520. Sunday Lunch With Beef Wellington At Harborne Kitchen

Former Head Chef Tom Wells.

Head Chef Patrick White.

 

  The thought of a beef Wellington Sunday lunch at Harborne Kitchen was irresistible and so I indeed did not resist and went on unhesitatingly to reserve my table there. Since I last dined there, former sous chef, Patrick White, had replaced Tom Wells as Head Chef, the latter having gone on to be Executive Chef at Hogarth’s Hotel in Dorridge. The restaurant has been redecorated in a cooling, sophisticated, soothing grey with restrained boxes of healthy-looking green plants trailing from high up and positioned under them colourful and perfectly apt tiles. Music was perhaps mildly intrusive but Harborne-cool as REM and Michael Stipe slithered out across the ether. The Harborne Kitchen is aptly named as comfortably off Harbornites chatter away, imbibe and in the back of their mind shiver at the nagging fear of what Rachel Reeves will come up with next.

  A thrillingly warming Old Fashioned taste-alike cocktail made with Bourbon and called Honey and Wine proved to be a secret pleasure until it was whipped away unfinished and mourned. Sunday service does seem rather brisk. Regardless, there was a lovely amuse gueule to start, an inoffensively small portion of Hereford beef tartare sitting on a satisfactory chunk of beef fat potato terrine with a tiny hint of confit egg yolk and the pleasing acidic hit of pickled walnut.

  The starter was a pleasingly cooked Orkney scallop serving interestingly with Jerusalem artichoke, julienne of refreshing, tangy fresh apple and a buttermilk sauce. This was accompanied by an enjoyable slice of sourdough and whipped homemade butter both of which were very good.

  Then the Beef Wellington. This is why I had come to this particular Sunday lunchtime.

  The Wellington was very good and the beef excellent - in fact - I would say that it was absolutely perfectly cooked and the tenderness spot on - very good beef indeed.The surrounding duxelle was tasty and did its job and the pastry was pleasing  The accompanying horseradish sauce was too subtle in its heat but the beef fat roasted potatoes were particularly good and acceptably crispy with well cooked interiors. The roast parsnips were nice and sweet in a parsnip sort of way and the glazed turnip was well cooked but contributed very little. The creamed spinach was as interesting as spinach can aspire to be. 

  Then the great pleasure of a tarte tatin which in this case was made more interesting by using quince rather than apple or pear or even pineapple which has been unsatisfactory when I have been served it in the past. Then quince had an excellent texture and was tasty but less so than apple usually is. There was also a rapidly melting, somewhat unconvincing vanilla ice cream but it’s hard not to enjoy a well made tarte tatin as this dish was. Finally a familiar mignardise, a pair of lips, which is always welcome.

  I wound down after this fine Sunday lunch with another Honey and wine cocktail. I would have been happier if the service, while fully meeting my needs and being appropriately friendly, had been a little calmer and I do wish that on taking one’s seat one is not immediately told that, effectively, one is welcome but only for the next two hours after which one will be expected to settle up and make way for another group of temporarily welcome guests. Yes, I know the economics of running a restaurant necessitate the turning of tables and I accept that but does the announcement of the temporariness of one’s possession of the table at which one has just sat down have to be made immediately on arriving?

  One other trick which might have been pleasing would have been if one of the uncut Wellingtons had been brought to the table to show off the artistry of the complete item. But everything was just too busy,it seemed, for that open.

Rating:- 🌞

30 November 2025.

229. Butchers Social

 

  By way of introduction to the Butchers Social it’s worth taking a, er, butcher’s at Blog 211 which reports a visit to Harborne Kitchen located in the old Walter Smith’s butcher’s shop where the first incarnation of the Butcher’s Social Club was founded by present Chef Patron Mike Bullard and Harborne Kitchen’s Jamie Desogus.

  Subsequently, in 2018, Bullard moved the BSB to the building in Henley in Arden where Glynn Purnell has just opened his first venture into pubs, The Mount (where I’m lunching tomorrow), and then, his family purchasing the The Forest Hotel in Dorridge, moved the BSB from Henley to the hotel in 2021. Sometimes it seems you can tell the history of West Midlands dining by mentioning just about ten buildings.

  Dorridge itself is an unremarkable, rather twee 1930s suburb for the comfortably off and it’s clear that Bullard was remarkably canny in opening his new restaurant there. The town is not a place you really take much notice of; the number of times I’ve sailed through Dorridge on the train journey from Birmingham to Stratford without lifting my head to take a look at it are countless. But it is exquisitely conveniently located close to Birmingham on the railway line and it is a matter of a few minutes journey from Moor Streetjcbzck or Snow Hill stations. And The Butcher’s Social can not be more than 20 yards distant from Dorridge Station - a brilliant location. 

  Here’s an interesting point which needs to be considered. Suddenly, apart from Kray Tredwell’s opening of his excellent but rather diminutive 670 Grams, all the major developments in West Midlands dining out are taking place not in the city itself but in villages/towns around it. Thus Tom Shepherd opened his new restaurant in Lichfield and just a few months later was awarded a Michelin star, the starred Peel’s restaurant is located in Hampton in Arden and has now been joined there at Hampton Manor by Stuart Deeley’s Smoke and the remarkable Grace And Savour. Based on his recent pop-up in Lichfield I tip Rob Palmer to be the next starred West Midlands Michelin-starred chef for his newly opened Toff’s in Solihull. And Glynn Purnell himself is extending out into the surrounding West Midlands with his highly publicised The Mount in Henley (did I mention I shall be lunching there tomorrow?) situated across the road from Matt Cheal’s fabulous Cheal’s of Henley which has surely been wrongly overlooked when it comes to the handing out of Michelin glitter.

  And what’s happening in Birmingham city centre itself with its failing trams, its tyrannical Council, its filthy streets and catchpenny’Clean Air Zone’? Nothing new to report. And that’s bad news for the city for all the great new chefs and some of the great older ones have sensed the direction the wind is blowing and that direction is straight out of the city. In fact we may be witnessing the closing days of Birmingham’s gastronomic golden age. 

  So, to where the action is …. Dorridge.

  The Butchers Social, located at one side of the Forest Hotel, with a nice outdoor seating area, is a pleasure to enter, spacious, attractive modern decor, a smart bar, an open kitchen where the smartly turned out chefs are beavering away. The front of house staff are excellent, knowledgeable and welcoming. And isn’t it nice to have a simple three course menu with a good but not excessive range of gastronomically titillating dishes on it. I was comfortable and entering into the spirit of things and a glass of Hendricks and  tonic was getting air into the sails.

  For my starter, after a consultation with my very wise and charming waitress, I opted for three beautifully pan-seared scallops with miso, hazelnuts (which seem very in vogue at the moment) and watercress salad though I am bound to say that the watercress was more of a garnish than a full blown part of the dish (pleasingly, after my recent excursion to Weston super Mare (see Blog 228) it at least was not a peashoot garnish). This was a delicious start and I really felt that I was enjoying myself.

  In our deliberations, my waitress and myself had agreed that I should have a dish of stone bass (sublime, am I bad person for wishing that chefs would dump the turbot and serve more stone bass? - yes, I know turbot is far too expensive to ‘dump’ but still ….) served with punchy lobster ravioli, three charming seaweed, dumplings, a pot of enjoyable greens (kale, leeks, hispi cabbage and broccoli) and a highly enjoyable slice of dauphinois. Every element of the dish was excellent and I consumed it like a trencherman. 

  By now quite euphoric, I studied the dessert menu and concluded that these were my sort of desserts. Eventually I settled, again in learned consultation, for ‘pinky winky’ cherry parfait, decently flavoured, with tiny peaks of mango purée and coriander and mixed berry ice cream which was bursting with sweet sharpness. I’m a little bored with granola but I could see the point of it. Eschewing coffee per se, I chose another item from the dessert list - affogato with which I am currently obsessed - served with Kahlua, something which I may now consume on a twice daily basis.

  How lovely it is to really enjoy a meal. Butchers Social is now up there in my pantheon of West Midlands restaurants I most want to eat in.

211. Harborne Kitchen.

 

  Having girded up my loins recently to visit Moseley with the extremely pleasing result that I had my first meal at Carter’s Of Moseley for an excessively long time, it was time, I decided, to finally head in the opposite direction to Harborne and set out for Harborne Kitchen. Both districts are home to the well-heeled and therefore, along with Edgbaston, the most likely suburban locations (though none of them are really all that far from the city centre) to be able to support expensive, highly rated restaurants (Harborne was formerly home to Turner’s - see Blogs 13 and 18) which is a description aptly applied to Harborne Kitchen and Carter’s Of Moseley.

  Harborne Kitchen was opened in November 2016 by its Chef Patron, Jamie Desogus, who said at the time that the restaurant would be focusing on “precise modern British cooking”. He said that he had the inspiration for opening the restaurant while dining at The Clove Club in 2013, later awarded a Michelin star, which offered a “new style of unpretentious fine dining to foodies”. Desogus, who was born in Kidderminster, himself in the past had worked in the kitchens of Michelin-starred restaurants including Gordon Ramsay’s Petrus. Prior to opening Harborne Kitchen, Desogus was cofounder of the ‘pop-up’ restaurant in Harborne, the Butchers Social, which centred itself on serving chicken wings and The Harborne Kitchen was then opened in the old Walter Smith butcher’s shop (once so widespread in Birmingham) which had been the home of the Butchers Social. He had also previously worked in Turner’s for a period (how well I remember Richard Turner’s scowling face looking around at the diners in that restaurant as he stood on the dining room side of the door to the kitchen).

  As a footnote to be returned to in the future, the Butcher’s Social under Chef Director Mike Bullard moved to Henley in Arden (in a building across the road from Cheal’s of Henley) in 2018 and reopened in 2021 at The Forest Hotel in Dorridge (the building in Henley in Arden now being taken over by Glynn Purnell for his new pub restaurant - The Mount - which is soon to open. The West Midlands culinary scene - forever evolving.

  But back to The Harborne Kitchen. It was awarded a Michelin Plate in 2018 in the 2019 edition of the Michelin Guide when the restaurant was described as, “Modern British - Neighbourhood. This neighbourhood restaurant is surprisingly spacious - long and narrow, with an open kitchen at its heart; the tiles depicting a bull harking back to its butcher’s shop days. Modern dishes have a Scandic feel and feature some unusual combinations. The seats at the counter are a popular choice”. Now the present online guide summaries the restaurant as, “Deservedly loved by local diners, this contemporary neighbourhood restaurant serves a set menu of interesting modern dishes prepared using excellent ingredients. At its hub is an open kitchen, where you can watch the passionate team at work: the tiles bull is a throwback to its butcher’s shop days”. The tiles bull, a Hereford I think, is one of those sights worth seeing for a Birmingham diner - meaningful, historic art which few other Birmingham restaurants can lay a claim to having as part of their decor. The bull itself gives a visit to the restaurant a sense of occasion. In its way it’s as noteworthy and historic as the twee painting of the street urchin in Roux’s Le Gavroche in London.

  But let’s launch into the food. After a pleasing welcome and a thoroughly delicious gingerbread-flavoured cocktail the amuse gueules came flying to the table one after another, “One, two, three, down the hatch, yum yum” to paraphrase Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited (but he was talking about Alexander cocktails not the fabulous little nibbles which were presented to me). From the word go it was obvious that the theme of the evening would be intense flavour. The first two little nibbles came mounted on crisps, first shockingly delicious Devonshire crab looking a little lost sitting in a scallop shell balanced on top of a large bowl of large pebbles (are pebbles, hay, edible soil  and so on all getting to be a little passé now?, I wonder). Still I get the point, there’s the crab scrabbling over some seaside rocks. 

  Much easier to spot was a wondrous nibble of chicken parfait with glorious sweet incursions of white chocolate, a delight indeed. And then the final nibble, a fine little tartlet of River Wye smoked eel with the flavours of heritage tomato and subtle hints of horseradish. Sometimes I dream of a restaurant which serves a meal just made up of numerous amuses gueules and that it is located in the building next door to where I live. Perhaps such an entity exists in Paradise and these three appetisers are there on its menu.

  Excellent bread, tasty and with perfectly crispy crusts, accompanied by an unusual and successful smoked yeast butter

  Then pasta, Sicilian pasta to be exact in the form of a thoroughly enjoyable dish of malloreddus, mini-armadillos in a creamy, cheesy sauce with a fine covering of 60 month parmesan and truffle and looking like an old man’s beard and fabulously flavoured. And then a truly great dish, the Roscoff onion, a crispy onion-flavoured tuile sitting on a bed of deliciously puréed salt baked potato with blue cheese and all with a little moat of stupendous miso. 

    More intense flavour presented itself in the form of sweet seasoned shrimp and kohlrabi tartare with nasturtium leaves. This dish could not be improved on, it’s flavour again makes it a classic. Next, to a dish of beautifully cooked brill - what a noble fish it is with its lovely moist white flesh and a pleasant respite from the ubiquitous halibut - served with sea aster leaves which made a real contribution, and soy and ginger. I wondered at first, was it a little too salt-flavoured? and then decided it was not and that it was the mild ginger flavour that had given me my early doubt. 

  The meat course - a fine piece of venison, cooked exactly how I like it, on a bed of tasty Savoy cabbage enhanced classically with the flavour of bacon and served with roast sliced celeriac and a celeriac purée with a sprinkling of chocolate which made sense but really did not seem to do all that much for me. I did have reservations about this dish - the celeriac two ways. Both of the celeriac offerings were tasty, the purée intensely so, but I could have done with just one of them - perhaps the purée and the roast sliced celeriac substituted by earthy potato instead.

  My least favourite dish was Baron Bigod, which showcases the Suffolk-produced unpasteurised soft Brie-like cheese of that name. My paternal ancestors lived in Suffolk from some time in the 6th century up until the late 19th century and among my ancestors are the Bigods, the original in England being the first Earl of Norfolk, one of William The Bastard’s most loyal henchmen who came across with him from Normandy in 1066. So Baron Bigod cheese, the first batches of which were produced by Jonathan and Dulcie Crickmore in 2013, has a special place in my gourmand heart.

  I do not usually have the (normally optional extra) cheese course with tasting menus - an old bloke’s stomach can only cope with so much - though I am a great cheese lover (it must be the sliver of Norman French in my genes) and it’s good to see a chef attempting to make the cheese course more interesting and using the intensely flavoured Baron Bigod as its centre piece. But the dish looked extremely inelegant and the presence of quince and amaranth though charmingly harking back to an older cuisine was not such a great success as one might have hoped. I think on the whole that the cheese course, if one is to have it,  should mainly keep to its traditional format but perhaps a second visit to Harborne Kitchen and a second indulgence in Baron Bigod may convince me otherwise.

  Then, great happiness. The ice cream trolley was wheeled up to the table in a great piece of restaurant theatre (perhaps not quite as dramatic as Birmingham-born Monsieur Joseph’s carving of the pressed duck at the Savoy - see Blog 146 - but great fun) and the pre-dessert was served - a delightful pairing of soothing bay leaf ice cream and scintillating mandarin sorbet served on a bed of crumbled polenta cake and with toasted almond. Another little gem. 

  I have no idea why it is (cocktails, wine perhaps?) but I frequently forget to photograph the final dessert and so the excruciatingly memorable “70% chocolate, coffee, Jerusalem artichoke” is visually unrecorded here. But no matter, its  memorability is not really visual but its remarkably unpudding-like flavour and squidgy nature of the artichoke and the hyper-crunchy toffee tuile which actually all did come together to make an unusual and enjoyable dessert. Great stuff! A pair of miso caramel-filled sparkly lips rounded off an excellent meal which made me sure that though this was my first visit to The Harborne Kitchen since it opened six years ago, my next visit would be considerably sooner. 

  

    So, I had finally visited the complete 2021 list of Michelin-rated restaurants in Birmingham in the space of the past twelve months. All, admittedly, except Opus which of course has not been open in the past twelve months thanks to the depredations of COVID-19 and Birmingham City Council and its unending roadworks. What a great city Birmingham is, despite its Council, when it comes to dining out and gastronomy. 

  One final thought; I took the opportunity of my Harborne excursion to amble down the High Street to take a look at what had happened at the location of the previous Michelin star-awarded restaurant, the eponymous Turner’s to once more relive in my mind being scowled at by Richard Turner as he surveyed his contented diners from the door to the kitchen. There now is a pleasant looking Asian restaurant, Tiffin.  I don’t expect I will ever get around to eating there, but who knows where the Michelin inspectors will visit and what idiosyncratic conclusions they will reach?

178. Ludlow Food Festival 2021.

 

 After a necessary year’s break (though there was an online version in 2020) the Ludlow Food Festival, Britain’s first, has returned to Ludlow Castle as autumn arrives in a timely way. Lucy The Labrador and I were in town for when the Festival opened its gates and I was surprised to see how many people were waiting to be admitted. 

 I attended all the talks from West Midlands chefs on the stage during the first day and broke them up by exercising the dog and visiting the fast food and other stalls. It was hard to believe that anyone was taking the pandemic seriously, no-one at all was wearing a mask, social distancing was a forgotten concept and the only visitors forced to keep their distance from the food tents were the multitude of dogs who, when you think about it, were probably a far lesser threat to the health of the humans than other humans. 

 The first speaker of the opening day was Reuben Crouch of C-Sons on The Green and C-Sons of Shrewsbury. He had been a speaker at the 2019 Festival and well worth listening to and he was the first speaker of the day to reflect on the difficulties of the pandemic and the possibly even greater difficulties now experienced by the hospitality industry due to the shortage of staff and the difficulties associated with supply problems.

  Well worth listening to was the Suffolk Food writer and Fisheries journalist, Mike Warner, who talked about preparing the various ingredients for a fruits de mer dish. The interviewer admitted she had never eaten an oyster so far in her life and was therefore encouraged by the audience, like a Collisium crowd gesturing a ‘thumbs down’ sign, to sample one, a fresh raw specimen. Warner advised that the best way to achieve most pleasure from the shellfish was to chew it and relish it slowly - first the salty, maritime “flavour of the ocean” followed by a sweetness and ending with a metallic burst. The interviewer was game though reluctant and with a moderate amount of gurning set about her task hardly with relish. She indicated that this might not only be her first oyster but also her last. 

  And then an enjoyable cooking demonstration by Andy Link, chef at the Riverside Inn in Aymestrey in Herefordshire. He had first spoken at the event about, I think 15 years ago as a mere lad, and now gave an account of his career and work in a fine restaurant in a Marches village and how he had dealt with the unique problems of the last 18 months.

  The final demonstration of the day on the Wardington’s original stage was by Mike Bullard, founder of the Butcher’s Social Club, now located in Dorridge. Bullard was asked about the evolution of his restaurant from a ‘pop-up’ in a butcher’s shop in Harborne, the several months of carrying on serving burgers and beer from there till he established himself in Henley in Arden. He found his restaurant was popular in the village but there was not sufficient passing trade and so he has recently moved on to the Forest Hotel in which The Butcher’s Social Club is now situated which offers greater opportunity for catering for events. He talked about how much of the restaurant’s meat is cooked in water baths (good for beef and lamb apparently, less so for pork) which greatly eases their preparation of large amounts of food. Well, each chef must choose what is best for his business but sous vide cooking may make good business sense but it often results in a less than satisfactory outcome for the diner - not so much Chef as artist as Chef as Swimming pool lifeguard. My enthusiasm for visiting the Butcher’s Social Club was considerably reduced by the prospect of everything there being largely cooked sous vide.

 

  In between listening to the talks, Lucy The Labrador and I toured the fast food stalls. Inevitably the longest queue was waiting at the Beefy Boys stall. My enthusiasm for burgers is usually only a little greater than my enthusiasm for food cooked sous vide but the previous evening I had had a perfect burger, precisely seasoned (which is the key) in the ‘Bistro’ (the former sitting room) of Fishmore Hall (it was accompanied by a sensuously delicious relish and very fine chips) and I resolved to see how the Beefy Boys burger matched up to the delight of the previous evening. I chose the Beefy Boys original burger - more simple and less encumbered with numerous additional ingredients - with its ‘original’ and ‘secret’ accompanying sauce. It was not really all that good. The Beefy Boys burger was desperately under-seasoned and the sauce unmemorable and really now one has to ask what all the fuss is about. Prize-winning in the past, I believe, but now nothing to place it in the firmament of great burgers. The number of customers queueing may say differently but it looks to me that the makers of this product have been living on old successes for far too long and need to take a long hard look at their tired product.

Beefy Boys burger, tired and underseasoned

The dog at least remained a fan

Fishmore burger, great chips, delicious relish

  The businesses occupying stalls at the Food Festival are little changed from previous years. There’s a wealth of local cheeses, ciders, ales, charcuterie, pies, meat, pottery, utensils, condiments, preserves, chutneys, relishes, breads, pastries, greengrocery and so on if you wish to buy. And very good it all lookks too. And of course there are countless opportunities to buy local gins from businesses around the area. Ludlow Gin is a major sponsor of the event but in name at least my favourite has to be Gun Dog Gin.