People who know or who say they know, are raving about Samo, the French-style bistro in the Great Western Arcade, at present. Who am I to argue with them?
I returned for my third visit there having already had a delightful, generously portioned Sunday lunch there and a weekday lunch there where I found the choice just too limited (and I had also found the Café de Paris butter melted on my well-cooked bavette steak too challenging as it overwhelmed the steak with an unhappy bitterness). But dinner offers a far better choice, so I was looking for a restoration of the pleasure I had experienced at Samo when I had eaten Sunday lunch there.
Pleasurably crispy baton sliced into five pieces with two types of butter was my pre-dinner nibble and consumed alongside a very pleasing glass of Maison Antech Crement. Being old, and remembering antediluvian times when bread was, as Glynn Purnell would call it, “a gift from the kitchen” £5 seems a lot to pay for a small baton with butter but the bread was good and I looked at forking out this sum of money as my personal act of generous support to a small independent restaurant.
For starters, I chose the only ‘special’ of the day which was monkfish cheeks in tempura batter with a very fine tartare sauce. This was adventurous of me - monkfish is rarely as successful as it should be and I wonder if chefs are a little frightened of as it seems so easy to overcook it and render it into the chewy state of a badly overgrilled steak. Sometimes they overcautiously undercook it and that is equally verging on unpleasantness. I remember entertaining an already fussy friend who believes himself to be something of a gourmet as well as being a fine home cook, to dinner at Forelles restaurant in Fishmore Hall near Ludlow in the days before an Asian businessman from West Bromwich took it over and by way of profiteering destroyed its Michelin-rated reputation in a matter of days though Michelin, clearly failing to review it for long after the business had been taken over, retained its listing for one or two years after Forelles fell from grace. Regardless of all that, at the dinner in question, I was served a well cooked piece of monkfish tail while my friend had delivered to him a gloriously barely cooked piece of fish meat which sent him to paroxysms of frantic scraping away at the fish to find any part that was edible, behaviour which only ceased when I asked the kitchen to replace the horror on the plate. Maybe it was just an error but I suspect it resulted from a need to attempt to not overcook the fish. There’s certainly no doubt that overcooked monkfish is a progenitor of tiresome excessive mastication and should be avoided at all costs and serving the cheeks, an obviously cheaper cut than the tail, is risky. I thought the cheeks were as well cooked as one would hope for but there were three on the plate and I had lost interest by the end of the second piece - they were only moderately chewy which was good and the accompanying piquant sauce tartare was really very good. Perhaps when next serving a similar dish, chef may opt to use cod cheeks wbich are less fraught with danger and serve just two rather than three.
I clearly had some reservations about my starter but the main was a wholly different kettle of fish - it was a magnificent gurnard, cooked so that its flesh was perfectly textured and moist and its skin charred and smoky and served with a delicious vierge sauce studded with pieces of tomato and tiny chunks of caper, aromatic with joyous hits of tarragon, The side dish of frites was very pleasing with the chips again being nicely crispy and tasty with beef fat, but not quite as overflavoured as the first time I had eaten at Samo. The dish was generous in size and astounding to see when it first arrived at the table - ‘wow!’-worthy - and showed that there is some truly great cooking going on in the Samo kitchen.
For dessert, something not even vaguely French but whose ancestor was described by the very English Thomas Dawson in 1585 - trifle and in this particular case - “disco trifle” made with what were described to me as ‘best English strawberries’ as well as lashings of cream and plenty of hundreds and thousands. A perky little number.
Over the course of my three visits there I have developed something of an affection for Samo - sitting at a window table watching the myriad and eclectic Arcade denizens pass by, quaffing a glass of something or the other, temporarily feeling Demi-Français in this quietly atmospheric petit bistro being unobtrusively served with rustic fayre from Elliot Brown’s menu which is as much English as Gallic. I shall return, I hope.
Rating:- 🌛🌛🌛🌛
25 July 2026.
Finally, worth mentioning is the sight of Ozzy the Bull wearing a pair of giant groovy spectacles which I saw at New Strreet station en route to Grand Western Arcade. He was thus adorned to commemorate the recent first anniversary of the death of the Birmingham-born heavy metal singer, Ozzie Osbourne.
