188. Upstairs By Tom Shepherd.

 Tom Shepherd, who grew up in Birmingham and was Head Chef at Adam’s from 2017 to 2019 (see Blog 165), recently opened his first restaurant, Upstairs, in Lichfield. The name derives from the restaurant’s location which precisely is on the first floor above his father’s  jewellery shop. As well as working previously at Adam’s, Shepherd had in the past worked in the kitchens of Restaurant Sat Bains, in far-off Nottingham, with Michael Wignall as Senior sous chef at the two-starred Latymer restaurant in Pennyhill Park Hotel in Bagshot in Surrey and as sous chef at the Samling Hotel in Windermere. He is therefore a man who is not without credentials.

  His new restaurant is relatively small with 28 covers but it is planned that a roof terrace will be opened in 2022.

  In between his departure from Adam’s and the opening of Upstairs, Shepherd had been running Dine At Home which involved the delivery of a three course meal kit to customers’s homes with the contents of the kit changing on a weekly basis.

  And so, naturally, off to Lichfield I went.

  After days of black skies and almost incessant rain this was a fine, sunny, chill,  blue skyed sort of autumn day. Lichfield could not look finer. The three spired cathedral beside the river could not have looked more magnificent. Dr Johnson rested on his plinth and at a respectful distance Boswell looked out over the market place. In their time neither of them could have heard of Michelin stars but there were enough old inns in the town to have kept them comfortably satiated. 

    I found Shepherd’s father’s jewellery shop and the entrance - a flight of stairs of course - up to the restaurant. A clean, modern, fresh, bright, tasteful, pleasing dining room, a piece of work by the same designers who had provided the decor for Craft Dining Rooms, with an open kitchen. And that was not the only connection - Craft’s manager had moved jobs to work in Lichfield and an excellent job she was doing.

  I was tempted by the excellently priced lunchtime menu, not least because it included an alluring-sounding roast plaice but I felt I must not miss the opportunity to try as much as I could without overwhelming my elderly digestive system and so I chose to eat the dishes on the five course menu.

 

 After two pleasing amuse bouches which included an admirable red cabbage gazpacho aptly accompanied by a mild horseradish ice cream, it was down to business with a first course of a splendid and beautifully cooked scallop, as accurately prepared as we might expect from the former Head Chef of Adam’s, served on a bed of celeriac with dashi and little cubes of apple. The flavour of the scallop itself had me purring with pleasure.

  Then to my least favourite dish, not because it was not well executed but entirely because I dislike poached egg, Arlington White hen’s egg served with beetroot. The main course was made up of excellent quality aged sirloin - full of a wonderful flavour and cooked to perfection - accompanied by Sand carrots and thin slices of sweetly pickled carrot with a Sauce Robert (a brown mustard sauce). I grew a little tired as I ate the course of eating nothing but beef and carrot, as delicious as they may have been and would have like another element to the dish apart from the sauces to break up the monotony of carrot-beef-carrot-beef-ad inf. But it was a fine dish beyond doubt.

  

  Next the menu signalled Transition offering “Thai green curry” which I found to be a highly memorable dish for all the right reasons. Anything with lovely creamy rice pudding and mango is bound to score highly with me. It one of those things, like Purnell’s 10-10-10 egg surprise, that you always want to see on the menu. The dessert proper was a fine piece of patisserie, an excellent Paris Brest, which either needed a little more pear to counter the caramel or perhaps just less caramel.

  Given Tom Shepherd’s background perhaps it is not surprising that I thought that Upstairs was like An acorn of Adam’s’ falling a little way from the tree - Upstairs may have fewer covers and a smaller area but the decor is as smart, the service is pretty well perfect (happily a little more relaxed than Adam’s but pretty spot on with everyone dressed immaculately) and the fine dishes are accurate and well thought out. The place was full for lunch and everything seemed to be running as smoothly as any long established restaurant can manage. A great start. Could Lichfield be the new Ludlow?

  Meanwhile there have been developments in the kitchen at Adam’s. Kieron Stevens (see Blog 165), who took over from Tom Shepherd as Head Chef there in 2019, left the post on September 2021 to work as Executive Chef at the JM Socials restaurant group in Cheltenham. On 28 September 2021 it was announced that James Goodyear had been appointed to the post of Head Chef at Adam’s. Goodyear had previously been Head Chef at the Michelin-starred Hide restaurant in London and was a Young National Chef of the Year finalist in 2014. Goodyear described his style of cooking as “European modern fine dining” and has expressed the opinion that the new post gave him the opportunity to return to his roots.

181. Three Days.

  I passed the weekend staying in town at The Grand Hotel and took the opportunity to relive some restaurants where I had recently enjoyed some very happy dining experiences. 

  Firstly dinner at The Oyster Club. Naturally rather more expensive than the excellent lunch deal by which I experienced the restaurant’s excellent fish and chips (see Blog 173) but worth every penny. To start I had the wondrous fish charcuterie platter with delightful thin slices of elderberry cured sea trout and supremely delicious monkfish accompanied by excellent pickles and a witty little fish-shaped helping of crème fraiche. An irreproachable first course.

  

Then on to a magnificent whole roasted Dover sole on the bone. A stupendous dish beautifully cooked and enhanced by being served with little slices of razor clams, pickled grapes and verjus sauce. This was a right royal sole and right royally was he appreciated. For dessert a very enjoyable powerfully flavoured dish of strawberry and lemon verbena panacotta with honeycomb and caramelised white chocolate to give texture though I have to say there are times I do not always want to be crunching and nibbling but just enjoying soft creaminess without exercising my jaws.

  I was sorry to hear that the restaurant manager is about to leave to go to live in France just as I was getting to appreciate her undoubted skills. 

 

  

For Saturday evening dinner I walked the short distance from The Grand to Chamberlain Square for another visit to Dishoom (see Blog ). I was pleased that I had made a table reservation as there was a sizeable queue waiting to be admitted. The place was buzzing, the staff as always were scurrying back and forth delivering an impeccable and attentive service to the colony of gannets seated at the tables. What an atmosphere. This must be the nearest thing to India in the city centre. What a disaster for the Hollywood actor, Tom Cruise, who was recently in the city while filming a movie, that the people responsible for entertaining him during his stay, took him along to Asha’s (see Blog 171) rather than to Dishoom - just sitting in the hubbub of the place is a memorable experience. Of course he famously ordered a second helping of chicken tikka masala at Asha’s. I personally would have ordered a half-helping of the spicy chicken biryani I chose on this occasion not because it was not enjoyable but because of the very generous size of the portion. I ate it with a helping of roomali roti, the thin bread I had eaten on my previous visit which just suited me. In the end I could indeed only eat half the portion and the rest was boxed up for me and I enjoyed it at home a couple of days later. It would not be true to say that this was a great dish but it was a pleasing bit of warming, tasty, filling nosh that we should all enjoy when we’re exhausted by eats which are so exquisitely presented that they take several minutes to plate up.

 

 Another food experience that I had not yet indulged myself in was the incredibly low priced Sunday lunch at Pulperia. I now corrected this foolish omission. I started with a gorgeous plate of smoky, tangy chorizo matched with heritage tomatoes which were quite tasty given the general poor quality of this year’s tomatoes and the refreshing zing of chimichurri.

  Then the roast arrived, sweet rose-pink slices of roast beef with many trimmings including an estimable, perfectly crispy Yorkshire pudding and numerous trimmings which each made their own contribution to enhance the pleasure - creamy shreds of cabbage with bacon, an admirably cheesy cauliflower, more well roasted potatoes than I could manage and unctions roasted carrot, some of the slices almost gooey with honey. A seriously fine Sunday lunch. For these delights just £25 for the two courses and a full stomach. I had nothing more than ice cream as a dessert but this gave the restaurant’s excellent sommelier the chance to let me try the still off-menu South American dessert wine which was a happy experience. This young lady knows her subject and has an impressive career ahead of her.

  So that was it. Three excellent Birmingham food experiences in as many days.

  Which brought me round to thinking of a list of the ten must do food experiences in Birmingham at this present time and so, in no particular order:-

1. Exciting, cutting edge Indian cuisine at Opheem.

2. Have a special occasion dinner at Purnell’s for yourself and a group of friends and family.

3. Soak up the exhilarating atmosphere over Friday night dinner at Dishoom.

4. Indulge yourself in Sunday lunch at Pulperia.

5. Experience the sheer glamour of afternoon tea in the Madeleine bar at The Grand Hotel.

6. Venture into Digbeth to dine at 670 Grams to experience just what Birmingham’s most exciting Michelin Young Chef of the Year is serving up.

7. Dinner - or lunch - at classy, precise, polished and very fine Adam’s.

8. Go wild and be utterly thrilled by dinner at The Wilderness which has fine tuned itself to near perfection since the pandemic began.

9. Off to the international Conference Centre for dinner at Craft Dining Rooms. No need to sit in a pod unless you really must and About Eight might be more than you really need, personally I opt for sitting in the dining room and hoping that the beef Wellington is on the menu.

10. Fish and Chips for lunch at The Oyster Club (or Dover sole for dinner).

 And here’s a possibility:- 

Not yet experienced (but reservation made), take a little journey to Hampton Manor and Smoke, Stuart Deeley’s new gaff.

  Meanwhile it’s interesting to observe which West Midlands restaurants the Michelin Guide has been mentioning in its Twitter account recently. Birmingham and the West Midlands are not featured too often in comparison with dining establishments in London, the Home Counties, the North and its present obsession, Ireland, and quite what an appearance on Michelin’s Twitter account means I couldn’t say but it may mean that the featured restaurant’s present Michelin status is being considered (and all the Twitter appearances are positive ones). So just for the record here they are:-

29 August The Wilderness.

18 August Harborne Kitchen

13 August Purnell’s

7 August Tailor’s of Warwick

3 August Wild Shropshire Whitchurch

14 July 670 Grams

 

  

  I look forward to seeing what’s happening in the Michelin Guide in these coming weeks to find out which other West Midlands restaurants are felt to be worth a tweet.

  

144. Fire And Food On A Cold Evening At Craft.

 

 

 And so at last the era of not going out to dine draws to a close. The most recently introduced rules in the gradually decaying age of the ‘lockdown’ have eased once more to enable groups of six to gather outside to break bread with each other and resume where we all left off in our personal relationships. We may again see the faces of old friends up close (but of course not too close) and not via the always irritating (can you hear me? You need to unmute ...) Zoom virtual call, Thank The Wee Donkey.

  The management of Craft Dining Rooms played a blinder those many months ago by introducing their outside dining pods which have enabled the COVIDly insecure to meet up in groups of four in the latter part of last year and again since the most recent rule changes and gone one step further by introducing a table for six sans murs with a little heater on it called rather exotically The Firepit around which six people may gather. With all the pods booked a friend summoned me a few weeks ago to meet with old acquaintances at Craft around the Firepit for our first post-lockdown meal together, all doubly vaccinated and brimming with happy anticipation. And so we did on a mistimed particularly cold evening in the dying embers of April. A bucket of embers, dying or not, would have been quite helpful on this particular evening given the bone-penetrating chilliness of the temperature as we sat on the cusp of May. But we were supplied with blankets with which to envelop ourselves should hypothermia set in and there was the tiny flame burning away on the table which put out more light than heat and which supplemented the warmth of the generally good spirits of my co-diners and myself. But I still wasn’t clear where a ‘Pit’ came into the equation.

  Gin was welcome and the menu announced a three course meal (or two if one wished) with a reasonable number of choices (four for each course) and how wonderful it was not to be faced with a Tasting menu, a concept which really should have been the first fatal victim of that virus along with horrors such as sous vide food warming (one can hardly call it ‘cooking’ ) and other gastronomic perversions of recent decades. What we wanted and what we were expecting was good, beautifully cooked food in sensible amounts. And we were not disappointed.

 

  No bread, no amuses bouches, no flim flam, just straight into a really rather delicious little starter of pea soup - not any pea soup I might say - with a good solid and tasty piece of haddock forming a central island crowned with my favourite greens pleasures, pea shoots, and with them some perfectly cooked peas. This was very good. A little cold perhaps but given the outdoor location and ambient temperature, a perfectly understandable and mild imperfection. 

  

For the main course, I stuck with fish and was glad to have done so as a splendid dish of beautiful roast cod with wickedly enjoyably crispy cod croquettes and taste bud-delighting salt and vinegar potato ‘crisps’, a  pea purée and a little blanket of crunchy pickles on top. This was a clever dish and the fish was cooked to perfection. It was one of those dishes you could feed me every day for a long time before I would feel it necessary to ask for a change of menu. What joy.

 

The dessert was fine, nothing mesmerising but pleasurable, rice pudding with well-flavoured hay ice cream. No complaints. The lot which made for a happy evening despite the chill air (though warmed by good company and delightful food) cost a very reasonable £40 plus drinks and service.

  

So as the pandemic seems to be dying away in this Blessed Plot of England set in the silver sea, which serves it in the office of a wall or as a moat defensive to a house, a fortress built by Nature for herself against infection .... I (brimming with antibodies) feel optimistic about that date, less than three weeks away when Craft and our other great restaurants can once more throw open their welcoming doors to this Happy breed of men and feed them the pleasures which they have in store. I’ve done it all over the past twelve months - isolated, distanced, ordered on line, mourned the sight of empty restaurants (some, but not so many round here, closed for good), had a Zoom birthday party, had cook-at-homes which proved I was never meant even to finish off fine dining dishes let alone cook them from scratch, and now eaten fine food in a sort of glorified if chilly picnic. This has been another era in the story of the food of this city and the region.

  I suppose it is worth noting that although the City Council is generally supremely incompetent and lazy, it has girded its loins in a minor way to provide rather amateurish-looking pavement shelters near bars and restaurants in some roads around the city centre including Waterloo Street near Adam’s (though I don’t see its customers being provided with their Michelin-starred dinners under the roofs of these constructions). As the spring advances these shelters may come into their own though they do rather spoil the overall appearance of that particular street with its fine buildings which have managed to survive the ill-intentions and depredations of various and multiple councils and countless mad architects over the years.

T

119. Eight Ate At Eight At Seven.

 

  Before I lose the power of all recall of the event - time takes a toll on my faculty of memory - I have to recall my evening of great pleasure passed at the opening public evening of Andrew Sheridan’s 8 or possibly Around 8 - the precise name isn’t clear in my mind. The date was 8 October 2020, I have a dated, signed menu to prove it. The setting - the bar area of the Craft Dining Rooms, now divided from the main dining area and sparkling and cleverly lit. Just eight diners; there will be 16 when the need for social distancing is over. All strangers and socially distanced but soon, and keeping to the appropriate degree of separation, chatting pleasantly in this immaculate relaxed environment.

  The evening started at 7PM, brought forward by an hour due to the then 10PM curfew. It was of course meant to start at 8PM to fit in with the theme but there you have it, the best laid plans of mice and men and so on. It took a little while for me to realise that the positioning of the plates had been precisely calculated to enable the diner to photograph their food to perfection and Chef and his staff chatted to the Lucky 8 about the food, the concept, the restaurant, the whole story. What nice people they all are. Andrew Sheridan said that a couple of evenings before, his very first service of 8 was to distinguished local chefs including Paul Foster of Salt in Stratford upon Avon and apparently and not surprisingly had gone down pretty well. But we were the Few, the Happy Few, to be there at the first service to the public.

  The menu in eight parts had dishes with variants of eight in its name and each course had relevance to the progress of Sheridan’s culinary career. I shall not enlarge on that mainly because I didn’t hear everything that was said and for much of the time I was staring enraptured at the sight of each new dish as it came along. The menu didn’t reveal too much so the serving of the food brought gasps and purrs of pleasure.

  There was a tear and share bread of great pleasure which as I was a single diner I did not have to share at all and had some left over to savour at the next day’s breakfast (too good to waste even a crumb), then V8, a sweet tomato tart with fabulous pastry and a clear sweet accompanying vegetable liquor. To paraphrase The Tempest, “Such things are dreams made on...” Exquisite.

  

  Then the remarkable Oxidised, a remarkable beef carpaccio with cep and beef fat truffle, cheese and thinly sliced brioche. Palpitating pleasure. Just look at it:-

  Square root of 8  Smoky celeriac with the clearest vegetable broth and then Lucky 8, a special bacon and cheese sandwich if you wish to think of it that way. Not my favourite dish that evening though others would disagree.

 

 And now we’re into a full gallop and Eight Days A Week brings with it a fabulous scallop, apple and sorrel dish. Luxurious, delicious and exceptional.

  And then to a gourmand’s fondest dream, Resurrection. A mind bogglingly beautiful venison Wellington, good in so many ways that it must be a dish served to those who have been saints in their earthly lives at the refectory tables of Heaven, utterly perfectly cooked and delicious venison stuffed with the right amount of foie gras surrounded by earthy mushroom duxelles and magnificently wonderful buttery pastry. It must have taken months if not years of practice to achieve such  a fabulous faultless dish. Such things are dreams made on, oh I’ve said that already but I don't apologise for repeating it.

 

  Feeling pretty full by now but the joy continues. 8 - 10 - 2006 - warm deconstructed carrot cake served for two to share but being only one I get enough to enable me to take half home with me to enjoy the next day. As the title of one of Delia Smith’s books told us, “One is fun”. The dish was accompanied by an orange carrot jam, so gorgeously delicious that it is more often, I should think, fed to the immortals in their palaces on Olympus and a lustrous sweet light cream. 

 

 And so the fat old bloke prepares soon to sing as 8.01 comes to the table to appropriately bring the After Eight combination of mint and chocolate. We chatter, still appropriately socially distanced, but 10 AM approaches. We all speak in glowing terms of the pleasure of 8, inwardly self-congratulatory I suspect, of being the First of The Few The Happy Few (to combine Churchill and Shakespeare) - come to think about it, the meal was pretty much that combination - gastronomic poetry and drama with a pugnacious Englishness at a time when a war is raging outside on the street as COVID-19 continues to marshal its forces. As the hands on the clock hurry towards 10 we grab our coats and get our hats and head off for the taxis before the crowds pouring out of the pubs can beat us to it, showering our delighted thanks on Andrew Sheridan and everyone who has made this a magnificent evening of gastronomic marvels here in Birmingham.