404. Simpsons.

 

  In the most recent couple of years or so, my visits to Simpsons, the doyen of Birmingham restaurants, have been several, almost numerous, but usually related to special dining events being held there. In the 20 teens, as I have previously reported, I had had several disappointing meals at Simpsons with near-chaotic service and food which did not reflect the expense of it all. My most recent experiences there have been wholly pleasing however suggesting that Chef Director Luke Tipping has pulled Simpsons through its dark patch and out the other side even though The Good Food Guide, seemingly presently devoted to the levelling up, or perhaps the dumbing down, of dining out continues to fail to recommend it in its hallowed pages (pages obviously less hallowed than those of the Michelin Guide which does still recommend the restaurant and rightly so). 

  It was time to dine at Simpsons for a meal from its regular menu rather than that of a special event (though it was a special event as it was the Old Bloke’s birthday - not that I was making it public - I can not bear fuss and have reached the stage of my life where endless well-intentioned congratulations are rather wearing).  The day was wet and miserable which did not seem very generous of the weather god but it was to be hoped that his colleague, the goddess of food and abundance, might be feeling a little kinder.

  My two guests arrived at Simpsons at exactly the same time as myself  and, as orphans of the storm, we were pleased to be seated in Simpsons’ comfortable sitting room quaffing glasses of pleasure = mine was white port with tonic - and nibbling on a sign of what was to come - a delicious little cod beignet, crispy-coated with perfectly textured and tasty fish and a pretty, flower decorated crisp with goats cheese mousse. 

  Thence into the bright, spacious dining room, its lengthy window giving a fine view of the garden, with purple rhododendrons in their fully blossomed glory being contemporaneously watered by God’s Almighy Hand, as the rain fell from the heavens.

  The welcome was excellent and the seating comfortable and we prepared to start on our seven course voyage through Simpsons’ current tasting menu (though we also had the choice of a three or five course menu). It was to be a voyage of calm seas and great pleasure.

    First the excellent bread with a cod’s roe spread and wild garlic butter. Already, Chef Luke Tipping was hitting the target with punchy flavours and wonderful textures - the crunchiness of the crust of the bread and the smoky marine flavour of the spread and the carefully judged garlic taste of the butter. 

  

  The first starter was the scintillatingly fresh flavour of Isle of Wight tomatoes with tomato sorbet - multi-textured, gorgeously presented and doing what a starter should do, enticing the diner to anticipate the coming of wonders and imminent great pleasure. Then a second starter bringing tasty white crab with the acidity of blood orange and three dainty and well cooked spears of asparagus under a crispy tuile. 

  If the crab were not enough, more luxury from the sea - this time a pleasingly sized piece of turbot, the best cooked I have had for a while, beautifully presented with a sweet carrot purée and a punchy, but not inappropriately so, bisque.

    The next course was a heritage beetroot dish, which in some restaurants can be rather tiresome, but here the beetroot was served in a number of forms of various textures and sweetnesses and acidity and, as beetroot dishes go, this was up there among the higher echelons of such beasts.

  And then, the star, a very fine dish of supremely perfectly cooked Cornish lamb served with a zinging mint gel (chefs so often fail to appreciate just why ingredients have become locked together by tradition - lamb and mint are a marriage made in culinary heaven) and courgettes, often dull and of little worth but here absolutely on point and sitting on the plate looking all perky and alluring, looking more, at first glance, like figs than chunks of courgette. But the lamb’s the thing. It was gorgeous, it was tender, it tasted of fine sheep meat, it was perfectly cooked, it was immaculately seasoned, it was … perfect. And it was crowned with a sublimely unctious lamb sauce. A great modern British dish. 

  And so, farewell to a great main course and on into the final phase of desserts. First the soothing flavours of peach and the hit of coumarin in woodruff. Finally, a spectacular mango soufflé, risen as high as a block of flats, as lightly textured as a cloud and accompanied by coconut and passion fruit. 

  Simpsons certainly is back up at the peak as well as being at its own peak. A simpatico space to eat in, a happy ambience, good service and extraordinarily good food.

Rating:- 🌞🌞🌞

On 20 May 2024, it was announced that the Chef director of Lunar in Stoke on Trent, Niall Keating, had left his post the previous day by “mutual agreement” with the co-founder, Craig Wilkinson,  Keating will be involved in a new role in a hotel in Manchester. (See Blog 400). Keating’s departure came a few days after the Head Chef at Lunar, Craig Lunn, had left his post at the restaurant.

  Three days after Keating’s departure, it was announced that Carl Riley, previously of The George in Alstonefield which had been recommended in the Michelin Guide from 2011 to 2023 but is not currently featured in the Guide, had been appointed to be the new Head Chef in Lunar.

Niall Keating

Craig Lunn and Niall Keating

214. Lunar Stokes Up Stoke.

 

  The concept of linking the name of a new local restaurant to a supper-consuming society of great historical importance is, I think, rather interesting and pleasing especially when this restaurant is located in Stoke-on-Trent whose appearances in foodie guidebooks have been either non-existent or profoundly rare or at the very best, fleeting. More notable for its industrial history than its gastronomic history, we all know by now that Niall Keating, two Michelin star chef recently working at Whateley Manor in Wiltshire, famously decided to give up his job there and return to his childhood home in the northern West Midlands and with Craig Lunn join up with the Wedgwood Centre there to open Lunar by Niall Keating, named after the 18th century Birmingham-based Lunar Society of which Josiah Wedgwood was a prominent member.

  This was too important an event to miss out on and so it was that Lucy The Labrador and I, overnight reservations arranged at a local dog-friendly hotel, embarked on a train headed for Stoke, travelling the reverse journey Josiah took monthly to meet his intellectual Birmingham friends including Boulton, Watt, Priestly and the physician William Withering. I wonder if his anticipation of supper was as great as mine was for my pending dinner at Lunar.

  Clearly they all had a good time or else they would not have continued to return for more and Wedgwood would not have troubled himself to travel the not inconsiderable distance from Stoke to Birmingham. The cartoon shows Priestly proposing a toast at one of the Society’s meetings. We can see that the participants have had a good bowl of soup and there are chunks of discarded bread on the table. Rather sinisterly, starved-looking beggars stand on the edge in the background waiting to grab the fallen crumbs from the table - well there’s always someone trying to make you feel guilty for eating a good meal! But perhaps the cartoon just rings a bell in these present times as the middle class head for the fine dining restaurants and the poor head for food banks.

  Four days prior to my visit, a miracle happened when a tweet (dated 31 January 2022) revealed that not only had a Michelin Guidebook inspector visited the West Midlands but had actually made it all the way to Stoke and paid a visit to Lunar. The tweet seemed to have commented more on the ceramics rather than the food but it was still a historic event - Stoke had attracted the attention of the Michelin Guide. A miracle indeed!

  My first ever visit to Stoke. The dog and I were nicely settled in our friendly hotel and I was waiting for my taxi. Lesson number 1 - don’t trust Stoke taxi drivers to turn up anywhere near the time they promised to or to turn up at all. Lesson number 2 - when you finally manage to persuade a taxi to turn up don’t expect them to actually know the location of the World of Wedgwood or to have heard of the city’s scintillating new restaurant. Lesson number 3 - Don’t panic, it’s not your fault you’re late arriving at the restaurant.

  But I did finally get to walk through Lunar’s doors into the immense space in which the restaurant is located. Not so much spacious, more like an aircraft hanger with a colossal suspended moon filling up some of the headroom. The welcome was very good and cocktail and tasty, perfectly salty sourdough bread were winging their way to the table just at the time when the bread should appear to provide a delicious little nibble while waiting for the starter. I say starter but that is not technically correct. No tasting menu is on offer which is a wonderful thing in itself but there is a pleasing choice of starters, mains, and desserts (beginning, follow, share and ending) and the portions are of a size which provides the diner with a comfortably sized dinner (certainly sufficient for an old geezer like me). However currently it is suggested that the starters are rather small and in order to satisfy, more than one is recommended. So I had two starters only to discover that they really are a very reasonable size and that one would have been a very sensible choice (perhaps younger people with more amenable digestive tracts might disagree).

  Recently Jay Rayner wrote a spot-on piece about the problems of the body’s mild failings associated with advancing age which come to the surface when sitting in a restaurant, among them small print, indecipherable menus read under a poor light. I was seated in an area of the restaurant with no direct light over it and struggled, despite squinting and holding up the menu at odd angles, to make out a word on it particularly because some of it was printed in a very pale ink. Fortunately my struggles were recognised by the excellent waitress and a menu printed entirely in black was brought to me and my menu dilemma was dealt with though I still had to cope with the several items of Japanese vocabulary, mostly familiar to me but not all, that made up parts of a number of the dishes. Have menus always been a struggle for oneupmanship between chef and diner? - it took decades for Englishmen to come to terms with French culinary terminology and now the Far East, particularly the Land of The Rising Sun, is challenging our linguistic and cultural knowledge.

  That said Lunar does offer an interesting menu of British food fused with all sorts of Eastern promise and I was ready to rise to the challenge. Hence my starter became two starters - a superb dish of succulent sweet Orkney scallops - just about as perfectly cooked as one could hope for with a supremely enjoyable crust on them which few chefs seem able to achieve and served with a parsnip purée, little snips of pak choi and delightful whispers of heat from the presence of togarashi (a pepper’ A truly impressive dish. My other starter choice was herb congee (a rice porridge), a rather humble dish with a texture not entirely to my taste, but immaculately raised to a much higher level by the additional inclusion of brutally tasty black pudding, a welcome kick of kimchi and a perhaps not entirely necessary quail’s egg. The latter dish was quite filling and I wondered about the wisdom of ordering two starters.

  For the main course I was too weak to resist the luxury of the lordly turbot dish on offer, its special flavour and robustly firm texture not at all overwhelmed by the delicious intense truffle sauce - they were matched in Heaven itself -  and the sheer indulgence added to by the presence of caviar, a glorious pomme purée and creamed leeks which would have sent St David into raptures if those are the sort of emotions he ever allowed himself to experience. The dish incidentally did not suffer because of the absence of any oriental element. Doubts crossed my mind however as to whether such luxury could be fully appreciated in this cavernous restaurant with no table cloths and casual cutlery placement. Have no doubt that this was luxury dining not run-of-the-mill fine dining; would it be a little more aptly located in a more intimate, even formal, setting? Perhaps the exceptionally reasonable prices for these remarkable dishes are not possible in smaller, more refined settings and the location does at least allow the up-to-now eternally gastronomy-starved residents of Stoke to turn up in large numbers to grab a piece of the culinary action.

 I could not resist the tarte tatin for dessert. The fruit used in it was spiced pineapple. The tarte was very good but highlighted why apple has long been the fruit to be used in this unctuous dessert.

  Some of the dishes, particularly the dessert, were served on attractive ceramics which should be expected I suppose given the location of the restaurant in the World of Wedgwood visitor centre. Less apparent were any links to the Lunar Society which gave the restaurant its name. While I waited for my taxi back to the hotel - arranged by the restaurant and it therefore actually turned up - I was given a brown card with small  black writing on it which gave some information about the Lunar Society and the restaurant’s philosophy and aims. I like receiving souvenirs and I never like to look a gift horse in the mouth but the card did rather suffer from the same problem as the menus - difficult to read with an old bloke’s eyesight either with or without his glasses on. The card is also rather wordy and worthy but with a good light shining on it tells the diner just what the restaurant is all about. However, though the diner is surrounded by the Wedgwood links while eating, the connection with the Society of which he was a leading member could probably do with being a little clearer to make the whole theme seem relevant.

  Lunar, then - a great piece of culinary history for Stoke on Trent and a missing piece to insert into the West Midlands fine dining jigsaw. It is an exciting place to visit and some fine food is indeed served there. Is the atmosphere quite right for the luxury of it all? - I’m not sure. One thing is for sure, as you wait for your taxi in view of the open kitchens and surrounded by many, many tables occupied by excited diners, the restaurant has certainly been taken up enthusiastically by the people of Stoke and in the kitchen chef Niall Keating is very visible and instantly recognisable and everyone is clearly working their socks off to ensure Lunar’s success.

189. Lunar Society Meets Niall Keating, Fine Dining Soon In Stoke On Trent.

 

Meeting of The Lunar Society at Heathfield, home of James Watt

  Reports in The Caterer as well as in the local press in North Staffordshire inform us that Stoke On Trent is soon to have a fine dining establishment to be overseen by Niall Keating, Head Chef at the two Michelin-starred Whateley Manor in Wiltshire and former winner of The Great British Menu Central region heats. Keating, brought up in Stoke, is partnering with The Great British Experience events company to establish the new restaurant at the World of Wedgwood visitor attraction at Barlaston near Stoke and the restaurant will be named Lunar to recall the 18th century Birmingham-based Lunar Society (named because it always met on a full moon) of which the Stoke potter, Josiah Wedgwood was a member. The Lunar Society was a supper club for the Midlands enlightenment movement and included scientists, inventors and businessmen such as Wedgwood.

  The new 120 cover restaurant kitchen will be run by Head Chef Craig Lunn who worked as sous chef under Keating at Whateley Manor and also as chef de partie at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay. The restaurant is due to open on 26 November.

  Stoke On Trent has not previously been known to be a place of gastronomic excellence. It does not get a mention in the 2021 Michelin Guide. Perhaps it is just about to benefit from a bit of gastronomic ‘levelling up’ and some Lunar Club-style enlightenment (of the gastronomic kind).

Niall Keating and Craig Lunn

  Bristol, it has to be said, is not in the West Midlands. It sits at the tail end of Gloucestershire but, while the regional status of most of Gloucestershire county is a matter of debate  - a Midlands county? a West Country county? (look at the map, it’s definitely in the middle) - Bristol has had its own county created for it to make its region indisputable - South Gloucestershire which is decidedly in the West Country. But it is only just across the border in its mini-county and I am there from time to time so I am not too unhappy about recording a visit to one of its respected restaurants.

  Bristol is a fine city though swamped now with a middle class, socialist elite since the Blairs saw a money-making opportunity in buying property there, that makes it like a vastly larger version of Moseley though in no way as ugly as that Birmingham suburb and of course it is not only a handsome city but it has the quay areas and the river which add to the city’s draw. Unfortunately since my last visit before the first lockdown, the self-regarding middle class denizens have gone mad and there is a great risk of being run over by dim-looking youths on electric scooters and green middle-aged people pedalling away on their bicycles and cars have been expelled to make way for this even more dangerous form of traffic shooting along the pavements. A warning as to what Birmingham will be like in the near future as the environmental fascists establish their new republic of bullying and sneering. Of course these well-heeled inhabitants can afford to eat in style once they’ve pedalled their way around the streets doing their best to kill old blokes with their ageing labradors visiting the city and so the city now has an array of Michelin-listed, -plated and -starred dining establishments.

  Not far from my hotel, on the waterfront, looking across the river at a vast, monstrous Art Deco building that looks like Mussolini put it up, on the upper floor of a collection of shops, cafes and restaurants housed by no means inaptly in shipping containers,  one finds the Michelin-listed Gambas which the Inspector’s report sums up as, “Set in a lovely first floor location in the bustling Wapping Wharf, Gambas comes with a terrace on two sides and lovely river views. The concise menu of small plates showcases great quality produce and has a seafood slant; dishes arrive as they are ready from an open kitchen”. Well, as I say, “lovely river views” is slightly debatable but being English the precise nature of the view does not really matter as we all like to sit by water, don’t we? and will do so in any weather come rain or shine.

“Lovely river views” (Michelin inspector)

  

  The welcome to the internally rustic-looking restaurant was warm and service was relaxed, informative and pleasing. I chose four dishes from the regular menu and the menu of today’s specials. From the former I picked the pan con alioli which was excellent with the bread being as delicious as any I had had in restaurants with greater pretensions - finely judged saltiness and excellent flavour - and precisely judged alioli with robust amounts of garlic but no bolder than than it should have been. Then came the absolutely delightful tortita de camerones - two delicate, thin and golden, extravagantly crispy, deep-fried sheets speckled with shockingly tasty, sweet little prawns. It was a great pleasure just to sit and admire their visual beauty, look at them so delicate, before purring with the happiness of tasting their flavour and experiencing their texture. I would go back to Gambas just for the pleasure of reliving the tortitas.

  The next arrival at my table were some supremely excellent patatas bravas with great swirls of even more alioli and then, from the specials menu, a perfectly cooked (and sized) meaty piece of glimmering hake with mojo verde and the sweetest and happiest little piquillo peppers. This was a very fine and enjoyable meal crowned with an excellent crema Catalan. The chefs in this kitchen really know their stuff. Fine but comforting, the Michelin inspector was right on this one.

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