536. Blacklock & The Fountain At Clent.

 

  Much hyped and opened fully only the day before I lunched there, despite some initial scepticism on my part, Blacklock, proved to be a totally enjoyable dining experience. At times I was alternately groaning and purring with the pleasure of it all. This is the third branch of this chain which strives to revive the era of the chophouse, the first being in London and the second in Manchester. I felt a little prematurely sniffy about it knowing it was a chain, albeit a rather short one.

  Situated in St Phillip’s Square next to Colmore Row and overlooked by the Grand Hotel, where my dog and I live to stay as often as we may, the spacious dining room is located in a building which was a Georgian vicarage in its first incarnation. Time moved on; at one time Brad Carter was planning to open his new restaurant there after he closed his original Moseley restaurant but the plans fell through and he eventually opened his new dining establishment in the Kings Cross area of London but in return Birmingham gained Blacklock from London and it really was a fair exchange.

 A considerable amount of time and money was spent on renovating the old vicarage and the result was an impressively sized, comfortable sort of space where the residents of Birmingham could relax over a dizzyingly modestly priced, delightfully rustic, brilliantly cooked and unimpeachably delicious meal. The service is friendly but efficient and the food is fabulous. This appears to be the beginning of a new era for dining out in Birmingham.

  I started off with an immaculately tasty crayfish cocktail - a generous helping of nicely textured crayfish with crispy lettuce (surely picked just a couple of minutes before!), creamy avocado lurking in the depths of the dish and surely the worlds most exciting Marie Rose sauce, thick and indulgent and provocatively spicy. Caramba! what a start! 

    But the main course was the real star, and how often that fails to be the case. A very satisfactorily sized pork chop arrived looked golden and tempting and for me it was just the right size. It was perfectly grilled, tender and moist, and the smoky flavour was as memorable as that of ant dish which I have eaten. I coupled it with triple cooked chips. The price seemed mildly deplorable - £5 for a small bucket of them - but as soon as I had tasted one  I realised that these were no ordinary chips - they were the greatest chips on earth - yes, really. The crisps were crunchy and the not overstated flavour caused by their being cooked in beef fat was celestial. This was, though rustic and unpretentious, a trip into the realm of culinary paradise and the chips were unsurpassable.

  And Blacklock had not finished even then. I chose the cheesecake with cherry compôte. It was as indulgent as a dessert could ever be. And it was served from a larger dish which was novel and mildly thrilling. The cheesy cream was gorgeous and the texture of the crunchy element was lovely and the cherry compôte was soothing and tasty.

  This was a very fine meal - one of the best I have had for a long time. In many ways it reminded me of Glynn Purnell’s new restaurant, Trillium, but more spacious and food sold at a fraction of the price and served hot. And this from a chain restaurant. Well, well, well!

Rating:- 🌞

21 April 2026.

 Four days later I enubered myself to Clent. It was a beautiful sunny day, more aestival than vernal, and the pretty, affluent village looked lovely as my Uber man drove through it en route to The Fountain Inn nestled in a quiet leafy road a good distance up one of Clent’s hills. It turned out to be an elongated, white-painted inn of some antiquity and I knew that the previous landlady, Jacqueline Macey, had raised its culinary reputation to a high level although it was never recognised by the restaurant guides. After her death in 2025, The Fountain was taken over by Mike Livesy who recognised its potential as a gastropub and rather smartly snaffled three young men to work there as chefs  - recognisable young fellers late of Simpsons (and for a short time, also of The Wilderness), and two of them Masterchef The Professionals contestants, - Evan Holliday who was appointed Head Chef, Jordan Johnson and Lewis Perks, a talented pastry chef.

  The inn’s interior is spacious, unfussy and comfortable. The service is quiet and unrushed and perhaps just a little too formal for the setting. But I quickly settled in and was given the printed menu and the blackboard specials which included beef Wellington after which I lusted but unfortunately it was only available for sharing by two. There did seem to be room for compromise but I felt I really did not want to cause problems especially as I was lunching quite late. So I ordered Prawn cocktail (for the second time that week), chicken and preordered my dessert.

  The prawn cocktail was excellent and the helping of prawns in it was remarkably generous though perhaps I should have liked at least one more salad element to make the dish more interesting. The lettuce was undoubtedly pleasingly fresh and crispy and theccroutons I suppose were an added textural element and the mildly spicy Marie Rose was delicious. This was an enjoyable dish though it had hard competition from the magnificent crayfish cocktail I had cooed over a few days earlier at Blacklock

  My main of roast chicken with confit thigh, ‘cabbage compôte’,  crispy hen of the woods and a remarkably delicious sauce supreme was excellent. The sauce was silky and full of flavour and the chicken was perfectly cooked, beautifully moist and tender. My only disappointment was the absence of any root vegetable prepared in whichever way the Chef preferred - I think it would have rounded the dish off.

  Then to the dessert - an excellent banana soufflé served with a delicious quenelle of banana and lime ice cream. The lime provided an excellent balance with the sweetness of the soufflé and all things considered, this was an enjoyable fine dessert to find in a country pub.

  Of course, the dishes in general and the soufflé in particular had the ring of Simpsons about them and there is a clear reason why that is the case - the former Simpsons young men who had been recruited to thrill the diners at The Fountain.

Rating:- 🌞

25 April 2025.

454. The Wildmoor Oak Inn.

  Living close to the south west edge of Birmingham, visits to Bromsgrove and north east Worcestershire ought to be easy and, true, there’s a train to Bromsgrove or Redditch via Barnt Green and Alvechurch but if one wishes to visit the villages some distance from the stations and one is not driving a car then things become more problematical because public transport is very poor and local taxi services do not necessarily respond to one’s needs in any convenient way.

 That is why I had not yet visited Wildmoor Oak Inn located between Catshill and Fairfield located along a country lane off the road to Stourbridge. Fortunately I had a friend who wished to join me for lunch and who was prepared to drive me there and so my opportunity to eat at this self-declared gastropub was seized upon with much positive anticipation. The Head Chef there is Peter Jackson, brother of Holly Jackson, partner of Brad Carter, who was Head Chef of Carter’s of Moseley before Carter decamped from Moseley (the restaurant is now home to Sartori, listed by the Michelin Guide just six weeks after opening and serving Japanese-style cuisine - a report to follow shortly). 

  Peter Jackson had studied at University College and his training had included stages at Purnell’s and Simpsons and Bank and a period at the Hotel Intercontinental Hotel Dieu in Marseilles under Lionel Levy before going to work firstly at the Fat Cat in Solihull and then with Brad Carter when he opened the Moseley restaurant in 2010.

  The Wildmoor Oak was reopened on 20 May 2024 after an eighteen month refurbishment carried out by its new owners, Bex Wilkins and her wife, Sarah Robinson, who had both previously worked at Peach Pubs which runs a number of gastropubs in the West Midlands region including The Highfield  in Edgbaston, The One Elm in Stratford upon Avon and The Rose and Crown in the Marketplace in Warwick, and further afield.

Peter Jackson, Head Chef, Wildmoor Oak Inn.

Wildmoor Oak Inn

A pub with a postbox, what could be better?

  There’s little doubt that The Wildmoor Oak is charming, located as it is at the end of a country lane so typical of this corner of north west Worcestershire. A tiny babbling brook runs through its grounds and the large car park has a public footpath running through it and walkers can have a pleasing walk across the lovely, green, rolling Worcestershire countryside before settling in at the delightfully warm and cosy inn. And the inn has been designed accurately to bring a homeliness to it - glowing fires, print covered walls, patterned banquettes, comfortable, non-shabby, old furniture, even an eclectic range of traditional style plates and ceramics from which to eat. 

  The welcome was fine and my lunch companion and I were shown to our table. This was a crowded part of the room and some of the lunchers already there had loud voices and a tendency to shreek or cackle when laughing which one or two did quite frequently and so we requested a slightly more isolated table where we could enjoy the atmosphere without being persecuted by gaggling - this was duly allocated to us.

  The closeness of neighbouring tables was probably the only problem we encountered during our visit to the Wildmoor Oak. Bex Wilkins and Sarah Robinson clearly learned a lot during their time with Peach Pubs and have put their experience to good use in the way they have paid attention to every detail in setting up the excellent gastropub. But what about the gastro- part of it all?

  Carter’s it isn’t. This is extravagantly rustic English fayre prepared with intense care and humorously clever quirks of deliciousness. This is not just delicious, comforting English food but it’s all that but prepared by a top chef. This is irresistible top of the range pub food at a sensible price which leaves one not only more than satiated but glowing with intense pleasure. We made a good fist of the menu. For starters, I chose brown onion soup with cheese on toast. I had visions of thin brown soup heavily populated by shreds of sweet onion and a massive cheesy crouton à la Française but my expectations could not have been more wrong. Peter Jackson was clearly making no concessions to Frankish tastes - this was a bowl of thick, warming, perhaps not so brown, potage and the crouton was good old cheese on toast served separately and none the worse for that. Jane Grigson would have admired this fine serving of English - and not European - food which shouted out that culinary Brexit was indeed a reality!

 

  As her starter, my lunch companion chose to order from the list of snacks - ‘pigs not in blankets with Paxo mayo’. This was exactly what the menu said - three fine English sausages (not encased in bacon), well cooked and humorously enhanced by the Paxo mayonnaise - all the flavours of that grand old English packet dried stuffing mix. We both felt we wanted to rush out and buy a packet of Paxo and add it to some mayonnaise and serve it to friends and pretend we invented it.  Great stuff! I had rather expected these to be short cocktail sausages but these were the real thing that would under other circumstances make fine hot dogs (I much more prefer hot dogs using good English sausages over frankfurters to which I am not very partial).

  Neither of us could resist the lure of the haddock and chips served with mushy peas and curry sauce. We have both lived through decades of fish and chips and while peas are always the perfect accompaniment neither of us feel the need to add curry though we appreciate that may not be the case with the young and the less experienced (in my time I ate battered ‘hard’ cod’s roe out of tins - and loved it (but I was quite young), ate battered haggis when the local chip shop tried putting it on the menu (I was still quite young), gratefully accepted the bags of batter bits which chip shop owners were happy to give away (I was still quite young) and always had a giant pickled onion to accompany my cod, chips and bread and butter (or sometimes pickled red cabbage or pickled sliced beetroot - oh, those were the days but curry sauce was never on my horizon). But full marks to Peter Jackson for moving with the times.

  The haddock and chips were perfect, they were fabulous, they were divine. Harry Ramsden could have taken lessons from Peter Jackson, The batter was crispy and gorgeously golden and not too thick and the haddock was divine - white, meaty, delicious. The chips were perfect - unimpeachable. The peas were a little bit of an afterthought and the curry sauce was not too exciting but there was a very good tartare sauce. Again, just fish and chips, you might think, but English culinary artistry at its best.

  We were both too full for desserts but we had one anyway. My companion wanted a light dessert and the meringue with winter fruits seemed to fit the bill - it did, though when it turned up it looked generously portioned by any stretch of the imagination - but she thought the meringue was excellent and of a pleasing consistency and nicely balanced by the berries. I had seen the apple and pear crumble with custard on the menu and formed an irresistible urge to try it. It was very good - the crumble light and infiltrated by clever occasional bursts of sea salt which seemed to me very innovative and successful and the custard was made beautifully - again, light and suffused with as much vanilla as one would hope for.

  We departed feeling mellow and well fed. This had been top flight pub food in an excellent setting. ‘Pub food’ does not do it justice but as I say, it was not Carter’s - but it didn’t need to be.

  Rating:- 🌞 

16 January 2025.

327. Summer Heat (5 - Carter’s Of Moseley).

  Carter’s of Moseley had announced that things were going to change - for the summer at least - and its faithful diners only had a matter of weeks to enjoy a meal in Moseley they’re recalling past pleasures. A canny move. Naturally, not knowing what was going to happen and keen to once more dine of its remarkable dishes before it was too late I reserved a table and back I went.

  The welcome was as warm as ever and the restaurant looked unchanged until I noticed that there was now a chef’s table, presently occupied by young people who did not seem to be having any money problems though as it was the middle of the day, you might have thought they should be out at work. In the 1920s we had the idle rich, now we have the idle middle class.

  My dining companion, who had never dined at Carter’s before despite living just a short distance away, chose the middle priced tasting menu, we really did not think that our alimentary tracts would be able to deal with the Full Monty

  And of course the meal turned out to be everything that one might have expected. Old favourites were not afraid to make an appearance and brought much joy with them - Cornicsh mackeral and kelp, the glorious oyster <pearl> and the so very meaty DW chicken <thigh>. I sometimes think that a restaurant that sold just canapés and appetisers might be the most successful restaurant around - if they were the quality of Brad Carter’s amuses gueules that would certainly be the case.

  Following a delightful summer tomato dish there was another old favourite - Carter’s twist on Matthew Boulton’s Birmingham soup which the 18th century inventor and industrialist devised to feed the hungry poor though Carter’s version was more likely to feed the satiated comfortably off. Memorably the dish is decorated with a lovely tuile which reproduces the outdoor decor of Birmingham’s notable Central Library.

  The trout dish was a great favourite enhanced by the force of the flavour of sea buckthorn and trout roe. Beautifully barbecued duck with a nice crispy skin to be shared by two diners was served as the main course with fine carrots and faux rice - this part of the dish was my least favourite ingredient - the ‘rice’ produced from barley, I find unconvincing and I am not particularly keen on the texture of the ‘rice’ (but it has to be said that my dining companion found it to be perfectly satisfactory).

  The dessert was lovely. And how very pleasing to have a cherry dessert. It was pretty and delicious. A work of art as was, of course, the brilliant strip of chocolate decorated with the pattern of the Birmingham Centre underpass. Carter’s had once more delivered the goods.

Rating:- 🌞🌞.

  And so, what will Carter’s be up to this summer? It looks like an excursion to Evesham is on the cards.

From the Birmingham Post 29 June 2023 -

269. Good Food Guide Rates Birmingham As Most Exciting Food Destination.

 

  It seems to me that the relevance of the Michelin Guide to high quality dining out in England is declining exponentially. Its inspectors visit London and Home Counties restaurants which are convenient for them and elsewhere they go to nice places in the Cotswolds, or Lake District or, latterly, even the Peak District. But the conclusions they reach from their visits are arcane and repetitive and most of all … questionably outdated and unambitious. But still chefs are whipped up into pre-Award announcement frenzies. They shouldn’t be. Michelin doesn’t even bother to publish a book now and the ‘reviews’ on their websites are vague and often unhelpful, text being sacrificed for a glossy photograph.

  The Good Food Guide, on the other hand has had, and is still undergoing, a reboot which brings it firmly into the post-COVID 2020s. It was slow to get reviews on its internet pages but the number of listed restaurants is now snowballing and making the Guide a very useful tool when deciding where to go for a really good meal. Its inspectors are out and about in areas which the Michelin inspectors have not imagined in their worst nightmares but where real people live and where they to wish to dine well without driving out into the middle of a fairytale forest on a moonlit night in late autumn or, even worse, where they have to pay £300 to stay the night if they wish to drink alcohol because there are no local taxis operating late evening. 

  For historical reasons, and because of snob appeal and the indoctrination of chefs, the Michelin Guide will remain of interest for the foreseeable future but The Good Food Guide now seems to be the reliable place to go for useful, clearly defined advice on where to eat in England (and here in the West Midlands).

  As of 17 October 2022, The Good Food Guide now lists the following West Midlands restaurants - 

Grading (the symbols are my little intrusion to make the post more colourful)

                 Exceptional  - 🍗🍗🍗

                 Very good -    🍗🍗

                  Good -           🍗

West Midlands County -

The Wilderness - Birmingham 🍗🍗🍗

Grace And Savour  - Hampton In Arden 🍗🍗🍗

Carter’s Of Moseley  - Moseley, Birmingham - 🍗🍗🍗

Harborne Kitchen - Harborne, Birmingham - 🍗🍗🍗 

Purnell’s - Birmingham - 🍗🍗

Adam’s - Birmingham - 🍗🍗

Folium - Birmingham - 🍗🍗

Opheem - Birmingham - 🍗🍗

Peel’s - Hampton in Arden - 🍗🍗

Smoke - Hampton in Arden - 🍗🍗

Yikouchi At Chancer’s Cafe - Stirchley, Birmingham - 🍗🍗

670 Grams - Digbeth, Birmingham - 🍗

Chakana - Moseley, Birmingham - 🍗

Chapter - Harborne, Birmingham - 🍗 

Dishoom - Birmingham - 🍗

Land - Birmingham - 🍗

Tierra - Jewellery Quarter, Birmingham - 🍗

Tropea - Harborne, Birmingham - 🍗

The Oyster Club - Birmingham - 🍗

Eat Vietnam - Stirchley, Birmingham - 🍗

Yip in Bashu - Coventry - 🍗

Warwickshire -

Cheal’s Of Henley - Henley in Arden - 🍗🍗

The Cross At Kenilworth - Kenilworth - 🍗🍗

Salt - Stratford upon Avon - 🍗

Tailors - Warwick - 🍗

The Royal Oak - Whatcote - 🍗

Staffordshire -

Upstairs By Tom Shepherd - Lichfield - 🍗🍗🍗

The Boat - Lichfield - 🍗

Shropshire -

The Walrus - Shrewsbury - 🍗🍗

Forelles At Fishmore Hall - Ludlow - 🍗

Mortimers - Ludlow -  🍗

Old Downton Lodge - Ludlow - 🍗

Charlton Arms - Ludlow - 🍗

Sebastians - Oswestry - 🍗

Worcestershire -

Russell’s of Broadway - Broadway - 🍗

Herefordshire -

33 The Homend  - Ledbury - 🍗

The Cider Barn -  Penbridge - 🍗

The Kilpeck Inn - Kilpeck - 🍗

The Riverside Inn at Aymestrey - Aymestrey - 🍗

Gloucestershire -

Le Champignon Sauvage - Cheltenham - 🍗🍗

The Bell at Selsey - Selsey - 🍗

The Butcher’s Arms - Eldersfield - 🍗

The Woolpack Inn - Stroud - 🍗

  The West Midlands now has 43 listed restaurants with 17 located in Birmingham. There are a number of glaring omissions still - no Simpsons nor About 8 - and no visit yet to Whitchurch nor to Lunar in Stoke on Trent. No listing yet for The Woodsman in Stratford upon Avon and I would have thought a call in at Lamb’s Of Sheep Street might be considered worthwhile while in that town. In Worcestershire, there’s no mention of Pensons, and Solihull and Barnt Green now both have excellent restaurants to be visited. The Guide remains a work in progress in some ways but is catching up rapidly.

  Regardless, on the evening of 17 October, The Guide held its ceremony to announce Britain’s Top Twenty Restaurants for 2022 at the Groucho Club in Soho. I was delighted to have been invited to the event and before plunging into the remarkably noisy hubbub of a lot of food people closely packed and reaching out for generous amounts of free drinks and delicious canapés - including a fabulous sausage roll and a sea bream ceviche - I took a walk around Soho wandering down the streets which had been, and still were in some cases, home to some legendary restaurants.

  Once in the Groucho Club and having eventually deduced precisely which part of it the event was located in, I was delighted to see the familiar face of Alex Claridge and with him his partner and later, the legendary Sonal Clare and head chef Marius Gedminas - so obviously The Wilderness was to feature on the list of Twenty Most Exciting Restaurants - a very real achievement for a dining establishment which had not previously featured in the book’s listings.

  The place was buzzing - here was Richard Corrigan, there was the larger than life figure of Gareth Ward. Eventually upstepped the diminutive figure of the Guide’s Chief Editor, Elizabeth Carter, quietly spoken to announce who had won what.

  Firstly came the announcement of the year’s Most Exciting Dining Destination. Birmingham. The young chefs have made the place. And the city has benefitted from their genius, their hard work, their inventiveness, their dedication. Well done indeed. But less us not forget that the city’s shining dining scene was established fifteen to twenty years ago, in evolving stages, by the generation of the city’s great chefs and restaurateurs that has preceded those whom The Good Food Guide is highlighting in 2022.

  And so to the announcement of just which restaurants are deemed by the editors of the Good Food Guide to be “the most exciting in Britain”. Birmingham and the West Midlands got off to a great start with Carter’s of Moseley being placed at number 18, followed shortly afterwards by Grace And Savour. But where was The Wilderness? The countdown continued to number 11. So The Wilderness was in the top ten. And that was its placing - an immensely impressive number 10 - with those placed higher all already established in the gastronomic firmament. The winner was the three Michelin-starred L’Enclume and just behind it at number two was the acclaimed Ynyshir, so the as yet unstarred The Wilderness had scored a notable achievement to be in such gastronomic company. 

  The announcements were over. The achievers, some locked in comradely embraces were ready to party and it was time to leave. What an astonishing evening for dining out in the West Midlands and in Birmingham. The Good Food Guide editors see this, I think, as a gradual changing of the guard as the blisteringly good young chefs begin to become the centre of attention as their seniors start to fade. What it means is that when the established chefs do call it a day, Birmingham will still have a mesmerising dining scene recognised by the experts who advise people where to eat.

Richard Corrigan (or his back at least) at the Awards ceremony -

Gareth Ward of Ynyshir -

Alex Clare and Sonal Claridge of The Wilderness with their award - 

Brad Carter of Carter’s Of Moseley in a comradely embrace with Gareth Ward -