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.

513. The Comfort And Sheer Pleasure Of A Fine Gastropub.

 

  I have great sympathy with the loonie Head Chef, Julian Slowik (played by the supremely creepy Ralph Fiennes) in the masterpiece of cinema, The Menu (2022) when he says to his soon-to-be-slaughtered diners, “But I have to beg of you one thing. It’s just one. Do not eat. Taste. Savour. Relish. Consider every morsel that you place inside your mouth. Be mindful. But do not eat. Our menu is too precious for that.”.

  I find myself not deriving much pleasure in eating. Julian is quite right - the pleasure of dining out emerges from the the tasting, the savouring and the relishing. And also there’s enormous pleasure in just looking at a finely presented dish. But eating - the process which also includes the loading up of the stomach and the alimentary tract downstream of the gastric bag - can be unpleasant especially if the volume of that bag is stretched to its limits by excessive food being loaded into it or, perhaps, the stimulation of the acid of the stomach in aggressive quantities. Eating therefore may also lead to bloating and acidity and there’s not much pleasure in that.

  Thinking about it all, one thing that today’s chefs seem to pay too little attention to is aroma. They stimulate the eyes and the taste buds (and as an unfortunate side effect, the stomach’s acid-secreting cells) but it’s unusual to be in a restaurant and be pleasantly assailed by an enticing smell of gorgeously roasted meat or tantalisingly caramelised onions or freshly baked bread. Perhaps aromas belong only in a south Asian restaurant with its emphasis on aromatic spices - and they are more rare there than they should be - or an old fashioned and rustic setting such as an old pub. Yes, stimulation of the olfactory sense in an alluring way is a much neglected feature of how chefs present their food. 

    Whether or not my first cranial nerve is being stimulated, and it’s nice when it is, I do like to be comfortably seated when I dine. The present obsession with fast food whereby one buys a good quality food item made with love but then is forced to eat it (though of course we should not ‘eat’ as Julian points out and as Margot points out to him when he uses the term) sitting on some uncomfortable wooden and aluminium chair or bench or perched nervously on a backless stool at a dizzying height enough to initiate an acute episode of high anxiety (how many film titles can I fit in this piece?} is all very regrettable and greatly reduces, for me at least, the pleasure of consuming that food (perhaps Julian would like diners ‘to consume’ rather than eat - I may use the verb more often).

  Well there’s none of all that when one dines or lunches at The Wildmoor Oak Inn in Wildmoor near Bromsgrove. It’s such a comfortable, warm place to eat, er, consume. I have written about my previous visits there and I recently returned for more instant pleasure. A pleasing welcome, a comfortable chair (though the tables (necessarily I suppose) are a little too close together) and the gastropub’s autumn menu. What else could an old bloke want?

  I chose a fabulous starter from the ‘specials’ menu, three truly jumbo, superbly devilled red Argentinian prawns, splendidly tender and drenched with flavour, the degree of devilling was as perfect as one might wish - yes, and the aroma of prawn, first cranial nerve satisfied - with little brown shrimps - mini textural masterpieces - served on toast. This was a robustly enjoyable dish and I did indeed taste, savour, relish and consider every morsel that went into my mouth - Julian Slowik. would have been pleased though at the end of all that I did actually eat it all and gained great pleasure from doing so, so perhaps Julian might not have been so happy after all. But I was happy and that was all that mattered.

specials menu

  From the main autumn menu I chose Blythburgh pork chop with bubble and squeak and braised red cabbage as my main course. The pork was pleasingly tender and generously portioned though it may have benefitted from a little more seasoning. The bubble and squeak was not successful in that the outer coating was charred - I assumed this had been Chef’s intention - and not all that pleasant but the interior pieces of potato and cabbage, unmolested by the charring, relived grand old working class English food in a dish. The accompanying sauce was pleasant but I longed for some apple which is such a perfect marriage partner for pork. The red cabbage was excellent with just the right texture and not oversweet. 

  I was rather disappointed by the dessert which again was one of the specials. I was lured into choosing it by the mention of the Worcestershire apples used in it (it would have been nice to see them making an appearance with my pork chop) but it was a sort of poor man’s tarte tatin - delicious nicely cooked pommes, heightened by caramelisation, sitting on a few sheets of filo. This seemed like a lazy way to present fine local produce - the filo was nice and crispy but in the presence of the apples, lightweight and lacking in ambition. These apples deserved to be served in fine pastry as the principle element of a great apple pie.

  Nevertheless, putting my apple moans to one side, I derived great pleasure from my lunch in the cosy comfort of the Wildmoor Oak Inn and already feel the need to return there to again enjoy myself.

Rating:- 🌞

18 October 2025.

  Jumbo prawns also gave me considerable pleasure as a starter when I had lunch at The Oyster Club by Adam Stokes a few days earlier. Again I was comfortably seated and warmly welcomed and feeling thoroughly happy even before my prawns with accompanying aioli had been delivered to my downstairs table. The prawns were very nicely textured and tasty and, yes, had discernible prawn aroma to them, so again cranial nerve one was satisfied.

  For my main I chose, as I often do, Dover sole with a little shoal of perfectly textured brown prawns and samphire scattered over it like magical marine fairy dust. This dish is one of Birmingham’s most noble main courses and the consuming of it represents a few minutes well spent. 

  The dessert was rather disappointing, sadly. This is the case with desserts all over the country. Pastry chefs are so vital and so thin on the ground. My message to restaurateurs woukd be to invest in one and make a big thing about it. An accomplished one will raise your restaurant to new heights. This dessert was edible enough - a tasty, icy strawberry parfait with undoubtedly unseasonal strawberries between wafers. Well, who goes to a fish restaurant for the dessert?

Rating:- 🌞

9 October 2025.

  Why, you may ask yourself, did Julian Slowik feature so heavily in this edition? Simply because Channel 4 is presently streaming the movie and I saw it again for the first time since I viewed it when it had its first cinema release. Like a fine meal as with this ultimate gourmand’s film, you remember the pleasure of it but not necessarily all the details and it was delightful to relive all those forgotten memories again.

  My other favourite foodie film is of course Ratatouille, probably the greatest dining out movie of all. In it once more there is a sinister figure, this time not a chef but a diner, Anton Ego the restaurant critic, After years of dining on the sophisticated cuisine of fine dining Paris he eventually finds gastronomic peace in the comforting food of his childhood, a plate of perfectly cooked ratatouille. Isn’t that the way we’d all like to exit the stage? Though in my case substituting the ratatouille with a perfectly cooked plate of battered cod and chips. Yes please. Thank you very much.

Anton Ego, gastronomic paradise in a plate of ratatouille

454. The Wildmoor Oak Inn.

  Living close to the south west edge of Birmingham, visits to Bromsgrove and north east Worcestershire ought to be easy and, true, there’s a train to Bromsgrove or Redditch via Barnt Green and Alvechurch but if one wishes to visit the villages some distance from the stations and one is not driving a car then things become more problematical because public transport is very poor and local taxi services do not necessarily respond to one’s needs in any convenient way.

 That is why I had not yet visited Wildmoor Oak Inn located between Catshill and Fairfield located along a country lane off the road to Stourbridge. Fortunately I had a friend who wished to join me for lunch and who was prepared to drive me there and so my opportunity to eat at this self-declared gastropub was seized upon with much positive anticipation. The Head Chef there is Peter Jackson, brother of Holly Jackson, partner of Brad Carter, who was Head Chef of Carter’s of Moseley before Carter decamped from Moseley (the restaurant is now home to Sartori, listed by the Michelin Guide just six weeks after opening and serving Japanese-style cuisine - a report to follow shortly). 

  Peter Jackson had studied at University College and his training had included stages at Purnell’s and Simpsons and Bank and a period at the Hotel Intercontinental Hotel Dieu in Marseilles under Lionel Levy before going to work firstly at the Fat Cat in Solihull and then with Brad Carter when he opened the Moseley restaurant in 2010.

  The Wildmoor Oak was reopened on 20 May 2024 after an eighteen month refurbishment carried out by its new owners, Bex Wilkins and her wife, Sarah Robinson, who had both previously worked at Peach Pubs which runs a number of gastropubs in the West Midlands region including The Highfield  in Edgbaston, The One Elm in Stratford upon Avon and The Rose and Crown in the Marketplace in Warwick, and further afield.

Peter Jackson, Head Chef, Wildmoor Oak Inn.

Wildmoor Oak Inn

A pub with a postbox, what could be better?

  There’s little doubt that The Wildmoor Oak is charming, located as it is at the end of a country lane so typical of this corner of north west Worcestershire. A tiny babbling brook runs through its grounds and the large car park has a public footpath running through it and walkers can have a pleasing walk across the lovely, green, rolling Worcestershire countryside before settling in at the delightfully warm and cosy inn. And the inn has been designed accurately to bring a homeliness to it - glowing fires, print covered walls, patterned banquettes, comfortable, non-shabby, old furniture, even an eclectic range of traditional style plates and ceramics from which to eat. 

  The welcome was fine and my lunch companion and I were shown to our table. This was a crowded part of the room and some of the lunchers already there had loud voices and a tendency to shreek or cackle when laughing which one or two did quite frequently and so we requested a slightly more isolated table where we could enjoy the atmosphere without being persecuted by gaggling - this was duly allocated to us.

  The closeness of neighbouring tables was probably the only problem we encountered during our visit to the Wildmoor Oak. Bex Wilkins and Sarah Robinson clearly learned a lot during their time with Peach Pubs and have put their experience to good use in the way they have paid attention to every detail in setting up the excellent gastropub. But what about the gastro- part of it all?

  Carter’s it isn’t. This is extravagantly rustic English fayre prepared with intense care and humorously clever quirks of deliciousness. This is not just delicious, comforting English food but it’s all that but prepared by a top chef. This is irresistible top of the range pub food at a sensible price which leaves one not only more than satiated but glowing with intense pleasure. We made a good fist of the menu. For starters, I chose brown onion soup with cheese on toast. I had visions of thin brown soup heavily populated by shreds of sweet onion and a massive cheesy crouton à la Française but my expectations could not have been more wrong. Peter Jackson was clearly making no concessions to Frankish tastes - this was a bowl of thick, warming, perhaps not so brown, potage and the crouton was good old cheese on toast served separately and none the worse for that. Jane Grigson would have admired this fine serving of English - and not European - food which shouted out that culinary Brexit was indeed a reality!

 

  As her starter, my lunch companion chose to order from the list of snacks - ‘pigs not in blankets with Paxo mayo’. This was exactly what the menu said - three fine English sausages (not encased in bacon), well cooked and humorously enhanced by the Paxo mayonnaise - all the flavours of that grand old English packet dried stuffing mix. We both felt we wanted to rush out and buy a packet of Paxo and add it to some mayonnaise and serve it to friends and pretend we invented it.  Great stuff! I had rather expected these to be short cocktail sausages but these were the real thing that would under other circumstances make fine hot dogs (I much more prefer hot dogs using good English sausages over frankfurters to which I am not very partial).

  Neither of us could resist the lure of the haddock and chips served with mushy peas and curry sauce. We have both lived through decades of fish and chips and while peas are always the perfect accompaniment neither of us feel the need to add curry though we appreciate that may not be the case with the young and the less experienced (in my time I ate battered ‘hard’ cod’s roe out of tins - and loved it (but I was quite young), ate battered haggis when the local chip shop tried putting it on the menu (I was still quite young), gratefully accepted the bags of batter bits which chip shop owners were happy to give away (I was still quite young) and always had a giant pickled onion to accompany my cod, chips and bread and butter (or sometimes pickled red cabbage or pickled sliced beetroot - oh, those were the days but curry sauce was never on my horizon). But full marks to Peter Jackson for moving with the times.

  The haddock and chips were perfect, they were fabulous, they were divine. Harry Ramsden could have taken lessons from Peter Jackson, The batter was crispy and gorgeously golden and not too thick and the haddock was divine - white, meaty, delicious. The chips were perfect - unimpeachable. The peas were a little bit of an afterthought and the curry sauce was not too exciting but there was a very good tartare sauce. Again, just fish and chips, you might think, but English culinary artistry at its best.

  We were both too full for desserts but we had one anyway. My companion wanted a light dessert and the meringue with winter fruits seemed to fit the bill - it did, though when it turned up it looked generously portioned by any stretch of the imagination - but she thought the meringue was excellent and of a pleasing consistency and nicely balanced by the berries. I had seen the apple and pear crumble with custard on the menu and formed an irresistible urge to try it. It was very good - the crumble light and infiltrated by clever occasional bursts of sea salt which seemed to me very innovative and successful and the custard was made beautifully - again, light and suffused with as much vanilla as one would hope for.

  We departed feeling mellow and well fed. This had been top flight pub food in an excellent setting. ‘Pub food’ does not do it justice but as I say, it was not Carter’s - but it didn’t need to be.

  Rating:- 🌞 

16 January 2025.