518. GULP Collaboration With1485 Wines, Again.

 

  Once more, with much delicious anticipation, to Kay Winwood’s GULP, quietly nestled as it is among the jewellery factories on Spencer Street and this particular evening proving to be a warm and welcome haven from a monstrous downpour which had gone on all day, its nasty behaviour softened by it having been given a woman’s name - I forgot what it was - Deirdre perhaps, or Rebecca or Judith or anything really but whatever it was called it had the wrath of one who had been spurned, as the saying goes.(See Blog 512). Drenched but unbowed, I once more climbed the steep, ancient staircase up to the lovely dining room and was warmly greeted by both Kay and her dining room. and a couple of old faces frequently met at these special dining occasions.

  Tonight, once more, it was a dramatically kindly priced wine and dinner collaboration between GULP and 1485 Wines with the featured wines being those from the Moscone Winery in Dolcetto d’Alba. This turned out to be a very good evening. The meal started with the always welcome selection of salumi   A lovely choice of meats paired with enjoyable focaccia. Then on to a truly tasty plate of open ravioli stuffed with pea and ricotta - a freshness and deliciousness more of spring than of a grim autumn evening and very moreish.

  As we went along the representative of Moscone Winery presented the accompanying wines. I particularly enjoyed the Reblanc Langhi DOC which was paired with the dish that followed the next course - well roasted sweet squash enlivened by thyme and given texture by crunchy hazelnuts. This was a fine vegetarian dish - our chef was on the top of her game.

  Then, one of my favourite dishes of the year - superbly and perfectly cooked braised chicken - moist and tender - a triumph of chicken cookery and served beautifully alongside  green beans cooked absolutely spot on and again, for well-calculated texture - almonds as well as sorrel.

  Next, shifting to the food which was paired with the red wines, a slow-cooked beef ragu which was a little dry, I thought, though the accompanying pasta and cheese helped one to not dwell too much on that. In all, an enjoyable dish despite that one fault.

  We were well satiated and very impressed with the food we had been served. The meal was rounded off with a sharing plate of  frozen grapes - deliciously sweet - paired with squares of not fine overly aggressive chocolate, edible flowers and cheeses. A simple enough dessert I suppose but very welcome at the end of this very pleasing dinner.

  As I polished off the remainder of my final wine, I admired the table decorations and nosily watched what was going on in the factory next door and it took me back to when I was teenager and worked as an office boy in my summer holidays in one of the many Jewellery Quarter factories such as this. No-one then would ever have imagined that the Jewellery Quarter would become so gentrified and one of Birmingham’s centres of fine dining. 

Que sera sera

Whatever will be will be

The Future’s not our’s to see 

Que sera sera

What will will be .

To be honest, I did indeed know what my immediate future was - stepping out into the bleak wet night having summoned my Uber. And so, it came to pass.

512. GULP Collaboration With 1485 Wines.

 

 Back to the Jewellery Quarter and an evening at Kay Winwood‘s Gulp where she was serving an Italian 6 course meal in collaboration with the wine merchant 1485;which was showcasing Terre di Serrapetrona wines.

  The meal started with a sharing plate of various antipasti which was delicious and then moved on to what I think was quite the best salad I have had this year (and I have had quite a lot of salads inflicted upon me in 2025). It was made up of pecorino, the sweet citrus of orange which really lifted the dish walnut plus some bitter leaves which worked wonderfully well with the orange’s sweetness, fig and the happy crunch of candied. This was a delicious and delightfully memorable dish.

  Some excellent bread was served and a very tasty 15 hour-cooked beef ragu with not quite al dente tagliatelle and more pecorino adding to the pleasure of it all.

   Next porchetta which was a little dry for me with, tenderstem broccoli (this particular green is ubiquitous) and truffle polenta and sweet, sharp cherries to really give the dish a pleasurable lift.

  The dessert was lovely - warmed plums with nicely chewy almond ricciarelli (a biscuit originating in 14th century Sienna), lemon ricotta and pomegranate seeds. It was a fine, perfectly balanced dessert both in textures and degree of sweetness. I loved the little spoon provided to eat it with - it was a good example of the charming and original quirkiness of dining out at one of Gulp’s occasional dinners. 

  This was a highly enjoyable evening in Gulp’s unique setting which ignites a companionable chattiness among the dozen diners, usually strangers to each other prior to the meal, sitting around the prettily laid table. The wine pairings were excellent and a good time was had by all.

Kay Winwood 

Peter Bridgwater of 1485 Wines

Rating:- 🌞

27 September 2025.

451. GULP’s Two Turtle Doves Christmas.

 

  With Christmas rapidly approaching and several sorts of Christmas lunches already consumed at various venues with various acquaintances, I was happy to be returning on a dark winter’s night to the atmospheric location of Kay Winwood’s GULP, heading from the tram station by Key Hill Cemetery, glancing at Banksy’s Father Christmas next to the Temple of Relief, and thence down quiet Victorian streets, past old pubs lit like lighthouses, the air of Dickens’ Christmas Carol about it all, though transported to the Jewellery Quarter. Through the front door and up the steep old factory stairs and into Kay’s warm and gorgeously decorated dining room where soon after I was joined by several strangers and one old familiar face whom I often bump into as we do our rounds of the restaurants of Birmingham. It’s Christmas and everyone is chatting and we’re off.

  This is the Two Turtle Doves menu though I’m pretty sure that particular type of pigeon is a protected species and so I guess that the main might not precisely be the bird named on the menu. Anyway it’s  delightful to be sitting in the candlelight in this fascinating room like a Christmas (long) past. Rusticity is matched with style.

 There’s a lovely wintertime start with delicious smoked chicken consommé and winter herbs - warming, tasty, relaxing, soothing after the journey to GULP. Then a very pleasing truffled scotch egg nestled in a bed of fantastic, crispy, straw potatoes with parsnip apple purée and a delightful accompanying velouté. Cratchitt and his brood would have been very happy with this and there would have been no need for the prize turkey.

  The main was roast pigeon. This was more cooked than pigeon aficionados woukd have wanted and rather tough but for one who is far from being an aficionado, the flavour was milder than much of the pigeon I have been served and therefore far more tolerable to me. The pigeon was very well matched by roasted golden beetroots, the smoke of charred hispi and the punch of celeriac needed to partner the brazenness of the pigeon.

  As a worshipper of the clafoutis I spared not my pan of festive plum, pear and gingerbread clafoutis happily paired with mince pie ice cream and with a little, somewhat over dense brown butter cinnamon beignet. And finally, whilst supping coffee, some gorgeously textured pate de fruits and the extravagance of stollen truffle.

A merry Christmas seemed assured as I returned home, heading back to the station through the quiet streets of a Dickensian Jewellery Quarter.  God bless us, everyone.

438. ADC x Highland Park Collaboration.

 

  I feel it in my water - either still or sparkling - that Alex Claridge’s Albatross Death Cult (ADC) is to be the next Birmingham Michelin star recipient come the next Michelin star reveal ceremony, presumably to be held early in 2025. I’ve dined there more than anywhere else this year and have experienced the novelty of the food and genius behind the invention of it. It is special and should be recognised nationally for being so.

  Having long ignored Claridge’s brilliance as revealed by The Wilderness, hopefully the Michelin inspectors will find it in themselves to celebrate his culinary achievements by recognising them in ADC. By doing so, they will not lose face and additionally be seen to do justice. Twenty four hours after Glynn Purnell’s announcement  that he had closed Purnell’s, Michelin had, quite reasonably I suppose, removed the restaurant from its internet site, as had the Good Food Guide, and so it is to be hoped that at least one Birmingham restaurant finds its way on to the list of starred restaurants in the next edition of the guide. If that is to be the case then ADCcould well be that very restaurant. If it were located in London it undoubtedly would be, I have no doubt.

Purnell’s no longer in the guidebooks -

Michelin Guide - 

Good Food Guide -

  Things change. And for the present a new style of dining is riding high so much so that I found myself dining at an ADC collaboration with Highland Park whisky (in the past I had attended a similar collaboration at The Wilderness but it doesn’t hurt to repeat a pleasure from time to time. 

  It was a completely different evening compared with the night before when I had also visited the Jewellery Quarter to experience another one of Kaye Winwood’s enjoyable occasions at GULP (see Blog 439) - the dark evening with teeming rain had changed to one of pleasing late afternoon sunshine and blue skies. What a difference a day makes. How uplifting in mood. I was ready to enjoy what was on offer.

  What was actually on offer were dishes which I have previously eaten at ADC and I, from my own point of view, might have liked something novel but on the other hand, almost all my fellow diners were first time visitors to the restaurant so for them the dishes were new and exciting and, as far as I could tell, greeted with universal acclamation.

  So the first two items were pleasing canapés of Cornish mackerel sashimi - silvery and glinting, as subtle a flavour of the fish that one could wish for, and a delicate croustade packing with orange trout roe the colour of a translucent popping satisfyingly in the mouth like edible  bubble wrap.

   Then exquisite, tender mussels in a scintillatingly and exquisitely gorgeous burst of black peppery velouté matched perfectly with a Highland Park whisky Old Fashioned. The wholly edible with the wholly quaffable. Then came another old favourite, presented I thought better than ever before - an Atlantic scarlet prawn with a deeply flavoured sauce made from the head. The final savoury dish was lovely Chalk stream trout with tom yum. 

  The meal was rounded off with another classic ADC dish - the bowl of silky, delightful sushi rice ice cream with nori tuiles which had the entire room purring with vaguely sinful pleasure. There was a single scallop-shaped mignardise and a draining of the remaining whisky in the diners’ glasses and the deed was done.

   And so, home, under the wolf moon, bright in the clear night sky.

439. Gulp. Sensperiment With Food.

 

  It had been some time, to my regret, since I had been able to attend one of Kaye Winwood’s GULP food experiences but finally I was able to once more head for the Jewellery Quarter to see what she was able to do. It was yet another unpleasant evening of miserable rain and early darkness and it took a lot of mental fortitude to get up and leave my warm little house and head for town and then on to the Jewellery Quarter but I was keen to revisit GULP having enjoyed myself on previous visits. This time however things were different. For a start, instead of having to mount the steep staircase in the old factory which leads to GULP’s now familiar, rather charming dining room, this time I made my way down Pitsfield Street, around the corner from the Jewellery Quarter railway station to the very smart, very modern Goodsyard JQ - trés convenient - where Kaye was holding this particular session. 

  It was difficult to identify the exact address in the darkness - no-one seems to put house numbers on their doors around those parts but eventually it appeared that the location was the brightly lit Great Western Hotel - at least I think it was a hotel, it may have been just a collection of apartments; regardless, it was the sort of place where a bell needed to be rung and a receptionist needed to let you in and then you had to identify yourself and be approved. I imagine that’s how everywhere in England will be after a couple of years of this new, oppressive socialist regime which was ushered in three months ago and which, by its threatened measures, has the hospitality industry feeling it’s very much in the last chance saloon.

  But it was all very plush, Kaye was very welcoming and the small number of participants gathered around the laid table as though they were going to indulge in a spot of spiritualism using an ouija board. A cameraman, with an annoying sniffing habit, joined us and Kaye admitted that she was rather nervous about it all but she was among friends and sympathisers. She gave an interesting illustrated talk on the relationship of non clinical psychology and the enjoyment of food, touching on her favourite subjects including the Italian Futurists, the chef Massimo Bottura, “Gastrophysics The new science of eating” and taught us about the difference between bouba and kiki (ah yes! I have you there, most probably).

  The table was laid out with little snack-like portions of various edible items which illustrated how taste may be affected by the other senses. At various times we were called upon to wear red goggles and blindfolds, to rub our hands on a box with a covering of sandpaper (which apparently makes something one is eating at the same time taste more salty than it otherwise would), to listen to sounds which brought out the flavour of a peach truffle, to eat picked onion strips to illustrate its effect on salivation and, on the whole, to have a collection of oo ah! moments. Great fun was had by all especially when consuming some puffed up crackers dipped in Kaye’s splendid homemade mayonnaise, her blackberry jellies enhanced with Szechuan sugar and her splendid home-baked lemon madeleine.

  This had been a fine ninety minutes and an excellent example of the off the beat enjoyable  dining experiences available for gourmands de Birmingham to enjoy. Kaye Winwood is a great asset to the food lovers of the city.

Rating:- 🌛🌛🌛🌛.