460. Dan Lee At Eat Vietnam.

 

  Dan Lee was the winner of the BBC’s Masterchef The Professionals competition programme in 2021. Subsequently he has been working at the Digbeth Dining Club and the Hockley Social Club where he has recently ended a long term residency. He has also worked at a number of pop up collaborations at various restaurants, most recently, I think, with Kray Tredwell at the latter’s 670 Grams. I had not thus far managed to be free on any of the evenings for which these collaborations were advertised and Hockley Social Club is just too much of a pain to get to from where I live in the evening. Hence I had not yet had the opportunity to experience Dan Lee’s food though I did once sit two tables away from him at a Kray Tredwell/Le Petit Bois collaboration in Moseley one evening (Blog 295) where he, like myself, were enjoying what was being served from the kitchens there. 

Dan Lee at Le Petit Bois, January 2023.

  Recently, however, it seemed at last that my long wait to eat his food was to end when a Sunday lunch collaboration with Eat Vietnam in Stirchley was announced and I hurried to make a reservation. I was irritated to find that it was impossible to make a reservation for a single diner but I made a reservation for two and a good friend was happy to join me to see what Lee had on offer. It was also an opportunity to revisit Ming Nham’s Eat Vietnam (Blog 270) as more time had elapsed since I had last eaten there than I had intended.

Dan Lee, Masterchef winner in 2021.

  Lee’s website notes that he trained at University College, Birmingham and he has also gained culinary experience working in his aunt’s takeaway shop. He travelled to various parts of Asia as well as Greece, France and New Zealand and this coupled with his English, Irish and Cantonese heritage enabled him, he felt, to develop his own multicultural fusion cuisine which led to him winning Masterchef and now forms the basis of the dishes he serves.

  The frontage of Eat Vietnam remains odd and still bears the name of Munchies, the greasy spoon café which had been located the as well as the large red and yellow poster with the sphinx-like inscription, “FISH SAUCE IS NOT FOR EVERYONE”, neither of which is helpful with locating the restaurant if one is a stranger to the area. But inside it was warm on a chilly, miserable damp day and the welcome was even warmer from a front of house staff member who had previously worked at The Wilderness. I spotted Ming Nham beavering away in the kitchen and then Dan Lee at the pass, the restaurant was filling up rapidly and the steam was rising in the kitchen. It was really quite thrilling though a tasty Saigon Gimlet proved to be a pleasingly soothing libation to counter the increasingly building anticipation of it all.

  This was to be a six course menu - a Sunday ‘Family Feast’, though this was more service à la Française than service à la Russe. The opening act of three dishes was served as one, then the two mains with accompanying plates together and finally the dessert. It was to be hearty, beautifully cooked and delicious. But I run ahead of myself.

  First came a platter of lettuce cups with pork ends, a completely delicious sandwich with lettuce substituting for bread, with brilliantly cooked pieces of pork belly, admirably crispy and tasty, possibly the most successfully cooked example of that meat I can recall being served to me, wrapped in a lettuce leaf (surely, the only useful thing you can do with a lettuce leaf apart from shredding it to use as part of a base of prawn cocktail or just feeding it to the pet rabbit), magnificent crispy butterflied prawns - such stuff as dreams are made on - and a scintillating papaya and pomelo salad. Who could ask for anything more? Well there was more to come, and no-one was sad about that.

  

  The highlight must have been the supremely perfectly cooked whole battered sea bass served with a delightful sweet and sour sauce. The fish was lovely - its beautiful white flesh exhilaratingly moist and tasty - and with it came individual dishes of plump, unctious slow cooked short rib, enhanced with fish sauce, caramel and coconut water with a perfectly cooked quail’s egg alongside it. In addition to these gems were dishes of lap cheong fried rice (with its tasty slivers of pork sausage) and a tofu skin salad which for the first time in my life, made me feel there there might be some use for tofu after all.

  These had been generously portioned dishes but there was still good reason to make room in my abdomen for the intriguingly flavoured dessert of mango and pandan cheesecake. The cheesecake was very well made - nice and smooth and just on the right side of the borderline of sweetness with, er, non-sweetness (I wouldn’t say savoury). The smallest flies in the ointment were the tiny cubes of unripe mango garnishing the cheesecake - they were flavourless and while their extreme firmness may have given a degree of texture to the dishes, it was not a particularly nice one. How I should have liked a real full-bodied hit of sweet, soft mango to seal the deal. Still, this was a small fly in the ointment and in the great, grand sweep of a very fine south east-style meal, it mattered but little.

  This had been a memorable meal with some very fine dishes - rustic but triumphant. The combination of Dan Lee and Ming Namh would appear to be a culinary marriage made in heaven.

Rating:- 🌞

9 February 2025.

440. Soi 1268

 

  Originally from Thailand, Sai Deethwa, began commercial cooking in 2011 and presented her products as Thai street food, using recipes inherited from her mother, and established Buddha Belly, attending various venues such as Digbeth Dining Club and Herbert’s Yard in Longbridge.

   Deethwa had met her partner James Fitzgibbons in 2004 and following his suggestion she took part in the 2012 BBC Masterchef series in which she successfully reached the final 24 contestants stage. Eventually Deethwa and Fitzgibbons opened Soi 1268 at 1268 Pershore Road in Stirchley and soon afterwards Aktar Islam, Executive Chef and owner of the two Michelin-starred Opheem, identified Soi 1268 as one of his favourite restaurants at which to eat.

    So it was clearly time for another expedition to the aggressively hipster paradise of Stirchley to dine at Soi 1268. I generally enjoy Thai food apart from Thai green curry which is ruined, it seems, because I have a gene, as does 20% of the population, which makes coriander taste like soap but I find Thai food wearisome. There’s not much range in it and when you’ve been to upwards of fifty, or however many, Thai restaurants - usually rustic in presentation and not all that cheap - it’s hard to imagine anything new and exciting is going to light up your gastronomic life. More of the same. So was Soi 1268 just that and did it float my boat?

    In the early evening drizzley darkness of the latter part of autumn, the black painted exterior is not so very inviting (why do restaurants in hipster areas feel they should  look like funeral parlours?) but once inside the interior is more reassuring - warm and cosily ramshackle though, as with so many of these Stirchley restaurants, the seating is fairly close together and not notably comfortable though the crowd of Stirchley denizens who have already taken their places seem oblivious to any problem such as discomfort and are tucking into their dinners, presumably happy with the suburban, middle class rusticity of it all.

My dining companion and I were presented with the shortish, somewhat disheveled, menus and he opted for what turned out to be highly delicious, splendidly textured King prawns toast zinging with ginger, garlic and spring onion and accompanied by a tiny pot of sweet dipping sauce. The toast looked magnificent and indeed it was.

  The menu was one mainly of the now ubiquitous ‘small plates’ and my companion also chose the impressive-looking Thai fried chicken which was nicely moist and encased in fine, crispy coatings. We both chose the small plate of immaculately crispy enoki in a tempura batter, the texture of  crunch serving as a good companion to the earthiness of the mushrooms.

  I had the enoki as a starter and had a larger plate as the main which was beef massaman curry (which I have loved to eat for decades). This was very well done. The black pepper brought adequate heat to the proceedings which was centred on succulent and unctuous meat, slow cooked to the point where it had almost melted away. Apparently Aktar Islam’s wife also loved this dish when served it at this restaurant. She clearly knows a good dish when she tastes one; the accompanying jasmine rice was very edible

  All the dishes were generously portioned but I had room for the only dessert on offer - the delightful mochi ice cream (pounded rice dumplings filled with my chosen flavour of vanilla ice cream) which I had not previously eaten and which I thoroughly enjoyed. I loved the chewiness of the dumpling and the flavour of the good vanilla ice cream that lurked inside the dumpling waiting to be liberated.

  Soi 1268 is a very pleasing neighbourhood restaurant though, because it is clearly popular, and because of the large numbers of diners in a relatively small space, not an entirely relaxing spot to while away a couple of hours. The rustic Thai food is enjoyable and filling and has a fine degree of authenticity about it though the menu seems to step out of its brief a little to visit dishes from other Asian cuisines. It serves street food in an environment that is more comfortable and much warmer than the sort of places Buddha Belly visited in the past but whether or not it might be nice to see the chef aiming to serve her food in a style with more finesse and in a more upmarket setting I shall leave to the reader. And it did ‘float my boat’ like one those little water vessels which serve as floating markets on the canals near Bangkok.

Rating:- 🌛🌛🌛🌛.

394. Politics, Film Noir And Shakespeare. (Part 1).

 

  A busy week of local politics, another visit to The Wilderness with a twist and ending with the annual Shakespeare Birthday Lunch in Stratford Upon Avon. What exciting lives we old blokes live.

 Monday. My first visit to the Hockley Social Club, the fast food and events venue on the edge of the Jewellery Quarter which replaced the iconic Digbeth Dining Club and is a mothership to Herbert’s Yard in Longbridge. It is altogether more inviting than Herbert’s Yard in that it’s warm and spacious and reasonably comfortable, none of which adjectives can be applied to the large, wooden barn in the south west of the city where I live (well, I suppose Herbert’s Yard is spacious - I must be accurate in my reporting). It’s shabby and struggling to be hipster-chic and, I suppose, cool (I am still not sure if that word continues to be used by those in the know) and seems ideally suited to the local population of comfortably off hipsters who inhabit the overpriced flats in the nearby Jewellery Quarter.

   In previous Blogs I have expressed a lack of enthusiasm for street food. There should be a context for street food. Ideally it should be eaten in the street, be it on a warm, barmy evening in a bustling south east or southern Asian city or as a gratifying scoff at some event here in England, be it a fair or a football match or a concert or somewhere else where crowds meet and are feeling a collective peckishness. Street food is almost by definition not something to be eaten in a heated, dimly lit building with tables and chairs and the paraphernalia of cosy modern British hipster living. Street food should also be reasonably priced and not sold at the bloated prices many of our street food traders charges. The prices alone exclude a lot of the population and reinforce this as a dining scene for negroni-swigging, well-off, self-satisfied hipsters who will not visibly blanch when they receive notice of the massive increase in their council tax charges. Well, everyone is entitled to their own environment and the Hockley Social Club, with its mock working class name, is an ideal venue for the Jewellery Quarter socialist with nothing useful to do.

 The Mayoral hustings debate was fascinating with the sitting candidate and present mayor, Andy Street (only fair therefore that I should eat some street food while there), able to demonstrate everything he had done for the region and his plans for the future in a straight forward way while his socialist opponent with a whining, wheedling, sometimes almost inaudible, voice failed to give a straight answer even once but from time to time would suddenly squeak loudly at something Mr Street was saying and then smirk at a tiny cabal of his supporters to his right though his embarrassing ejaculations were something the Hockey Social Club sound system found alarming and incapable of dealing with without assaulting the audience’s hearing.

  The subject of what the Mayor could do for the local hospitality industry was raised by the founder of the Digbeth Dining Club, Jack Brabant, and neither had much in practical terms that they could seriously put forward at this stage - Mayor Street answered the question honestly and directly while the sheep next to him wittered on for a couple of minutes with no useful result. This was the pattern of the evening and unless one were a socialist fanatic, a fair neutral observer would have scored an overwhelming victory to Mayor Street. It will be interesting to see if the ordinary regional voter, removed from the comforts of the hipster lifestyle, will support Mayor Street. I do hope so - his opponent has the charisma of an over grilled snail (not that there were any escargots on sale at the Hockley Social Club) which enables me to segue into the food.

  Only two stalls were open -  giving a choice of ‘jerk’ fried  chicken and, er, ‘jerk’ fried chicken. It was disappointing that Dan Lee’s east Asian food stall was not selling its wares that evening - I am keen to see just what he has on offer. I chose the ‘Mango box’ from Only Jerkin’ Fried Chicken priced at £14. This offered 4 strips of nicely flavoured, crispy coated, pleasingly moist and well cooked chicken together with a very edible coleslaw and agreeable sweet potato chips which, like the chicken, were well cooked. 

  But this was fried chicken with a mildly spicy taste. Had I missed something? My Caribbean food knowledge is. I’ll be the first to acknowledge, very limited though I think the repertoire needed to present Caribbean-style is fairly limited. But shouldn’t this chicken have some punch to it? Shouldn’t I have been hit by the bite of spice and the tang of smoke? Well, I wasn’t. This was just deep fried chicken, not grilled, not barbecued, cautiously spiced - ideal for the audience it was being served to, I suppose. Where was the adventure in it?

  What else can one say? Fried chicken is everywhere. I eat it rarely and would not go out of my way to do so though Greidy’s fried chicken which I’ve had a couple of times at Herbert’s Yard is particularly enjoyable. As for Only Jerkin, it reminded me of the Labour Mayor candidate - quite nice but otherwise unremarkable.

Rating:- 🌛.

  

201. Peruvian Street Food in Longbridge.

 

  I have expressed in previous Blogs my lack of excitement when faced with the threat of having to consume Street Food. I have had one or two overpriced stinkers in my time and all eaten uncomfortably seated on some stray street bench somewhere or the other with a gale whipping around me, drizzle in the air and the dog looking utterly miserable.

  Digbeth Dining Club made consuming street food in Birmingham somewhat more comfortable and, more importantly, cool, (or whatever word is now used to denote cool) and eventually sent out little satellites on a regular basis so that street food was not just confined to the inner city (by which I mean Digbeth and, lattetly, the Jewellery Quarter) but also suburban neighbourhoods and notably distant, near-rural Longbridge. 

  On 19 November 2021 St Modwen, the company which redeveloped Longbridge, with Digbeth Dining Club, opened Herbert’s Yard, named after Herbert Austin who founded the Longbridge motor factory, to house diners buying street food from stalls set up by regular stall holders of Digbeth Dining Club. There are dozens of tables which from the first day attracted hundreds of people local to south west Birmingham and northern Worcestershire - families, the young, the old and … their dogs. At last - street food at Longbridge in dry, spacious, wind-free surroundings (and Longbridge can be so wondrously windy that any denizen of Digbeth would believe that they had been transported to another planet by gastronomic aliens). 

  South west Birmingham has no restaurant to thrill the gourmand and so Friday, Saturday and Sunday at Herbert’s Yard is an opportunity not to be missed with approximately six Digbeth Dining Club stall holders turning up every week to sell their wares; the vendors changing every week. On the opening day I ate Taiwanese style with a delicious spicy jackfruit bao and in contrast then turned my attention to a hot dog but the size of the ‘jumbo’ sausage’ was far too excessive for my taste and Lucy The Labrador came to my aid and polished it off. The accompanying crispy onions were also no substitute for sweet gently fried onions which are traditional accompaniments with hot dog - sometimes change is not always for the better.

  I was unable to revisit Herbert’s Yard for a couple of weeks being away in Ludlow and Lichfield dining very well as previously reported. However on a return visit I was delighted to find that there was a stall there named Chakanita, run by those behind the Michelin-plated Chakana Peruvian-style restaurant situated in Moseley (and which was recently gushingly reviewed by Jay Rayner in a swooning ecstasy after visiting Chakana). There was no competition for my interest this week. It had to be Chakanita. It had to be Peruvian. After all, how often can you eat food prepared by a Michelin-listed establishment in these distant outer reaches of the city?

  We must remember that this was street food, prepared on relatively primitive cooking devices in a wooden shack. Not a smart Michelin-listed, food critic-pleasing, restaurant in a wealthy, Champagne- socialist, inner suburb of the city. I had long viewed Chakana as a restaurant I really must visit but I have an aversion to Moseley which I find hard to overcome and I still had not summoned up the moral fortitude to head to Moseley to enable me to eat at Chakana. But here was Chakana, or its smaller wayward sibling at least, plying its trade in modest Longbridge. 

 I chose a chicken tomale with an excellent, fresh spicy salsa which proved to be very edible indeed. The chicken was nicely cooked and the slickness was perfect. The pork in a blue corn bun - not a lot to say about it except that it gave a lot of pleasure.

  These few minutes of pleasure at Herbert’s Yard were the spur I needed and when I returned home I reserved a table at Chakana for a few days time. It was time to overcome my Moseleyphobia and set off to see if I could also experience Jay Rayner’s ecstasy at Birmingham’s mothership of Peruvian cuisine. The excitement of anticipation is growing already.

168. Birmingham Street Food - Old Man Bites Pig.

   I regret that I find myself repelled by photographs of burgers, often huge mounds of calorific monstrousness with everything bar the kitchen sink shoved in between the upside and downside of a sliced brioche, and find it hard to look at a burger in real life let alone a virtual one and find it even more difficult to contemplate ordering one for myself to eat.

  The burger is really the centre point of Street Food which is so trendy now, particularly here in Birmingham where the now ageing Digbeth Dining Club reborn as the Hockley Social Club pioneered street food here in the West Midlands. Of course we’ve always had street food - when I was a child I recall the vendors of hot chestnuts and baked potatoes and hot dogs laden with sweet, mildly slimy slices of onion that could be found in the smoggy, damp streets of the centre of Birmingham. There was nothing like a finger-burning baked potato or a delicious juicy hot dog on a dreary late November day in the early 1960s to bring a little joy into your life when as a child you are being dragged around Lewis’ and Rackham’s and Grey’s department stores by my mother and her 2 sisters (the adult male members of the family wisely found other things to do).

  So street food, like the poor, has been with us always. But now we have arrived in an era where street food is almost a cult even if the consumption of street food now takes place indoors and is often shockingly over-priced. Like the concept of  Fine Dining, Street Food has been marketed brilliantly and aimed highly successfully at the well paid age group who are least likely to accept a COVID-19 vaccine - as my old Gran used to say, aptly I think, those who “have more money than sense”. The Digbeth Dining Club was designed just for them, those who see themselves as being cool or whatever the present term might be, the 20 to 35 year olds who live in the Jewellery Quarter, the Gas Street area, Harborne, Kings Heath, Moseley and latterly, the superannuated  Stirchley which throughout my lifetime has been grim and unappealing but is now judged to be vibrant because it now has some coffee shops and a bakery that is not Gregg’s.

  Here where I live in the south west of the city, where Lord Austin’s old motor factory was demolished and replaced by glass and concrete and, more pleasingly, some rewilding along the river Rea which is really just a brook in this particular area, the Digbeth Dining Club has been hosting regular pop ups of five or six traders which it has named the Longbridge Dining Club and, our peculiar microclimate (persistent wind, lower temperatures and pop up showers) allowing, is a source of entertainment for the population where not very much else happens apart from minor crime (most of the pubs have closed and no-one seems prepared to risk their money opening a decent restaurant in the area). Now a building is being erected in conjunction with the Digbeth Dining Club at Longbridge to provide a permanent home for Street trader-type businesses. Is Longbridge about to become cool? A centre of the Street Food industry in Birmingham? The latest Stirchley but with fresh air and a lot of greenness? More than likely I think.

The new home of the Longbridge Dining Club under construction

  With that in mind I took the dog along with me to a recent session of the Longbridge Dining Club. The showers were repetitive and insistent but in between there was blue sky and moderate sunshine and the wind was quite soothing. There were only 5 or 6 stands and not a burger in sight. There was a steak sandwich stall, a drinks stall, an Indian food stall, a dessert stall but I choose to give my custom to a stall selling bao and south east Asian curries. And very pleasant it was too.

The Longbridge Dining Club

  

  To start I chose a very good gua bao - a very tasty version of Tiger bites pig (hu yao shi). Not being at all knowledgable about the consumption of baos, I enjoyed the bun itself very much and the nicely cooked diced pork belly it was served with had a splendidly unctuous sauce. It proved to be a happy way to pass a minute or two, so much so that I returned to the stall to treat myself to ‘a second course’.

  This was a good helping of a beautifully cooked chicken in a coconut sauce. The chicken was over seasoned but the accompanying spices helped to moderate the flavour and the accompanying salad was very good - fresh with crunchy red cabbage - and the rice was very well cooked. My bias against street food was moderated as a result of this excellent little meal under the summer clouds in the fresh breeze.

Chicken coconut curry

  It is just possible that as the combined damaging effects of COVID-19 and the present appalling Birmingham City Council (BCC-19) on the general state of the city centre continue to unravel, Longbridge, or somewhere like it, may emerge as an alternative  to the city as the place for Brummies to travel to for rest and relaxation particularly to track down good food. Now, is there anyone out there who wants to have a go at opening a smart restaurant here?

139. Street Food In Birmingham. Goodbye Digbeth, Hello Hockley. Goodbye Beefburgers, Hello Venisonburgers.

   I think I have made it clear before that I haven’t been caught up in the lemming-like plunge from cliffs into a sea of expensive, often somewhat unpleasant street food served on nasty cardboard trays that has become inexplicably popular in this city. Much of it just isn’t very nice. There are a couple of recent developments in this aspect of Birmingham dining that are worth mentioning here.

  Firstly Digbeth Dining Club is no more or at least not in the form in which those who like that sort of thing (mostly aged under 40 who have lead a life of whining and who are now prone to long-COVID) have come to know it. It has been based in Lower Trinity Street since it began almost ten years ago in venues such as Mama Roux’s and Spotlight but as the triumph of the government’s vaccination campaign enables the hospitality industry to be reborn imminently the DDC has revealed that it will open a new venue in the Jewellery Quarter in Hockley. DDC does say however that it is looking for its own venue in Digbeth, the charms of which remain lost on me to this day, and that the venue will be, “a place where we can grow, develop, champion independence and incubate the best food traders, musicians, DJs (I don’t think they’re referring to dinner jackets), artists and makers that the region has to offer”. So that’s alright then. The new location in Hockley will be in Great Hampton Street and it is said that the “Hockley Social Club will still feature a line-up of street food and DJs in a 10,000 square feet space” (really you’d think that cool street food-consuming dudes would have converted to metric measurements by now).

  Meanwhile Birmingham’s appalling City Council which is dominated by a Labour Party locked in perpetual civil war between the Corbynistas and Starmer’s Limp Left faction, which in itself does not give much hope for good governance, and made up of a lot of worthless inner city councillors who make no contribution to the progress of the city apart from claiming their £18000 annual ‘expenses’ (they’ve just voted themselves a substantial rise again) and anything else they can get their hands on along with councillors representing privileged members of the wealthy, self-satisfied left leaning-middle class who have swarmed in places like Moseley and Harborne, has taken it on itself to withhold licenses from long established street-traders unless the traders introduce an “innovative approach”to what they offer for sale. 

  In reply the traders have taken the council to court accusing it of wanting to “gentrify” the city centre which one expects is just the vision that the denizens of Moseley and Harborne and their council representatives probably do hope to see happen. In court the lawyer representing the Council was forced to deny that the Council wished to replace current stalls selling beefburgers with those selling chai lattes and Tibetan curries (I had to look up what a Tibetan curry is and had to conclude that it most certainly has a home in Moseley). The lawyer for the Council, one Jonathan Manning, said that an “innovative approach is what the council is looking for”. He continued that traders were not required to sell “something that no-one has ever heard of, that no-one knew existed” (not Tibetan curry then obviously). “if you are burger van (an interesting piece of transformation in itself) you can still innovate within the burger market by selling goods that are perhaps more diverse than you were previously selling,. An example could be perhaps a vegetarian line or a different kind of meat - one could have a venison burger”. Such drivel. Frankly I find most burgers to be pretty unpleasant but I do support the traders who have worked in this city through all sorts of weather over many years and resent the assault on them by those who represent the Tibetan curry-eaters who live in their million pound houses in Moseley and such suburbs. If they want a venison burger then you are bound to find one in B13 or B15 and you can wash it down with an over-priced  Côtes de Rhône at the same time.

What is a Tibetan curry? Well nothing special I wouldn’t think though it is said to be less oily than Indian curries and have a “cleaner, healthier feel” (that figures, I’m surprised Birmingham City Council has not already made it de rigeur in all Birmingham restaurants). Recipes on the internet seem to centre on bright yellow potato curries and while genuine Tibetans (I’m not sure how many there are in Moseley or Harborne) use a yerma peppercorn in their’s, western recipe variants seem to feature a lot of fenugreek. So now we know. I wonder how soon it will be before Birmingham city centre is full of Tibetan curry stalls and if one will find its way to the Hockley Social Club (actually to give myself an easy time I often make a potato curry and like to use a lot of fenugreek so I think I have been several years ahead of the denizens of Moseley on that one). However I haven’t yet made myself a venison burger.

10. Birmingham Food Geniuses. The Wilderness Is Regenerating.

The Wilderness ... Not Dying But, Like Dr. Who, Regenerating.

  I've just had a very happy couple of weeks - firstly going to lunch with a very good friend at Alex Claridge's "The Wilderness" and then, the very next day, to lunch at Purnell's, the day before the restaurant closed for a few days for a well deserved summer break. Lunching at the establishments of two geniuses on 2 consecutive days is a true gift from Heaven.

  And indeed Claridge and Purnell truly are geniuses though one of them has had only a short time to prove his brilliance while the other has had long enough to prove that genius doesn't fade.

  The Wilderness - the location is convenient - a minute's walk from New Street Station but Dudley Street is rather insalubrious and uninviting. Still once you've located exactly where the restaurant is and you've entered it then its quirky moss-covered walls make you forget that you're you're located near an adult shop and under a grim concrete bridge.

  The menu is presented as a story though I was not entirely sure what the story was though my own interpretation was that the story was about fabulous, inventive, delicious, brilliantly original edible works of genius. The menu, the story, is depicted below. I won't describe each course because I shall find it hard to not overuse words such as delicious, brilliant, wonderful and so on. But particularly memorable - I shall never forget this dear little bird whose fate it was to give the utmost pleasure to an old bloke - was the quail dish with its little thigh so beautifully tasty that I still say that this was the most enjoyable little bit of bird that has ever delighted my taste buds.

  I must not fail to mention the perfectly cooked Iberico pork dish with its remarkable pickles and the splendid rhubarb-based dessert.

  Claridge is a great cook but also a clever and inventive artist. Birmingham has a number of great chefs but Claridge has added brilliance which makes me use the word "genius".

  Don't forget Claridge's spooky petit fours, where else can you get to eat chocolate human skulls? And he has carried this spooky quirkiness over into a trailer video titled "The Wilderness Is Dying" to draw attention to his news that he is to move the restaurant and open it up along with a bar to the building which is next door to Adam's pop-up restaurant when it was situated in Bennett's Hill off New Street. The old, moss-infested Wilderness will close on 23 December and reopen in February 2018 in this much more appealing location. Personally, I can't wait to see what it's like though being rather staid and old I should like the decor to be that little more conventional but then again who knows what Alex Claridge will come up with? Something pretty unique I expect. More chances to show us his genius are coming along. And Birmingham food lovers can only be delighted at the prospect of what 2018 will bring us. The Wilderness is not dying but, like Dr. Who, regenerating into a new body.

  And so to another genius whose history I covered in Blog 9. I've developed my own personal tradition of lunching at Purnell's on the day before (always a Friday so far) the restaurant is closed for the staff's summer holiday. It gives a chance to make sure I taste Glynn's summer menu and also just a chance to experience a great pleasure which is to be denied for the next couple of weeks or so.

  And of course, as mentioned in Blog 9, "Purnell's" has now been open for 10 years. And I'm sure he's just getting better and better. I had the 5 course lunch which is immaculately good value at £45, the illustration below details what was served.

  Pork's obviously the meat of the moment - it was served both in The Wilderness and Purnell's - but how lovely to have fillet rather than tiresome belly which we diners have had to put up with from various establishments all over the country for many years. You might guess that Purnell's Wiltshire pork dish was cooked perfectly and the accompanying tamarind blatjang and the splendid little turnips made this a dish to remember.

  But before that had been a truly fabulous dish of pan-cooked plaice (hopefully sous vide cooked fish is an entity never to have to be endured again) with remarkable Rose pickled onions and summery broad beans. The fish was so perfect and tasty that it is wrestling with Claridge's little quail thigh I mentioned above for my award of favourite dish of the summer.

  These dishes do, though, have strong competition in the form of Purnell's ingenious and delectable "Chocolate and cherry" - the ultimate word in deconstructed Black Forest gateau - with its eminently delicious sorbet and quite magnificent frozen cherry "cloud" which is another one of those gastronomic experiences in life which one should not miss. The dish was let down a little by some rather flavourless fresh cherries but such was the brilliance of the rest of the dish that one could forgive Chef for the vagaries of English fresh fruit.

  There are also some new petit fours served with the coffee and delicious they are too but I am pleased that the fabulous blackcurrent and anise jellies are with us still. I always save these little flavour bombs so that they are the very last element I consume of my Purnell's meal. I can live happily on a diet composed entirely of these products of Purnell's brilliance but then again I'd never have got to taste Purnell's Brixham plaice dish or Claridge's wonderful little quail thigh and how much emptier my life would have been!

  Birmingham is Food City with its great chefs and Culinary Geniuses be they long established or newer to the scene. We are lucky, aren't we?

  And on the subject of new young culinary geniuses, we await news of Ben Tesh's new restaurant and of where it will be and when it will open. Even more to make us happy and full of expectation.

  Finally, the Digbeth Dining Club pleasingly had an away day in Longbridge. Here on the edge of the city in south-west Birmingham it can feel a little remote from the activity and excitement of the city centre so full marks to DDC for coming here and treating we yokels to the pleasures of a street food selection of some variety. The locals - what no doubt Giles Coren would call "One eyes" (see Blog 6) - turned out in their numbers to make the most of the opportunity- there were families in notable evidence and a number of accompanying dogs - my Labrador would have been mortified to miss the event, she just loved sniffing out any food that had been dropped.

  Hmmm...it hasn't been a bad summer at all really.