527. Christmas At Hotel du Vin Stratford Upon Avon.

  In recent years, the beloved and greatly missed Lucy II and I have passed our Christmases in Ludlow at Fishmore Hall. In early 2024, the owner, the remarkable Laura Penman sold the boutique hotel with its Michelin listed restaurant, Forelles, to a businessmen based, I think, in West Bromwich and immediately large cuts were made to the quality of service in the hotel (while the room rates and food prices remained high) and the quality of the food served in Forelles. The service was often chaotic despite the efforts of one or two loyal staff and chefs came and went (I was told one stayed just a couple of hours) and last Christmas everything came to a head with a restaurant full of annoyed customers there for Christmas lunch for which they had paid a very large amount of money.

  I had still hoped to visit Fishmore during 2025:but my dear old dog died in March and little Lucy III, then aged 9 weeks, came to stay with me on 21 May and really was not ready to stay in other people’s property for a few months though I hoped to take her to the Ludlow Food Festival in the second weekend of September and stay at Fishmore then but I was told there were no vacancies and that was why Lucy and I passed the Food Festival weekend at The Feathers in Ludlow town. I contacted the hotel about staying for Christmas but I was told that Christmas 2024 had been such a disaster that it had been decided to close for three days. And so it was that Lucy and I had a change of location for Christmas 2025 and chose the Christmas package being offered by a hotel we regularly stay in whenever we are in Stratford upon Avon, the very dog (and human) friendly Hotel du Vin located in Rother Street. As for poor Fishmore Hall, it is up for sale again. Let us hope it finds a buyer who will treat it (and its staff and customers) with a lot of love and respect after the disgraceful way the present owner has abused the whole idea of hospitality.Bizarrely, Forelles remains in the Michelin Guide. I suspect this provides evidence that Michelin inspectors do not visit the restaurants that are included in the guide on a yearly basis or even on a two yearly basis because if that were the case, Forelles would certainly and sadly not find a place as a recommended restaurant in that particular book at present.

  The welcome to the Hotel Dublin was lovely, the room was familiarly spacious and we settled in instantly after opening the rather nice gifts left for us in our room, of which more later. Because this Blog is mainly about dining out, let us proceed straight to the food, after all this was Christmas and first there was Christmas Eve. Christmas Eve dinner allowed a spending of £35 as part of the Christmas package and this went a nice way to paying for my starter of prawn cocktail (it surprised me when it arrived at the table as I had ordered coquilles St Jacques en croute. I queried the order and I was told that I had definitely ordered prawn cocktail - the confusion was not easy to explain because although ‘coquilles’ sounds, I suppose, rather like ‘cocktail’, the word ‘scallop’ had been used more than once during the ordering process. The prawn cocktail itself was unremarkable - the salad only made up of lettuce and nothing else but the Marie Rose sauce was passable & the prawns plentiful. Still, I was rather lusting after the coquilles.

  The main course was an extremely well cooked piece of pan fried cod (pavé de cabillaud) with a nice crispy skin served with a accurately spiced curried cauliflower and absolutely delicious vinaigrette of pomegranate, golden raisins, red onion and lime. This was a great success and my disappointment about the coquilles was rapidly dissipating. Four dessert I had a somewhat disappointing trifle - there was hardly any fruit in it and no sherry. Trifles need sherry and in generous amounts. So a very good main but not somewhat unsatisfactory bookend dishes.

  Lucy the Labrador settled in for the night, happily comfortable and quite tired. In the morning on leaving the room, I saw that each room had been visited by Father Christmas during the night and little individual knitted socks were hanging from the door handle filled with a tiny candy walking stick and three chocolate gold coins. How sweet and what fun. On arrival, on the previous day, gifts of a bottle of champagne and a container of bath salts awaited me on my arrival along with a packet of toothsome chocolate praline Christmas trees.

  And so to Christmas Day lunch and I arrived in the restaurant to find a charmingly laid table had been allocated to me. There was a splendidly sized, pleasingly cheesy gougère as an amusement gueule and then I had chosen a very good starter of chicken liver terrine with a sweet fig and plum chutney, cornichons and toasted brioche. Things were going stingingly and the dog found her first Christmas lunch (as an observer up until then) to be a gripping and fascinating experience.

But the proof of the Christmas lunch lies in the turkey. This was really very, very good. The turkey was full of flavour and absolutely perfectly cooked - it was unimpeachable and the best Christmas Turkey I have had for years. It came with a good stuffing and a marvellously phallic pig-in-blanket and tge vegetables were generally well cooked - the red cabbage tender and not oversweet, the roast parsnips and carrots tender and tasty and the roast potatoes reasonably well done. The only disappointment for me were  the Brussels sprouts - sprouts, like Christmas, come but once a year and should celebrated by perfect cooking. I have been presented with some real stinkers in my time - boiled to a soggy pulp or served as hard, and bitter, as bullets. I do like my sprouts to be tender and not al dente  which is how many chefs seem to serve them. The texture of these sprouts, for me, erred too far towards the latter but others, no doubt would have praised them for the restraint applied to cooking them. Such is life.

  I had preordered my dessert and had chosen trifle again. It was similar to the first dish that I previously bred served but had more flaked almonds which made it a little more interesting. 

  Boxing Day dinner was somewhat disappointing though it started very well as I was able to pay 50p for a £14 glass of Kir Royale in the cosy bar due to a couple of offers the hotel was making. And very good it was too. For my starter I had a very satisfactory pâté de foies de volaille, an enjoyably not over-rich chicken liver parfait again with a nicely complementary chutney and toasted brioche.

  I was not happy with my main which seemed to be the leftovers from Christmas Day. It was suggested that I might like the roast beef - which sounded highly tempting and looked good but had the feel of being reheated meat from the day before and the accompanying vegetables had the same look about them. There was a nicely puffed up Yorkshire pudding but it was dry and unexciting and gave little of the pleasure that Yorkshire pudding should give.. There was the ane unctious gravy, which was needed, as at Christmas lunch. This was not a good main course. If I had wanted the Christmas Day leftovers then I could have stayed at home and served them myself.

  I had ice cream and a sorbet for dessert. 

   My final evening at the Hotel du Vin was altogether more enjoyable. After two heavily discounted kir royales in the bar, I had a hot, warming, bowl of sweet French onion soup with its cheesy lid - splendid - then I continued with the French theme by choosing roulette de ratatouille en galette des pois chiches gratinée au four (ratatouille in chickpea pancakes baked until golden). This was a great pleasure after all the heavily traditional English meat-based fare of the preceding days. The ratatouille was delicious with a toothsome sweetness to it and the pancakes were crispy and gave a necessary texture to it all. French and vegetarian - what is happening to me?

  I coukd not resist a class of splendid Royal Hungarian Tokaji to accompany my dessert. It was a great priblem - there were two new desserts on the menu. Firstly there was rum baba for which I always have and had then, a great longing but there was also galette des rois, the famous French dessert served at Epiphany and made from puff pastry and filled with frangipan and here served with an excellent vanilla ice cream . It was too good an opportunity to miss and I opted for the galette and was overwhelmed by the pleasure of it - it had the correct swirling patterns in the pastry which was perfectly cooked and was an inviting golden brown. The frangipani was delicious and the whole extremely memorable. A perfect dish to round off Christmas.

   The next morning, the dog and I once more enubered after an initial crisis in which  the driver who had taken on the job as a uber pet job suddenly decided he could not take Lucy because he had a allergy to dogs. Luckily, another driver appeared to be just seconds away and whisked us away from Stratford to bring us back to Birmingham and a necessary rest.

Rating:- 🌛🌛🌛🌛

After thought - as above - Christmas comes but once a year. Just like sprouts do. 

The painting below is titled ‘Seven Brussels sprouts’ and was painted by Eliot Hodgkin (1905 - 1987), a well-known painter of still life’s, in 1955

428. Ludlow Food Festival 2024.

 Lucy The Labrador and I are back in Ludlow for the Food Festival - the original food festival in Britain. This is our tenth year (though of course we were not here in 2020 when a Festival of sorts was broadcast on line because of the pandemic we did not attend thr festival in body though we were in Ludlow physically.

  Once more we were staying at Fishmore Hall, as we always have, and the now old dog is familiar we the room we always have if not the staff who have largely departed after Laura Penman sold the hotel in January this year to a cost-cutting businessman who seems to be doing to Fishmore what Starmer is doing to the country. A lot of the joy seems to have disappeared from the place just as it has from Britain in general over the last two months or so. The kitchen staff all departed with the Head Chef Phil Kerry who had maintained the reputation of the hotel’s restaurant, Forelles, after his predecessor, Joe Gould, had moved on and matters culinary seem to have been very chaotic over the late spring and early summer. A new chef, Nicky Hull-Saldhana, who had worked for a long time in the Cayman Islands, was appointed in June and dining in Forelles seems to have improved with only an à la carte menu being on offer (three courses for a fairly stiff £55) but I am told that he will depart Forelles next week to be replaced by a Cayman Islands colleague, Alan Pressly, to whom I was introduced as he was arriving at the hotel.

  The dishes on offer generally have a veneer of fine dining but lack the finesse needed to see Forelles returned to The Good Food Guide or to maintain its presence in the Michelin Guide. We will have to see what chef Pressly brings to the party.

  My first dinner at Forelles brought with it an amuse bouche of a mushroom in a crispy batter on a rather rough looking pea purée, but who doesn’t like a piece of crispy batter?

   There then followed a starter of murky coloured but nicely textured leek and potato soup which was tasty and accompanied by well-flavoured smoked haddock and precisely poached egg. There was the inevitable garnish of the omnipresent pea shoot.

  A slice of sourdough with miso butter was served along with the soup. I was not too keen on the butter. Sometimes I would like to experience the pure taste of good quality English butter.

  The main was visually messy, wholly lacking in the finesse one would expect to be on display in a “fine dining restaurant”. But it tasted much better than it looked - blackened cod, nicely cooked and seasoned on a bed of mashed potato. Some sad pea shoots inevitably served as garnish and they did not add to rhe dish’s attractiveness.

  The dessert was very enjoyable and quite arty in its presentation though to be fair it was a passable strawberry cheesecake deconstructed with no very good reason.

  All in all Nicky Hull-Saldhana presents some pleasant and edible food but the presentation leaves something to be desired. It will be interesting to see if Alan Pressley brings more finesse to the dishes presented at Forelles.

Alan Pressley

  In my search started before the assault by the COVID-19 virus for great Ploughman’s lunches, I derived some pleasure for an example of the dish served at Fishmore especially as the plate included to be, aptly, Shropshire Blue, though one fully understands that Shropshire Blue is not made in Shropshire?

  And so, to the festival. I attended some of the food demonstrations including that by a Gareth Johns, ‘Slow Food Ambassador for Wales’. This was helpful especially as Johns gave an explanation of what ‘Slow food’ is exactly, particularly as the term seems to have become very trendy. Basically it is food that isn’t fast food and not slow cooked food.

  I should have liked to be present at the food demonstration given by Stuart Collins of Docket in Whitchurch but unfortunately his session clashed with an excellent tasting demonstration on cheese and drink given by Emma Young, author of The Cheese Wheel. Emma concentrated very appropriately on local cheeses which, because no cheeses are made in Shropshire other than Ludlow Blue from the Ludlow Food Centre, involved presenting Cheshire and Welsh cheeses.

  I was very impressed by the demonstration by Ivan Tisdall who earlier this year opened Native at Tenbury Wells at the location of the former Michelin starred Pensons. It was interesting to hear how pleased he was to have exchanged the pressures and costs of London for the quieter rural location of Worcestershire. It emphasised to me how fortunate to live here in the West Midlands rather than London which may have far more to offer but at a much greater price.

  Dinner again that evening at Forelles. After an amuse bouche the starter I chose of trout gravlax came with little blobs of beetroot relish dotted all over plus, I think, a saffron cream. It was quite enjoyable but, goodness, what a fussy presentation.

  The main was made up of three very nicely cooked slices of lamb served with pickled walnut and another rendition of beetroot. This was a very enjoyable dish and the lamb was just as I should have liked it. I chose not to have dessert.

Rating:- 🌛🌛🌛.

411. All Change At Forelles.

 

  After about three months away from Fishmore Hall, I had a grave foreboding as my driver pulled up in front of Fishmore Hall. A new owner, based in West Bromwich of all places, lusting seemingly after a chain of hotels to add to his nursing homes and other properties, had obtained Fishmore from the hotel’s founder, the remarkable Laura Penman, and appeared to be in the mood to cut costs at Fishmore whether or not the service suffered. Most of the excellent staff who were present at the beginning of the year had departed, the garden is looking disorderly and the couple of staff who have worked there for years soldier on providing reassuring, friendly, recognisable faces that the hotel dearly needs.

  Head Chef Phil Kerry departed from his post in May 2024 and the hotel has had problems recruiting a successor. It seems that most of the kitchen and restaurant staff departed at the same time. Hotel and restaurant owners must realise that we are in a new era - the hospitality industry is desperately short of staff and if you don’t pay staff enough money then they can easily find a job elsewhere..Fishmore would seem to be at the sharp end of this staffing market crisis.

  The Forelles kitchen crisis seems to have been particularly serious in the late May/early June and hotel residents were not served meals except at breakfast time. An attempt to provide a Tasting menu (without an à la carte alternative) over the weekend when the latest Head chef took up his post was not successful and so a two or three course à la carte menu is now in play for dinner with a limited à la carte available at lunchtime. Reducing costs was very much at the forefront of the new approach to dining at Forelles. Out goes Fine Dining and in comes Bistro. The Guidebooks need to change their references to Forelles if they decide to include the restaurant at all.

  To start, a slice of very ordinary bread paired with some very ordinary butter was served. Right from the word go, cost cutting seemed to be the new theme. At the same time an ‘amuse bouche’ was presented. Apart from being oily there was little taste to this bowl of emulsion despite four little crispy bits being present in the dish - no attempt was made by the polite but clearly brand new young waitress to explain what it was. I deduced that it must be a bowl of mayonnaise with nothing to go with it. It was flavourless and vaguely unpleasant.

I failed to photograph my starter because of a degree of pallaver associated with it. I had ordered confit tomato bruschetta. It was a long time coming though one feels the time to prepare it might not have been lengthy. Some discord arose at the table next to mine when an elderly lady was surprised by the appearance of her main course which had been delivered by one of the very inexperienced waitresses. Both the diner and her husband were of the opinion that she had not been served the dish she had ordered which should have been scallops with fried black pudding and ‘pea pot fricassee’. The gentleman pointed out to the waitress that there were no scallops present on the plate while the young woman insisted that the confit tomatoes actually sitting there were indeed ‘scallops’. My suspicions were aroused and I stood up to claim what very likely was my starter which it indeed proved to be. The elderly couple were correct - there certainly were no scallops on the plate. Most of the tomatoes were flavourless though the dish was rendered a little more interesting by heat coming from some added spice but the bruschetta was somewhat soggy and the dish, as a whole, was gloriously mediocre.

Fresh drama arose next door to me when the gentleman who had correctly identified that the supposed scallops were really tomatoes drew the waitress’s attention to the fact that he had requested rare steak and that which was served to him was anything but. To be fair, the overcooked meat was swiftly whisked away and replaced with a specimen more in line with what had been ordered which is fair enough.

And so my very own plate of three plump, nicely seared scallops arrived at the table with the accompaniments already mentioned above. The scallops were satisfactorily cooked for my tastes though I could see that one or two scallop aficionados might have expressed the opinion that they were a few seconds over. In contrast the black pudding was probably a few seconds over but more moist than some I have been served but two of the pieces came complete with the wrapping paper around them. The pea pot fricassee was unremarkable. There seemed to be something missing perhaps because this is a dish usually served as a starter.

  There were just two desserts - lime posset and brownie with vanilla ice cream - which failed to excite me and so I called it a day reflecting on how things change and usually not for the better. 

  I later learned that the newly appointed Head Chef who is faced with the mammoth task of sorting out the Forelles kitchen is Joshua (Nicky) Hull-Saldanha who was born in Portugal and raised in England where he undertook his training as a chef. In 2007 he moved to the Cayman Islands where he first worked at the Ritz Carlton Hotel moving three years later to work at Cracked Conch for the next ten years and where he was Chef de Cuisine, then Outpost Bar and Grill in San Pedro and in December 2021 as Head Chef at U’NIQUE in Georgetown.

Caymangoodtaste.com reported that Hull-Saldanha was, “…at the Outpost cooking the food he loved, ceviche, any form of salted cod, sushi and fish stew such as bouillabaisse”. Perhaps that will give us an idea of what is to come at Forelles once the kitchen becomes more stable from the point of view of staffing.

Nicky Hull-Saldanha -

  I dined again at Forelles the succeeding evening. It had been a hot day and it was a fine evening and, if nothing else, the restaurant is a lovely place, a gorgeous, spacious conservatory with a distant view of Titterstone Clee Hill rising above the surrounding countryside looking never better than it does on a beautiful summer evening. I liked the look of the menu and I liked the way it had changed since the previous evening. An amuse guele was presented which was rather good - spicy steak tartare served on a circle of toast - in the past we might have expected it to be served as a croustade or tartlet - the cost cutting was showing already but the appetiser was tasty enough.

   Then, perhaps not entirely unexpectedly, my main course of lemon sole arrived, switching places it seemed with my chosen starter of smoked haddock rillette. The main was swiftly whisked away when I pointed out the error and it was not long before the pleasingly presented haddock rillette showed its face nicely complemented with little balls of apple and some trout roe. The smoked haddock gave it a punchy flavour and it was very nicely balanced with citrus but pthe dish was lacking in physical substance with nothing binding it together. Nevertheless, I enjoyed it - it was light and summery and made good use of the remnants of the smoked haddock which must have been in the kitchen after I had ordered it for what had been a substantial breakfast.

  I also enjoyed my main course - two small pieces of nicely cooked lemon sole fillets on a particularly enjoyable, very rustic bed of crushed potatoes and under two magnificent stalks of broccoli whose texture was very much to my taste. There was sweetness and citrus which perfectly complemented the sole.

  The desserts were the same as those on offer the previous evening and again I could not work up sufficient enthusiasm to order one of them but I left the dining room feeling generally happy with the food I had been served though fully aware that the Food Guides were going to have to change their description of Forelles if they decided to continue to recommend it all. I was told that the restaurant will soon have a new manager with more staff which is vital to keep this once excellent restaurant on its feet but the change in style of the food I think will see Ludlow lose another representative in the Michelin Guide, Good Food Guide and so on.

  Restaurant owners must decide if they want to cut costs or maintain a good reputation - there seems no doubt which of the two the present hotel owner has chosen and I mourn the likely passing of a fine gem.

Rating:- 🌛.

Post scriptum - shortly after posting this Blog, I discovered that Hull-Saldanha was to be moved to work at the hotel group’s restaurant in Droitwich and two new chefs from Romania had been appointed to work in the kitchens of Fishmore. It will be interesting to see what happens next.