252. Sazerac. Adam’s. Michelin. Good Food Guide.

 

 

 I was going to dinner at Adam’s a short walk, as anyone would know, from The Grand Hotel where Lucy The Labrador and I were staying. It was too good an opportunity not to have a Harvey Wallbanger in Madeleine bar before heading off to Waterloo Street and Rich the barman there does a very good HW. He was telling me he previously worked at Fazenda and mentioned what he judged to be his own favourite classic cocktail, the Sazerac, of which I was previously ignorant which was a gap in my knowledge which should not have existed. The sazerac, said to have originated in antebellum New Orleans (pre-Civil War) though possibly more fin de siècle, is claimed to be the oldest known American cocktail.  It is named from the Sazerac de Forge et Fils brand of cognac which was combined with absinthe, Peychaud’s Bitters and sugar. There was nothing to do but try one of Rich’s sazeracs. Golden amber, clear, stately, adorned with an appropriately restrained tiny slice of orange peel - as refined and mature a drink as can be found on this earth and crafted by a master of his trade - the antithesis of the drink - the negroni - of vulgar, self-regarding hipsters. The negroni is fine but in the hands of Rich at least, perfected I should think by much practising and experimenting, the sazerac is the final word in cocktails for people of style and good taste. Will there be a sazerac revolution? Time will tell though perhaps it’s something that would lose its position at the head of the elite cocktails if the secret gets out.. And so to Adam’s.

  Adam’s. As serene as a sazerac. Calm, precise, formal but comfortable. I was planning to choose to eat from the tasting menu but was lured away by the à la carte with the thought that I might add the extra dish - crab with yuzu - to what looked like excellent dishes.

  First an array of fine appetisers including the tiny but memorable beetroot meringue and a speck of mackeral tartare. Next excellent sourdough with two types of butter and then take off with an excellent starter of scallop with grilled pea purée plus other pea variants, cuttle fish and chamomile. Fine food.

  Next came the extra dish of crab with yuzu. It looked very pretty but for me, the yuzu was far too powerful and the flavour of crab was all but lost. For me a disappointment and a dish that the chef really needs to reflect on.

  

  

  But rough seas were soon calm again with a main course of stupendously delicious aged beef served with smoked curds, bone marrow sauce and somewhere marigold though I am not sure I would recognise its flavour as marigold is not exactly a regular ingredient I have with my beef. The meat was, as it should be, the star of the course, tender, full of flavour, nicely seasoned.

    There followed a delightful predessert of blood orange granita with frozen yogurt and olive oil and then a very fine raspberry soufflé as dessert. This was a soufflé about which no complaints could be raised, light and tasty, pleasingly memorable. The petit fours included a charming miniature Paris Brest to lift the soul. 

  This was a Wednesday evening, for restaurants now the start of the working week. That day the country was being tortured by having its public transport assaulted by a rail strike courtesy of an unpleasant trade union leader who sees himself as a new Arthur Scargill and inflation is roaring away shooting up the price of food, basic commodities and one expects, soon, demands for big wage increases. The hospitality business has had a nightmare two half years - floods in some parts of the West Midlands, then repeated lockdowns and restrictions necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic and now the fragile economic situation and all this seems to be having an effect endangering our recently burgeoning restaurant industry. There were only  ten people dining at Adam’s the evening I ate there - only about half the tables were in use in the main dining area. I suspect that that did not reflect the usual state of affairs even on Wednesday evenings. On social media various restaurants are having to publicise last minute availability where cancellations have occurred in an effort to fill their restaurants - even Adam’s see below).

  One hopes that our excellent restaurants are not going to go under now having survived the protracted period of the pandemic. Still there is some good news - indeed a historic moment - the Michelin Guide has finally included a West Midlands restaurant in one of its monthly listings - in the most recent it has featured Solihull’s Toffs by Rob Palmer (see Blog 231). A well-deserved recognition.

  Meanwhile The Good Food Guide has now gone live on the internet charging almost £30 for access to it and its recommendations. This is quite a lot more than the price of the last printed edition (it is no longer sponsored by Waitrose) and presently there are only about 300 recommended restaurants featured on it with many notable restaurants to be added. However in many ways it is much improved and now has an excellent rating system. So I have paid my fee and have the access to the Guide which I want but to give value for money the editor really needs to get moving with adding many more restaurants.

The West Midlands restaurants listed so far are:-

  Tropea (Harborne Birmingham) Good

  Dishoom (Birmingham) Good

  Tierra (Birmingham) Good

  Oyster Club by Adam Stokes (Birmingham ) Good

  Land (Birmingham) Good

  Cheal’s of Henley (Henley-in-Arden, Warwickshire) Very Good

  Tailor’s (Warwick, Warwickshire) Good

  The Royal Oak (Whatcote, Warwickshire) Good

  Russell’s of Broadway (Broadway, Worcestershire) Good

  The Homend Ledbury (Ledbury Herefordshire) Good

  The Cider Barn (Penbridge Herefordshire) Good

  The Kilpeck Inn (Kilpeck Herefordshire) Good

  The Bell at Selsley (Selsley Gloucestershire) Good

  The Woolpack Inn (Stroud Gloucestershire) Good

  Forelles at Fishmore Hall (Ludlow Shropshire) Good

  Old Downton Lodge (Ludlow Shropshire) Good

  Charlton Arms (Ludlow Shropshire) Good

  There does indeed seem a long way to go with this project at present. 

  The scores so far are:-

  Gloucestershire - 2 Good

  Herefordshire- 3 Good

  Shropshire - 3 Good

  Staffordshire - nil

  Warwickshire - 1 Very Good

    

                           2  Good

 West Midlands - 5  Good (all Birmingham)

  Worcestershire - 1 Good.

  The problem currently is that with only 17 restaurants listed so far in The West Midlands the reader is paying for a completely useless list (unless the visitor is planning to dine in Ludlow and even there omissions are obvious). The list will need to be expanded almost exponentially to make it of any real use to the diner who has paid a lot of money to have access to it.

 

    

    

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.

165. Adams.

  Professional food critics and Tripadvisers all agree that Adams is the best restaurant in Birmingham and probably the whole of the West Midlands. Two out of three visits there in the past led me to conclude that that statement was probably not the case. Excellent in many ways but too many faults for my liking but who I am to be at odds with Tripadvisers and those that get paid for reviewing food? So, it was time to return and to discover how much I would enjoy lunch there after a break from visiting Waterloo Street.

  Adams as we know, started life as a pop-up in Bennett’s Hill before moving to Waterloo street. I visited the pop-up once and felt that while it was pretty good, it was not quite as exciting as I had been led to expect. Then a very fine lunch after its arrival in Waterloo Street and then something of a calamity on a  follow-up visit which involved a double jeopardy of an excessively salty dish (precisely what it was has been blotted out of my memory) and a dish which involved paying a large extra sum to have some tasteless lobster added to the dish involved with no gain at all to the pleasure the dish gave.

Kieron Stevens, Head Chef at Adam’s

 

Tom Shepherd, Head chef 2017-19

 

  I was consequently lacking any real will to return to Adam Stokes’ much admired (by almost the whole world) restaurant where the head chef is presently Kieron Stevens (he trained under David Everett Matthias at the once two-starred Le Champignon Sauvage, see Blog 160, and took over the role from Tom Shepherd in February 2019) but the time had come.

  The restaurant operates like a well-oiled military machine. The staff look smart, the decor is chic, the restaurant is spacious (apart, perhaps, for the bar area which was full when my lunch companion and I arrived meaning that we were led straight through to our table for our preprandial cocktails (I had a fine, sensibly priced and very quaffable negroni) and everyone goes about their work efficiently, politely and effectively. The pace of service is spot on, not stiff and not relaxed. Professional would be the apt adjective in any business that performs the way Adams does. But I thought it was all a little more clinical than I should have liked. I would have liked a little schmoozing to have crept in at some point during the meal. 

  The food was very accurate and impressive. The dishes were presented perfectly and gorgeously. We chose the £80 à la carte menu (really I don’t need 4 starters, 1 main course, 2 desserts and all the extras at lunch time which the tasting menu would have rendered up to me) and the dishes on offer were more attractive on paper than the cheaper lunch menu. But I think this range of menu choices is perfect and the price of the à la carte menu sensibly pitched to ensure that the meal served was not made up of the cheapest ingredients but food of higher quality. What’s the point of going to somewhere rather smart and being fed dishes made from the cheapest cuts of meat and species of fish just to offer a lunch at a cut price? If you’re somewhere grand then let’s have some grand ingredients treated lovingly by an accomplished chef.

 

I chose the starter of delicious lightly salted cod coated with ‘Thai green curry’ with an included side dish of lobster in a crunchy tempura batter with a pleasing satay sauce. A remarkably good dish which could hardly be bettered anywhere else in the city except it included one of my bêtes noirs - fairly tasteless scorched pak choi (the entire national stock of which should be bundled up and exported immediately to the Far East) included in the dish no doubt because of its link with the cuisine this dish recalls and because there was some texture provided by it.

  This starter had been preceded by some happily enjoyable little appetitisers including a cheeky cheesy little chou pastry, a little squid ink wrap enclosing sublime beef tartare with pickles and two of the most fabulously tasting mussels I have ever had the pleasure to put in my mouth floating on a verdant velouté.

  

  My lunch companion and I both opted for the very fine aged sirloin which I greatly enjoyed. It was a precisely cooked plate, the meat could not have been more spot on. The accompanying vegetables were enjoyable but if they had not been there the two slices of beef by themselves would have made for a lordly main course. Accuracy, precision, modern versions of painstakingly cooked classic dishes - I felt was finally getting the measure of Adams..

 

 A predessert based on pineapple was not so palate cleansing as one might have hoped for (nothing does the job like a briskly lemon-flavoured tidbit) and then on to my dessert proper - I had chosen wild strawberries with a violet sorbet - a gem - and a scattering of perfectly matching, crunchy pistachio - a fine summer dessert. I had missed the option of rum baba (hiding under the headline ‘Apricot’) on the menu but my dining companion pounced on it and judged it, with its accompanying almond elements, to be one of those great pleasures in life.

  It was all over bar the coffee and its accompanying petit fours - this time a macaroon with a chocolate filling and another chou pastry but this time sweet and hence providing a clever little symmetry to the whole meal.

  The visit to Adams had dispelled my previous doubts. It serves very fine food indeed. It has the air of being somewhere very special. It is very highly placed in the firmament of Midlands restaurants.

                                                         ______________________

When I was a child*, I partied like a child, I drank Harvey Wallbangers like a child, I was easily pleased like a child. When I became a man I gave up childish ways and entered the dark lands of much more serious cocktails. When I was an old man I frequently visited Purnell’s Bistro (in the company of other old men - don’t worry I never drank alone) and eventually the excellent head barman put Penicillin on the menu. Dark, warm, autumnal, comforting as only an old bloke can appreciate.

(* here a “child” is a young whippersnapper well above the legal age for consuming alcohol.)

  But Purnell’s Bistro is no more and I ask myself where can I get myself my next shot of Penicillin when I need it? Now I rather like the hedonistic luxury of Madeleine at The Grand. Actually I have cravings to be there from time to time, not, I assure you for the alcohol (though that is an added bonus) but for the sheer pleasure of being there. It really is very nice, a few negronis and antique negronis have passed my lips in that very pleasant environment and now I have gone one step further and entered the land of the Boulevardier and one further step has taken me to making this dark drink myself, Satanic in its deliciousness, positioned I’m sure somewhere strategic in one of the Circles of Hell, and rather pleased I am with my Frankenstein creation. I have not quaffed a Penicillin yet since the reopening but I’m quite happy sitting around with my Boulevardier and letting the tormented world sail on by.

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!

25. Colmore Food Festival 2018.

  In burning sun, the 8th Colmore Food Festival opened today in Victoria Square. As Lucy The Labrador and I walked up to the square, keeping in the shade as much as possible, we heard the sound of a steel drum band. We entered the square at the Town Hall side where two stages were set up - one for cookery demonstrations and the other for other entertainments. After the necessary opening speech by the rather dreary Deputy Leader of Birmingham City Council (politicians so lacking in charisma really shouldn't be seen at such fun public events) the show got underway with a fine cocktail-making demonstration by one of the excellent bar men from Purnell's Bistro but the dog and I had to move away after a few minutes because the scorching sun to which the audience, accommodated appropriately in deckchairs, was getting just a little too hot for the Labrador to bear.

  We went in search of food and shade and dealing with the first need we headed for the Asha's stall and bought a helping of some magnificent chilli garlic chicken tikka which was truly delicious. On to the stall belonging to The Old Joint Stock where I selected a fine Mini chicken tikka pie with coconut and coriander served with an excellent mash and red wine gravy. Lucy and I sat in the shade at the end of Waterloo Street sharing the excellent pie - fine pastry indeed - and then we prepared for Round 3. Before we could set off however a man dressed as a large red chicken came along quite unexpectedly and Lucy amused the surrounding crowd by having a sustained loud bark at the strange creature, a performance she was to repeat later when 2 human pigeons strutted along beside us.

  Round 3 proved to be disappointing - I bought a Chinese tapas from Chung Ying Central - the deep fried prawn was satisfactory and the prawn dumpling seemed to be generously stuffed with prawns but the Vietnamese spring roll was quite horrible, the contents tasted quite unpleasant and the surrounding pastry could easily have been constructed from old leather.

  Finally after another sit in the shade, Lucy and I headed for the Zen Metro Thai Restaurant stall and thoroughly enjoyed the generous helping of Spicy wok chicken which indeed was very spicy. I definitely needed to cool my mouth down so we rounded off our visit to the Colmore Food Festival with a visit to Gingers Bar stall and I had a most refreshing Thyme For A Pimms cocktail.

  The Colmore Food Festival, which this year hosted stalls from about 30 Food and drink businesses homed in the Colmore Business District, is now well established as an important feature of the Birmingham food scene - it seems to grow from strength to strength.