536. Blacklock & The Fountain At Clent.

 

  Much hyped and opened fully only the day before I lunched there, despite some initial scepticism on my part, Blacklock, proved to be a totally enjoyable dining experience. At times I was alternately groaning and purring with the pleasure of it all. This is the third branch of this chain which strives to revive the era of the chophouse, the first being in London and the second in Manchester. I felt a little prematurely sniffy about it knowing it was a chain, albeit a rather short one.

  Situated in St Phillip’s Square next to Colmore Row and overlooked by the Grand Hotel, where my dog and I live to stay as often as we may, the spacious dining room is located in a building which was a Georgian vicarage in its first incarnation. Time moved on; at one time Brad Carter was planning to open his new restaurant there after he closed his original Moseley restaurant but the plans fell through and he eventually opened his new dining establishment in the Kings Cross area of London but in return Birmingham gained Blacklock from London and it really was a fair exchange.

 A considerable amount of time and money was spent on renovating the old vicarage and the result was an impressively sized, comfortable sort of space where the residents of Birmingham could relax over a dizzyingly modestly priced, delightfully rustic, brilliantly cooked and unimpeachably delicious meal. The service is friendly but efficient and the food is fabulous. This appears to be the beginning of a new era for dining out in Birmingham.

  I started off with an immaculately tasty crayfish cocktail - a generous helping of nicely textured crayfish with crispy lettuce (surely picked just a couple of minutes before!), creamy avocado lurking in the depths of the dish and surely the worlds most exciting Marie Rose sauce, thick and indulgent and provocatively spicy. Caramba! what a start! 

    But the main course was the real star, and how often that fails to be the case. A very satisfactorily sized pork chop arrived looked golden and tempting and for me it was just the right size. It was perfectly grilled, tender and moist, and the smoky flavour was as memorable as that of ant dish which I have eaten. I coupled it with triple cooked chips. The price seemed mildly deplorable - £5 for a small bucket of them - but as soon as I had tasted one  I realised that these were no ordinary chips - they were the greatest chips on earth - yes, really. The crisps were crunchy and the not overstated flavour caused by their being cooked in beef fat was celestial. This was, though rustic and unpretentious, a trip into the realm of culinary paradise and the chips were unsurpassable.

  And Blacklock had not finished even then. I chose the cheesecake with cherry compôte. It was as indulgent as a dessert could ever be. And it was served from a larger dish which was novel and mildly thrilling. The cheesy cream was gorgeous and the texture of the crunchy element was lovely and the cherry compôte was soothing and tasty.

  This was a very fine meal - one of the best I have had for a long time. In many ways it reminded me of Glynn Purnell’s new restaurant, Trillium, but more spacious and food sold at a fraction of the price and served hot. And this from a chain restaurant. Well, well, well!

Rating:- 🌞

21 April 2026.

 Four days later I enubered myself to Clent. It was a beautiful sunny day, more aestival than vernal, and the pretty, affluent village looked lovely as my Uber man drove through it en route to The Fountain Inn nestled in a quiet leafy road a good distance up one of Clent’s hills. It turned out to be an elongated, white-painted inn of some antiquity and I knew that the previous landlady, Jacqueline Macey, had raised its culinary reputation to a high level although it was never recognised by the restaurant guides. After her death in 2025, The Fountain was taken over by Mike Livesy who recognised its potential as a gastropub and rather smartly snaffled three young men to work there as chefs  - recognisable young fellers late of Simpsons (and for a short time, also of The Wilderness), and two of them Masterchef The Professionals contestants, - Evan Holliday who was appointed Head Chef, Jordan Johnson and Lewis Perks, a talented pastry chef.

  The inn’s interior is spacious, unfussy and comfortable. The service is quiet and unrushed and perhaps just a little too formal for the setting. But I quickly settled in and was given the printed menu and the blackboard specials which included beef Wellington after which I lusted but unfortunately it was only available for sharing by two. There did seem to be room for compromise but I felt I really did not want to cause problems especially as I was lunching quite late. So I ordered Prawn cocktail (for the second time that week), chicken and preordered my dessert.

  The prawn cocktail was excellent and the helping of prawns in it was remarkably generous though perhaps I should have liked at least one more salad element to make the dish more interesting. The lettuce was undoubtedly pleasingly fresh and crispy and theccroutons I suppose were an added textural element and the mildly spicy Marie Rose was delicious. This was an enjoyable dish though it had hard competition from the magnificent crayfish cocktail I had cooed over a few days earlier at Blacklock

  My main of roast chicken with confit thigh, ‘cabbage compôte’,  crispy hen of the woods and a remarkably delicious sauce supreme was excellent. The sauce was silky and full of flavour and the chicken was perfectly cooked, beautifully moist and tender. My only disappointment was the absence of any root vegetable prepared in whichever way the Chef preferred - I think it would have rounded the dish off.

  Then to the dessert - an excellent banana soufflé served with a delicious quenelle of banana and lime ice cream. The lime provided an excellent balance with the sweetness of the soufflé and all things considered, this was an enjoyable fine dessert to find in a country pub.

  Of course, the dishes in general and the soufflé in particular had the ring of Simpsons about them and there is a clear reason why that is the case - the former Simpsons young men who had been recruited to thrill the diners at The Fountain.

Rating:- 🌞

25 April 2025.

504. The Wilderness New Menu.

  As ever, there are changes at The Wilderness. Marius Gedminas has left his role as Head Chef to do some travelling with Turkish-born Ediz Engin leading a new young team, some of whom, I’m sure, will acknowledge Simpsons as their Alma Mater - including recent Masterchef The Professionals contestants, Evan Holliday and Jordan Johnson (see Blog 496) and soon another big change will be announced which will stun and shock. Despite all this, I was visiting the restaurant again because there was a new Control menu (the menu has a new splendidly gothic TW at the top of it) to try out and the chance of a new 6 course meal which is quite enough for me and it is very well priced at £65.

  This was an excellent lunch with Ediz Engin in charge of the kitchen apart from one course which really didn’t do it for me. My dining companion had no reservations at all. We both agreed, as we have many times before, that if this food were being served in a London that restaurant would certainly have a Michelin star.

  We started with a charming croustade, with good crispy pastry. How Indo like my amuses gueulesand then enjoyed

  We found the Raw course of flamed Cornish mackeral to be lovely, the mackerel’s flavour was restrained and for me all the better for being so and it felt all very summery with the scattering of peas and the soothing buttermilk. Then the vegetable course - Greens - which was something of a misnomer as the principle element of the dish’s colour palate was the crimson, where ruby meets amethyst, of beetroot bathed in a joyous ajo blanco, the subtle almond calming the beetroot. A very pretty dish.

  There was a choice of barbecued mussels in Cafe de Paris sauce served on toasted brioche or a fine - well, actually quite fabulous - plump Orkney scallop, perfectly cooked and full of flavour, served with a full bodied, delicious roe sauce and very edible seaweed. Although costing an extra £12, the pleasure the dish brought meant it was worth every extra penny.

  And so to the main course. We both chose lamb rump with anchovy, a courgette espuma and a condiment monsterously powerfully flavoured with lemon which appeared to have been installed on the wrong plate altogether and certainly seemed to me to be the worse possible match for the delicate lamb which itself was beautifully cooked but ended up being grossly assaulted by the lemon. This was a match made in Hell and not in Heaven and needs to be expelled from the menu with all due haste. Yes I know that the acidity of the lemon cuts through the fattiness of lamb but there is more to lemon than acidity and no matter how many chefs may say that this is a classic pairing, I beg to differ. Alas, poor lamb. 

     We were treated to a predessert which restored pleasure to the meal in the form of a play on cheesecake and then a fine seasonally summer dessert employing strawberries, a tonka ice cream and a pretty tuile, coloured and shaped, like a strawberry.

   There’s a new fresh team at The Wilderness. Apart from the unhappy lemon condiment served with the lamb, this was a very fine meal.

Rating:-  🌞🌞

8 August 2025.

The pass at The Wilderness, Ediz Engin & Evan Holliday, August 2025

Farewell to Marius Gedminas, seen here at ADC.

Here is the Submission menu, cost £135 - 

Ediz Engin and Alex Claridge,

496. ‘Bâtard’, New Faces At The Wilderness.

 

  Alex Claridge was organising another dinner at The Wildetness to try out new dishes on customers before wheeling them out on to his menus definitively. As usual the diners were expected to give feed back which would help to decide whether or not the dishes made it to the medal winners stand. From August, Claridge is aiming to change his menus to make them more accessible to the dining public and not just in the financial sense. Hopefully he will successfully capture the atmosphere of the mid-2020s rather than the late 20teens, an atmosphere which I admittedly rather enjoyed. This particular attempt to engage the vox populi he named Batard which sounded controversial but, though being playfully provocative to those who do not know, was simply invoking the name of a French bread - the batard which tells us more about Alex’s current thinking on direction than one might first think.

A real batard.

  There was also something else new about The Wilderness that evening - being the first to arrive and having an easy view of the kitchen, I spotted two newly arrived young chefs - young but familiar, late of Simpsons, Evan Holliday and Jordan Johnson, who had appeared earlier this year, quite memorably, in Masterchef The Professionals, cooking then very much in the style of Simpsons and their then mentor, Luke Tipping. The Wilderness had also recently appointed the fine young pastry chef, Lewis Perks (recently awarded second place in the Young Chef of the Year competition) which further depleted the talent in Simpsons’ kitchen (though I have no doubt that there will be many more talented young chefs wishing to work in that restaurant’s kitchens depending, I suppose, on just what Simpsons’ future is to be given that Andreas Antona has announced that he intends to sell the business - maybe there’s a reason they are all leaving).

  However, The Wilderness has also experienced an important senior staff departure with the loss of former Head Chef, the immensely talented Marius Gedminas, who, I was told is presently doing some travelling in Europe before returning to the United Kingdom to do some agency work.

  All these changes! But to the food. 

  Gougères - pleasingly - seem to be the order of the month as the amuse gueule of choice and when you’ve got a highly talented new pastry chef, put him to good use. And of course it all brings La France to mind and I have the feeling that Alex Claridge is finding thoughts of French cuisine crowding in on him. Which is good.

  I am becoming worn down by the ubiquity of Chalkstream trout but the next dish restored by ability to eat - nicely cooked to a perfect texture and perfectly married to wasabi and a buttermilk sauce studded with a brunoise of darling summer peas and other vegetables. This was an excellent dish.

Evan Holliday, Jordan Johnson & Sonal Clare

  Jordan Johnson served me his notable contribution of a fine beef tartare elevated by the zing of mustard  and mustard ice cream. Classic combination. A fine dish.

Jordan Johnson

  Then another triumph. This was a devastatingly perfectly cooked red prawn with spicy tomato jam and Café de Paris butter alongside a crispy brioche (looking rather like that previously served at Simpsons) and prawn head and a slice of lime to spray deliciously over the dish. Big prawn flavours and more besides.

  We moved on to a choice of Cornish plaice with Champagne sauce or Iberico pork presa with mustard sauce. I was delighted to have chosen the delightfully cooked fish with its fine sauce, pickles, the texture of pine nuts and a sea herb garnish. One of my dining companions opted for the Iberico and found it very toothsome. The dishes were accompanied by a splendid Caesar salad and barbecued potatoes which were a littleal dente for my taste.

 Then to the desserts and what a delight to be served pastry. Lewis Perks is clearly making his mark in his new home. Firstly there was a tremendous lavendar tartlet, generously portioned, the lavender subtle and not overpowering - in fact quite the nicest lavendar dish I can rember having - and made beautiful with a glistening raspberry sorbet and the humorous use of ‘sparkles’. 

  Then a little macaron, by way of a mignardise, crispy on the outside, gloriously gooey at the centre. I assume that Mr Perks was also responsible for that little gem.

  Just one thought - in coaxing the admittedly lovely brioche out of Lewis, perhaps Alex Claridge might have suggested to him to bake a bâtard loaf instead.

Rating:-🌞🌞🌞

10 July 2025.