought, to get on with sampling what was being served. I started off with poppadoms which were pleasingly peppery accompanied by a remarkably ambitiously large pickle and chutney tray which covered the range from the aggressively acidic (mango piclkle) to the the sweet and soothing (raita and mango chutney which woukd have benefitted from it having a little more body to it.

  In place of steak, my dining companions had opted for salmon, but had not been informed that this was a a piece of salmon marinated in spices (which was obviously a problem as they had already rejected anything with the mildest spiciness to it) so that was returned to the kitchen and eventually they settled for scampi and chips which met their approval so that was alright then. The restaurant’s staff dealt with all this with good humour and patience. I was impressed by the what looked like finely cooked chips which were served to the curry naysayers but as for the scampi I can say nothing save that it looked like, er, … scampi. 

  The restaurant has no bar licence and one may bring one’s own tipple if one so wishes but we had none and so I opted for a jug of nicely blended mango lassi which I eventually coaxed my dining companions into sampling and which obtained their evolving approval leaving me with just a small quantity for myself as they realised some ‘Indian food’ can be fun and they glugged it down. Oh, the Labours of a gastronomic Hercules.

  There was little enthusiasm among the English food eaters for a starter and so I ordered onion bhaji for myself which was presented as three crispy little spheres which promised much but delivered less, there being very little flavour in them, with none of the sweetness of caramelised onion for which I had been hoping. For the main, I had my old favourite of lamb dhansak - a complex dish, centred on lentils, though routine on a south Asian menu - it should be dry and sour and sweet and moderately hot, all together. In English restaurants it is usually served with pieces of pineapple to bring out the sweetness though as this is, allegedly, originally a Persian dish, I am a little dubious about any degree of authenticity the pineapple, indigenous to South America rather than South Asia, might give to it. 

  The lamb was very nicely cooked - delightfully tender and moist  - and the sauce had a spot-on dryness to it, and well-judged heat, but there was no real hint of sweetness which would have lifted an otherwise middling-flavoured dhansak to something of great pleasure. There were little cubes of pineapple lurking in the gravy but they had little sweetness to them and contributed very little. Nor was there any hint of sourness. The dish rose above the humdrum but was hardly attempting to reach the heights. The dhansak was served with some nicely cooked rice - I ordered plain rice but the more expensive pilau rice was served. 

  This meal may have been more successful if it had been shared with companions who actually wanted to eat Indian/Bangladeshi food but in the end, after decades of visiting south Asian restaurants, I have to conclude that while the service was enthusiastic, patient and even kind, problems arose from the restaurant not being able to serve what was on the menu and not conveying successfully to uninformed customers what was actually going to be served to them. The atmosphere is very good but the food did not seem to have the depth and sophistication of flavour that I wanted.

  I never did find out who exactly was “one of the founding members of the Curry Trade in Birmingham” whose legacy the restaurant represented..

Rating:- 🌛🌛.

5 December 2024.

186. Pig Saves Brummies’ Favourite Seaside Resort.

 

 

 Whether or not the extended period of necessarily taking holidays in our precious islands has saved the English seaside resort from a progressive, seemingly terminal decline one cannot say but Weston super Mare has not had a bad summer season and on an early October Saturday, warmer and sunnier than we should expect, there are good numbers of people, from young families who look more middle class than they used to (day trippers from increasingly gentrified Bristol?, I ask myself) to those of advanced and even greatly advanced age (some dressed rather pensioner chic), walking up and down the Royal Parade, throwing balls for their numerous dogs on the vast expanse of beach and queueing for ice creams at the former Cove West cafe not far from the new pier. 

  In Blog 27 I referred to this North Somerset town’s importance to West Midlanders as a holiday resort for the working class in the historic past - in the 50s and 60s the dominant accent was more Brummie than West Country in the summer months as ten of thousands from the centre of England thronged the town, snuffling out the best fish and chips, the hottest hot dogs, plentiful pots of tea and buckets of ice cream (then just vanilla, strawberry, chocolate or perhaps raspberry ripple) like truffle pigs out on a mission. Now the Mercians as still coming to visit but there are just as many Home Counties accents to be heard, as well as those identifying the speakers as coming from The North and of course, there’s plenty of Welsh, from just round the corner across the bay.

  For years there was a remarkably good restaurant with marvellous views - Michelin-listed The Cove (see Blog 27) - but this sadly went the way of all flesh and for a short brief period, as Weston College extended its hegemony over most of the buildings in the town, there was Lasseter’s (again see Blog 27) but its promise was short-lived. Then COVID-19 struck, locks went down and up and down and up and down and up again, Brexit got done and sent the hospitality business into a staffing crisis, fuel costs began to soar (and the story is not yet told by a long chalk) and anyone trying to run a restaurant at present has to rely on Boris Johnson’s rule by optimism as the only assurance that their business can survive.

  So it was not good timing to open a restaurant in November 2019 just as the coronavirus was festering nicely up to a boil in far off Wuhan and Boris was putting his Brexit legislation through the House Of Commons. I hate the phrase “A perfect storm” but this was indeed a perfect storm. But not knowing all that - which of us did? - two chefs from Lasseter’s - David Newman and James Baker opened their first restaurant on the site of a former bistro at the edge of the town centre, the Weston Mercury at the time saying that “the kitchen offers traditional bistro food with a twist, ‘to make it a little bit more special’”.

  The bistro, which pleasingly does not include the word ‘bistro’ in its name instead choosing the uncompromisingly English Ginger Pig Kitchen, is splendidly rustic, adorned as it is with an artificial (hopefully), mildly unsettling  pig’s head mounted on the wall (a thought of ancient baronial halls their walls lined with mounted stags’ heads flashes irrelevantly through my mind) and heavily varnished wooden tables and a mélange of chairs. The place is full of diners which can not be bad for off-season Weston and there is a degree of Pensioner Chic in evidence.

  A surprise amuse bouche is whisked to the table. A soupçon of what was basically a melon gazpacho, mildly acidic and wholly effective in waking up the taste buds of refreshment. The problem with one amuse bouche is that you can not help but think that there should be another one or even another two. But still, a nice little surprise.

  Down to the serious stuff. An excellent chicken liver parfait with some very edible toasted brioche, a delicious apricot chutney and a sensible two or three cornichons to cut through the richness of the dish. Look at Blog 27 and it becomes apparent that the chefs have brought some of their Lasseter’s’ dishes with them.

  

Then magnificent and bountiful dressed Cornish crab served attractively in a scallop shell with a perfect accompanying lemon mayonnaise and toasted pain de campagne and a salad whose elements were not all complementary to the crab. There were a few tiny pieces of shell in the crab but they did not detract from the immense pleasure the dish gave me and to be fair, I have still to visit a restaurant that has succeeded n eliminating every vestige of shell from its dressed crab. Finally a dessert/drink I recognised from my visits to Lasseter’s - a vey quaffable affogato with local clotted cream ice cream and generously-sized chunks of honeycomb.

  A fine meal, outwardly simple but highly enjoyable with the crab dish well worth storing up in one’s memory as an example of just how good bistro food can be in the hands of the right chef.

  So good was it all that I returned the next day for Sunday lunch. Thus it was that I came face to face with Thatcher’s Gin not surprisingly endowed with the flavour of apple and very pleasant it was with good tonic and well matched with the prawn cocktail I chose as starter (again see Blog 27) which was a cornucopia of crustaceans, large and small, with a pleasing, mild, not too acidic Marie Rose sauce, all looking very pretty in a scallop shell.

 

 It was not possible for me to resist choosing the roast as main course; I could have had beef but why would you go to a restaurant called The Ginger Pig Kitchen and not choose pork? The succulent sliced pork came with about every Sunday lunch accompaniment that you could imagine and another cornucopia - this time of vegetables. There was a well cooked donkey carrot of a size I have previously seen served as the main element of a main course in an expensive Vegan restaurant, excellent cheesy cauliflower, broccoli and a happy surprise in the form of crispy cabbage as well as tasty red cabbage. The roast potatoes were better than many restaurants manage to serve up and there was a decent stuffing and a fine Yorkshire pudding plus apple sauce and crackling though this was sadly inedibly too hard unless one was ready to imperil the structure of one’s teeth. It was all finished off by a decent gravy. Such pleasure for we rostbifs or should I say rostporcs? 

  Having rediscovered the pleasure of affogato I rounded off the meal with that little self-indulgence. Chef David Newman came out to speak to his happy diners - once more the restaurant was full to the rafters with customers. It looks as though this restaurant is one little piggy that is not going to be slaughtered ahead of its time.

183. Autumn Tidbits; Michelin Ignores The Midlands Again.

 

  Lucy The Labrador and I passed another 3 days in Birmingham city centre feeling rather comfortable and pleased with ourselves at The Grand Hotel where Lucy is something of an icon. Autumn had suddenly arrived with a vengeance, no more Indian summer but 36 hours of remorseless rain resulting in wet humans and soggy dogs. This was a midweek stay. The hotel was now busy with charmless businessmen, their time devoted to the making of money. I have long held that there are many in England who have a lot of money but are still as common as the Beckhams and Blairs. It appeared many of that ilk were staying at The Grand during our visit.

  Breakfast provided me with a shock. A buffet system has been introduced and while the products remain high quality one’s timing needs to be immaculate to ensure that the food is even mildly warm. The worst sight of the morning was an almost empty tray of dried out scrambled egg remnants, badly in need of replacing, but a rather vacant young man put in charge of it all did not seem to appreciate that such a need existed. He was more willing than able, it seemed. Matters, however, were soon put right when a senior person arranged for me to have freshly prepared plate of scrambled egg delivered to my table though even then things would have been better still if chef had recognised how much the addition of some salt enhances the flavour of scrambled egg.

  All around me, busy looking businessmen were playing with their mobile phones whilst shovelling great lumps of food, gannet-like, into their busy businessmen mouths. One charming individual, not far from me, thought it was a good idea to carry out a COVID-19 lateral flow test at the breakfast table. It was one of those occasions when one thinks, “Well now I’ve seen everything”. A charming member of the front of house staff picked up on my repugnance at this business-beast’s behaviour and asked if I would like her to speak to him but really this was not the fault of the hotel nor its staff and one hardly wishes to find them being put in an awkward position because of the disgusting behaviour of one of the guests. 

  I surveyed my fellow breakfasters around the room, mostly ‘busy businessmen’, all with a sense of self-entitlement bigger than Yorkshire, hardly any of them capable of eating food in a civilised manner but reduced to stone age shovellings of colossally-sized boulders of food into their gaping maws. England has very little to thank America for - and here’s another example - our restaurants serve unnecessarily huge amounts of food, à l’Americaine, and the English have learned to wolf down these vast piles of barely cut-up food using their forks like garden spades with no sense of just how disgusting they look. And now, why not blow your nose loudly over breakfast and then shove a stick up it for good measure to try to bring a crop of coronavirus into the outside world?

  The previous evening I had had a much pleasanter experience in the Madeleine Bar. Those who know (The Tatler) have ruled that while one may now use the word ‘toilet’ without being considered to be common (it has taken many decades to reach this point), the drinking of negronis is common. So obviously choosing a negroni was out (possibly one may still ask for a Boulevardier without committing a social indiscretion worthy of Posh Spice). Regardless, I opted for a Margarita and very good it was too (confirmed by a second glass of said pleasurable liquid) and suppered firstly on The Grand’s rather fine prawn cocktail and afterwards on the wondrous (and huge - too much for me but then I’m neither an American nor a busy businessman) The Grand’s charcuterie and cheese platter which was probably intended to be for sharing and would have been had dogs been allowed in the bar (Lucy would not be averse to a tidbit of robust flavoured venison salami). I rounded off supper with an impeccable Brandy Alexander which was flawlessly luxurious and simply the right drink at that time of night.

  After breakfast, Lucy and I set off for a walk around town and passed a sight worth mentioning when thinking about the city’s gastronomic history. Towards the furthermost end of Corporation Street, next door to the spectacular Victoria Law Courts Building, one comes across the Pitman Building which housed the Pitman Vegetarian Restaurant (see Blog 180) from the late 1880s to the 1930s and was famously visited by Mahatma Gandhi during his tour of England in 1931.There is a plaque fixed to the building which dates back to 1998 marking the Centenary of the opening in the building of the first ‘Health Food Store’

  

  Across the road from the Pitman Building is a building which once housed the Court Restaurant, presumably the place to which those who had business in the Law Courts would repair for lunch to prepare for the afternoon session. A building of its age, grandly decorated and barely noticed, surrounded as it is by other fine Victorian constructions, part of Birmingham’s gastronomic history. An photograph dating to 1961 found on the internet shows the Court Restaurant being used a first storey south Asian restaurant called The Light Of Asia located above a pharmacy and under a ‘Hair and scalp clinic’.

  It was the last Wednesday of the month which meant that the Michelin Guide was to release at midday the names of the latest restaurants to be added to the Guide. Given previous form it was not surprising to discover that absolutely no Midlands restaurants were included on this present list of nine; unsurprisingly two are located in Dublin which is the place that Michelin inspectors seem to be most in love with at present and there are also two in London inevitably, one in Belfast (33% of the list therefore located on the island of Ireland improbably), one in Scotland (genteel Edinburgh), two Up North (York and Manchester) and two Down South (Sussex and Reading).

  Not for the first time I am driven to wonder if Michelin inspectors ever pull off one of the northbound motorways to drop in on a Midlands county. Well occasionally but only, it seems, to visit places they have visited before. There is just one recent Michelin inspector Tweet from The Midlands to report - from Salt in Stratford upon Avon on 19 September. Perhaps they called in there on the way to Birmingham Airport to catch a flight to Dublin.

149. 17 May - What Happened Next.

 

Under Clee Hill 

  So the day of liberation arrived - 17 May 2021 - and once more we could dine in restaurants in the warm indoors and stay in hotels. And so to Ludlow and the lovely Fishmore Hall (see Blog 126) and a light lunch. In Blog 75 I outlined my plan to make 2020 my Year of The Ploughman’s Lunch which was soon thwarted by a creature so small that you wouldn’t know it existed apart from the havoc it wrought. So what better than to start the new era off than with a ‘Fine dining’ Ploughman’s lunch at a slightly unnerving price of £15 (‘large’ ploughman’s lunches cost £20;- certainly fine dining prices)?

 

 Putting the price aside, this certainly was a fine ploughman’s lunch and the size was just perfect for my appetite (I certainly did not need the £20 version). The plate was made up of, according to the menu, honey roast ham (pleasingly tasty), (delicious, soft, creamy) Worcester hop, ale and mustard cheese (highly recommended), salted radish (with the mildest of radish flavours, perhaps a little more subtle than it needed to be), pickles (gherkin and deliciously sweet onion with a delightfully sweet chutney), a (vaguely exotic-sounding but by now too familiar)  green salad (rocket, lamb’s lettuce and lolla rossa) and (pleasurable) warm bread. A pleasing dish eaten in the lovely setting of Fishmore Hall and so well worth paying for, though I think I would palpitate at paying £20 for a ploughman’s lunch if I had chosen the larger version.

  When evening came I opted to eat from the ‘bistro’ menu. I went straight to the main course of baked cod, chorizo, butter beans, courgette, tomato and olive. A triumphantly tasty Basque-style dish very suited to the bistro concept. I fear the fish was somewhat over cooked (but still infinitely preferable to a limp, anaemic refugee from a sous vide water bath) and the two thin slices of chorizo were burnt but the flavour was very enjoyable nonetheless and I thoroughly enjoyed the accompanying vegetables, particularly the butter beans) I could not help thinking that the chorizo might have been better presented chopped into little chunks with some bite to them and the paprika oil seeping out from it. The dish cost £14.

  Being a man who only likes a very light dessert I chose coconut panna cotta with mango, toasted coconut and basil sorbet at £6.95p. This was an absolute delight and a real pleasure to eat with the basil sorbet standing out in particular as something to remember. I shall have that dish again before the week is out, that’s for sure.

  The following morning, after a sturdy breakfast in the Fishmore Hall Conservatory restaurant, the dog and I marched off to Ludlow town. Down to Dinmore weir and a coffee sitting out at CSons accompanied by three labneh doughnuts which given their size and the fact that I had only recently eaten A Full English brought on an overindulgence panic which I rapidly solved by eating one there and, à L’Americaine, had the other two parcelled up to take away and eat later. Waste not want not, as my dear old Gran would have said. I had not really expected quite such a large helping - three people could have easily shared it. My initial impression was that the doughnuts themselves were not particularly tasty but with a delicious syrup cut through with perfectly cooked sweet rhubarb poured over them, and given the chance to soak up some of the syrup, their flavour matured and evolved. Well worth trying but only if you have fasted for two days or are staging a modern day version of the feeding of the 5000.

CSons’ huge dish of labneh doughnuts (minus the one I’d already eaten) soaked in syrup with rhubarb.

  Afterwards I took the opportunity to take a peak at the recently Michelin-plated French restaurant and cafe, French Pantry in Tower Street, with the hope of making a lunch reservation for some time but found that it was not due to reopen till 21 May and I could not find an on-line reservations site. That will therefore have to wait till our next trip to Ludlow.

  The French Pantry was reopened not long before the first lockdown, with monumental bad timing by the new owner, chef Olivier Bossut and his wife Lynette. The restaurant had been closed for a while and Bossut had previously been chef there as well as having also worked at Elliot’s at Dinham. Despite its short existence after its rebirth it was awarded a Michelin Plate in the 2021 awards. Michelin stated that, “Classification - Simple restaurant. Francophiles should head to this little piece of France on a town centre side street. The laid-back interior ticks all the bistro boxes - think checked tablecloths, studded banquettes and a classic French menu of boldly flavoured dishes such as French onion soup, snails, cassoulet and tarte Tatin”. Hmmm.....how much does ‘classic French cuisine’ really appeal in this era of ‘modern British’ cooking. I hope soon to find out. Obviously it appeals to Michelin but is that just its eternal French cuisine bias?

  And so to dinner at Forelles at Fishmore Hall. I have reported dining there several times before and so this is just a short update. I thoroughly enjoyed the little morsel of a fish croquette which started off the meal and then a delightful Camembert tartlet, the pastry of which was very pleasing and then there was the usual bread with its accompanying enjoyable marmite butter and, to me at least, the far less agreeable seaweed variant. For the starter I had quail which was a sort of 2 layered terrine of pleasant quail meat with a chervil-flavoured mousse, leek which was incidental to the dish I think and a confit egg yolk on what I took to be shreds of leek-enclosed confit quail leg which had been cooked into small pieces of very chewy material which offered no pleasure at all. Not one of the restaurant’s greatest successes in my modest opinion, I’m afraid. It did look pretty however.

I

 

 The main course was in a different league and largely a very good dish. This was very nicely cooked piece of halibut with various extras largely based on red peppers including an enjoyable quenelle of quinoa given flavour by its combination with red peppers, little pickled micro-pepper which tingled one’s tongue for a couple of seconds, an avocado purée and a happily, sharply startling lemon gel topped by a fine crispy fish skin (if one is a fan of crispy fish skin). The meal could have ended with a chocolate dessert, a crème caramel, the restaurant’s long established and delicious baked Alaska (which I’ve eaten several times before and felt that this time I might give a rest) or 5 cheeses with accompaniments (which is like a meal in itself) but I did not feel I could choose any of them (what I secretly wanted was another helping of the previous evening’s Bistro menu coconut panna cotta). So my meal ended there as I drained off my glass of excellent New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc which had paired very nicely with the halibut.

Another post-lockdown Shropshire big sky

  

The weather was clement on our third day and the dog had a happy swim in the river Teme and we then returned to Fishmore Hall for a snooze and then a bask in the beautiful sun on a sweet English spring afternoon, quaffing the Maître d’hotel’s margarita cocktail, good in itself, and then pre-dinner his special version of an Old fashioned which ditches bourbon and replaces it with a spiced rum and is to be highly recommended. To the Bistro, three pleasing little ham hock croquettes to start, though they may have benefitted from a little more seasoning, accompanied by a very acceptable and unaggresive piccalilli and to follow a fine Bistro dish made up of a plump chicken breast with pleasurably salty pancetta, enjoyable lyonnaise potatoes, accurately cooked green beans and a sauce which looked inadequate in amount at first sight but which proved to be spot on. An excellent and satisfying dish. Afterwards I could not resist returning for a second indulgence in the above mentioned coconut panna cotta which was even more delicious than I recall it being two nights previous. This combination of flavours and textures makes this dish just about my favourite dessert of recent years - since I first tasted Glynn Purnell’s 10-10-10 Egg surprise - as light as you would wish at the end of a satisfying meal. I would fly from China to indulge myself in it again - with its fabulous basil ice cream - but fortunately I don’t live that far away. Advice to chef - always keep this dessert on the menu and do not change it except perhaps by increasing the amount of basil sorbet a little just to indulge the diner even more.

  

Since the coconut panna cotta is only featured on the bistro menu and life without it was becoming unliveable I opted to dine the following evening in the bistro. I had the delicious Herefordshire sirloin cooked exactly as I requested, tender as butter, with big, fat chips, tomato, mushroom (not as delightfully buttery as the last time I had the dish), leaves (for which, by nature, I have little desire but fine if you like the metal taste of rocket, the more tolerable lamb’s lettuce and the dullness of others) and, after an attempt not to have it, Béarnaise sauce which was pleasant with its tolerable degree of tarragonicity but hardly necessary given that the meat tasted so good that it required nothing to give it extra support. I blame Carême, or perhaps Escoffier or both plus numerous other Gallic chefs of the latter part of the 19th Century and the early years of the 20th. Because the quality of French produce was poor they had to dress it up with various sauces to make it edible and subsequently they imported their inventions to England to bring novelty to the increasingly snobbish, well-heeled middle classes and the aristocratic, even though the quality of English produce available to them was head and tails above the French peasant ingredients that French chefs needed to disguise in their own backyard. And we still have the stuff; steak eaters, which I usually am not, have these wretched sauces - peppercorn or Béarnaise or whatever - dangled before them at extra cost (but included in the cost of the Fishmore Hall bistro steak) though the steak is quite exquisite without them.

  And the evening finished happily with a dish of coconut panna cotta with the sublime basil sorbet cut through with the bite of mango purée and with a quite adequate amount of texture being provided by the toasted coconut. I fancied a glass of Benedictine, sipped with coffee and a satisfying meal came to an end.

  And the next day, the dog and I were Birmingham-bound, ready to explore the glamour of the newly reopened Grand Hotel of which more .....

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!

147. Opus Will Not Reopen.

 

  Birmingham’s first major restaurant casualty of the COVID-19 pandemic era is the Michelin-plated Opus, opened by Ann Tonks and David Colcombe in 2005 and situated across the road from, and almost opposite, Purnell’s in Cornwall Street. On 12 May 2021 its internet site announced that its management would not be reopening it on 17 May, the date chosen by the government for restaurants to be allowed once more to serve food indoors to diners, stating that it “is not viable to carry on trading ...”.

  Sadly, I had eaten there only once, driven into having the cheapest lunch deal and thus consequently, I suspect, an unremarkable lunch, by a parsimonious dining companion who likes to dine fine but at prices which hardly allow a chef to show off their true skills. I was struck by the remarkable spaciousness of the restaurant which must have be difficult to fill at times, even with a Michelin recommendation and though it was striving to find an image for itself - sustainable ingredients - after David Colcombe departed in 2015 and Ben Ternant took over as Executive chef having been Head chef, I can see that it probably relied more on a coterie of loyal old customers to keep it going (I may be wrong, of course) than anything else (and yes of course I accept everywhere needs their loyal customers to stick with them).

  The problem for Opus was that, though it was well thought of and respected, it never reached the heights of being the in-place to eat in the city and diners need that extra something to make them choose somewhere to eat. Still it is a loss to the city and reduces our number of Michelin-listed restaurants to 15 (5 stars and 10 plates).

  The Michelin 2021 review:-