550. What’s The Point Of Restaurant Guides?

   I asked Gemini - at a time when I hadn’t got anything better to do - about the subject of how useful each of the main restaurant guides are to the ordinary but discerning diner who was reasonably prepared to eat novel dishes and experience new cuisines. I know AI is often wrong - it makes things up and its research is not as thorough as it might be and I’m pretty sure it rather grovellingly tries to give you the answer it thinks you want to receive. Still it does its best. Anyway we had a pleasant interchange where it did indeed largely express views which were in line with my own. Firstly, is the Michelin Guide any use? Its reply -

    We then moved on to the Good Food Guide which under its present editor uses flowery descriptions and reviews not sparing in the number of words used and is largely aimed at middling middle class hipsters and students giving it the impression of it trying hard to dumb down good food. It has surrendered to trendiness and coolness and this is much to be regretted. 

  Then there is Hardens which is like a Sunday family roast lunch in comparison with the Michelin Guide which is dining at the Ritz. As such it is to be commended. It is a vox pop but mostly the pop is informed, experienced, knowledgeable and discerning. There are certainly some restaurants included in it which would not make the cut in any other guide. I remember sitting in one of the (Harden-listed) bistros on Stratford’s Sheep Street and talking to a couple in early middle age who adored eating there and dined there whenever they were in the town. I smiled supportively, and hopefully not too patronisingly, as they praised their technically unambitious and quite pricey main course, inwardly grimacing as I tried to find even a glimmer of pleasure from the seriously overcooked fish I had been served. Still, I like Hardens, a Guide For The Common Man.

    Gemini deemed that the AA Guide was the guide for me. And I think it might be right.

 The AA Guide sets out the landmark events its own evolution but in terms of it being a restaurant guide the important dates are -

1967 - Introduction of the AA restaurant inspection scheme

1992 - The AA rosette scheme is revised as a 5 tier rating system.

   To explore which Birmingham and West Midlands restaurants had been featured in vintage editions o tge AA Guide I obtained the 1990 edition and perused its pages in search of well thought of Birmingham and other West Midlands restaurants which the Guide deemed worthy of inclusion. It really was not terribly useful. It took far more interest in the hotels it was reporting on with passing reference to eating arrangements in most of them. I really would have been better served by a 1992 edition when the 5 rosette system was introduced. I ordered a copy from É Bay but discovered that I had mistakenly ordered a copy of the 1992 Egon Ronay Guide which was a good thing as I hadn’t paid any attention to that particular important publication up until now (see below).

  Apart from hotel dining the guide mentioned only two restaurants and indicated their grading while the quality of those located in hotels was not indicated apart from commenting on price and nature of the menu. The two mentioned were Sloan’s and The Lombard Room in Kings Norton - 

xxx “Sloan’s, 27-29 Chad Square … Unusually located in a small square of shops to the west of the city centre, this chic, split level restaurant offers an imaginative menu of dishes in the light French style, making good use of fresh seasonal produce, and complementing its cuisine with a fine wine list and friendly professional service”

xxx “The Lombard Room, 180 Lifford Lane …. About ten minutes drive south of the city centre and convenient for the M42 is the famous Patrick Collection motor museum, within the beautiful grounds is the complex that contains the Lombard Toom, the elegant conservatory which holds the lounge and bar - all furnishings and décor are of very good quality. A short, imaginative à la carte menu offers a selection of tempting dishes. The quality of the food is complemented by professional attentive service and a magnificent of wines.”

  I am won over - for the present at least - by the idea that the AA Guide is the guide of choice for diners rather than chefs. I look forward to the next edition. I shall deal with the Egon Ronay Guide and the story of its editor in a future edition of BFAOBP.

Egon Ronay 

431. Trentina.

  The Good Food Guide added Trentina, an Italian-style restaurant located in Mary Street in the Jewellery Quarter, to its list of recommended restaurants as a ‘local gem’ on 4 August 2024. It described the restaurant as, “a truly local diamond, a cheerfully informal addition to Birmingham’s Jewellert Quarter scene. Inside it looks and feels sparsely contemporary”. The Guide goes on to say that “Here you will find big flavours on a short menu that leans heavily on the pasta roller….”.

  It’s always difficult to find somewhere to eat on Sunday in the city centre but Trentina opens then and so, off I went. Autumn was well and truly entrenched and the continuing rain that had infested us for months coupled itself with a greyness worthy of Gandalf but Trentina was pleasingly easy to find, on the corner of Mary Street and Caroline Street, in the very heart of the Colmore family names system of roads, and was warm and welcoming on arrival, both from the front of house staff and the restaurant’s heating system.

  I sat opposite the bar on a not terribly comfortable wooden banquette but as my lower body gradually accustomed itself to the vaguely masochistic seating I had chosen, the discomfort was gradually dispelled by a pleasing gin and Sicilian lemon tonic and a perusal of the promising menu. I discussed the options with the helpful and pleasant front of house young lady and opted for nduja and mozzarella arancini and then the pleasingly decorous mafaldine ribbon pasta with pork shoulder, finely chopped leek all enlivened by sofrito.

  The arancini were magnificent - impressively large and even more impressively, gorgeously crispy and tasty with the rice being beautifully textured. The starter was a meal in itself.

  The freshly prepared pasta was excellent, irreproachably textured and accompanied admirably by the pulled pork and the perfectly pitched flavour of the sobrito. This was a generous portion to which I failed to do full justice but I enjoyed it very much.

  The desserts on offer were variants on the theme of soft icecream and I opted to have it as an affogato which closed the meal very nicely, especially with an accompanying limoncello. The Good Food Guide’s label of this restaurant as a Local Gem is very apt. If I lived in the Jewellery Quarter I can  see myself happily visiting there not infrequently.

Rating:- 🌛🌛🌛🌛

425. Lunch At The Harborne Kitchen.

  Harborne looked busy and thriving on the warm late summer day when the taxi carrying my dining companion and myself pulled up just around the corner from the Harborne Kitchen. I was pleased to have returned as, I think, almost a year had passed since my last visit. Tempus fugit.

  

  It is a smart, comfortable and interesting place which, as I have written before, was once a Walter Smith’s butcher’s shop and jolly good meat they served too - their beef was unrivalled in my family’s opinion in the area where I live. The welcome was pleasing and we moistened our throats with the Harborne Kitchen’s Passion flower Sour which did have a nice sourness to it but was also a little too sweet for my taste. 

  But we were there for the food and with us comfortably settled, and both having chosen the £100 11 course tasting menu, the show began. Firstly, a pleasing Devonshire crab arancini which was delightfully crabby and the rice had a nice texture but we agreed that the dish was too salty. We reached the same conclusion with the second amuse gueule - another pleasing English pea (and broad bean) and ricotta tart. The peas were cooked admirably well but to be perfect I would have liked them to have been a little sweeter. Then there was a little oblong of brioche covered with tasty aged Cheddar and a successfully crispy chicken skin. This canopé was not troubled by excess salt and was very enjoyable.

   Next was what for me was one of the highlights - two gorgeously tasty panisses accompanied by little dishes of herring roe, the colour of Whitby jet, sitting on a brown butter custard enlivened with spring onion. The panisses were first dipped in the roe and brown butter and the effect was an original and highly enjoyable take on fish and chips and then the remaining roe was scooped up with a little spoon to ensure nought was wasted. An excellent and clever dish.

  Then perhaps the weakest dish - a slice of Westland’s tomato with a tomato ponzu and lovage. The weakness was the tomato which was lacking in any real flavour as seems to be the case with tomatoes in general in this year of grey skies and occasional sun. Given the poverty of flavour, it might have been best to omit this weak dish though the ponzu was good and made me think I should have liked some gazpacho or cold soup in its place.

  On to the Malloreddus, by now very familiar to regular Harborne Kitchen diners. I liked the gnocchi though my companion thought them a little more dense than he would have liked them to be, but this was an enjoyable dish with punchy flavours and the joy of truffle.

  We both agreed on the excellence of a finely cooked, plump Orkney scallop served with pleasingly textured charred sweetcorn, nasturtium leaves and tiny morsels of chorizo as chorizo jam which gave an added different and enjoyable texture though I am not sure it influenced the dish’s flavour to any degree. Then the meat - excellent salt-aged Herefordshire beef cooked to give a texture which required just the right amount of chewing with a good body to it. The beef was accompanied by nicely roasted onion, a split beef sauce and the best part of all - precisely slowly cooked beef cheek served in a fabulous crispy tube of pastry looking for all the world like a piece of bone marrow - a crazy twist, I think, on beef Wellington - it was delicious.

  I like the way the Harborne Kitchen serves a cheese course prior to the desserts as in the days of yore - Tunworth served with a pleasing texture of amaranth and the sharp taste of burnt apple. Then a pleasing predessert of smooth, soothing yogurt sorbet with the great fun of puffed rice to give texture and the flavour of sorrel.

  Dessert proper took the form of a generous mound of meringue which enclosed a white chocolate mousse and served with a yuzu sorbet. To end, though neither of us could manage coffee, a mignardise in the shape of glossy lips was served and we were very happy to smile back at them.

  Harborne Kitchen is very well thought of and deservedly so. Its menus are ambitious and very good dishes are served and there’s a lot of originality which will keep some dishes such as the herring roe and chips in the memory for a long time after they were eaten; the service is excellent and the atmosphere is pleasing and soothing. The Good Food Guide, which is not infrequently somewhat quirky, judges Harborne Kitchen to be Exceptional. I don’t agree - it’s very good and deserving of high praise and always worth a visit - but I feel that the GFG’s rating might be just a little overstated especially when it rates Simpsons as being merely Good. But let’s not get carried away with all this rating claptrap - I enjoyed my meal at Harborne Kitchen and believe, also, that it represented very good value.

Rating - 🌞. 30 August 2024.

414. The French Pantry, Ludlow

 

  The French Pantry in Ludlow is very well loved by those who dine or lunch there and I think it must be one of my favourite restaurants in which to eat of all the places I have visited in the West Midlands. I have described it before and will not go over old ground but I have to say it is one of those restaurants which I truly look forward to dining at with great anticipation. Lacking in any pretention, it serves delicious, rustic French food which takes into account British tastes - it is not extreme Français but, having a French Chef Patron its authenticity can hardly be questioned. The helpings are generous, the presentation is rustic, the food is delicious and the overall delivery gives great pleasure.

  On this occasion, it being one of those rare hot, bakingly sunny, English summer days where you feel a thunderstorm can only be a few hours away, despite lusting after the magnificent French onion soup and perhaps the signature Olivier’s coq au vin, I opted for the two rather more summery sounding specials as starter and main course.

  The opening quiche Lorraine was lovely and highlighted just how awful supermarket quiches, which I am apt to buy, really are. The custard was tasty and nestled in a pleasingly textured pastry and the ham inside was full of flavour and the cheese, which I assume was Gruyère, had a bite to it that made this quiche a thing of gustatory beauty.

  Then the special main course on offer - salmon almondine - a beautifully cooked and generously sized piece of salmon, again tasty beyond the normal, with a beurre blanc. The sliced almonds gave a soothing texture to complement the meat of the salmon - dishes have not become classics for no reason one thinks - and the accompanying broccoli was cooked to be nice and tender though broccoli aficionados might have judged it overcooked, and they would be entitled to their opinion I suppose. This was a very enjoyable, seasonal dish and brought me great happiness but also rendered me too full to feel capable of managing a dessert though the tarte tatin was alluringly beckoning to me. 

  I love the French Pantry. Au revoir but I’ll be back!

  Rating:- 🌞.

  Meanwhile, I see that sadly, the Good Food Guide has removed Forelles from its online list of recommended Ludlow restaurants. Let us hope that the new owner sees sense and takes action to enable the restaurant to return to its former glory and its place in the Guide.

10.10PM, 26 June. Night falls over Clee Hill as viewed from Forelles.

272. Diners.

 

  Dining out is a great pleasure - in the main - chefs crucify themselves to invent, design, prepare, present and come up with excuses such as sustainability and “respecting the entire animal” for using ever cheaper ingredients in their dishes in order to keep themselves solvent to provide dishes to customers; Maîtres  D’Hotel - the very best at least - schmooze and smarm charmingly and convincingly (who doesn’t want to feel loved by the maître d’, feel picked out for special attention and to be congratulated that the dish or wine just chosen was “an excellent choice”?); the usually young front of house staff, soft voiced and often not fully conversant in English, struggle to remember the detailed descriptions of what they’re bringing out to their diners and to enable old blokes like me to understand what they’re whispering and precisely what is on the plate set before one  ….. aaah! the pleasures of dining out. There are many more.

  But then there are the other diners who are generally horrible. And not one of the pleasures of dining out. The problem is that the younger middle classes now just have too much money and while being useless to society and self absorbed, they are able to make themselves seen in decent restaurants though it would be better that they were never seen by anyone apart from their fellow self-admirers and ‘selfie’-takers.

  This diatribe, not yet finished, was set off by a recent visit to Weston super Mare’s The Ginger Pig Kitchen (which really does deserve a mention in The Good Food Guide given the guide’s new approach to sites of dining out that caused it to allow hipster neighbourhood restaurants such as Eat Vietnam in the Stirchley Socialist Republic to be admitted to its august pages). I was pleased (and surprised) to see how busy the restaurant was at 6PM on a Thursday evening but I noticed that there had been a paradigm shift in the clientele dining there - the Brummie and West Midlands elderly holidaymakers had made way for a younger, scruffier (sorry, more casual) collection of diners with middle class West Country accents. And a lot of them spoke very loudly.

  My table was unfortunately positioned next to that of the loudest man in the room where he sat with his three dining companions. One of the females had a loud repetitive inauthentic laugh - ha ha ha - which advertised her presence to everyone else in the restaurant and filled in for the periods of a few seconds when the male, a large man of about 40, unsuccessfully doing his best to look cool and admirable, gave his tongue a rest. The group behaved as though they were entitled to ignore the presence of any other diners in the room or, conversely, to inflict their dull conversation on the other diners whose presence they were treating with indifference. In truth it is likely that they were indeed unaware of all the other diners except that they provided an audience for them.

  The previous evening I had dined at an Indian restaurant and again was unfortunate enough to be sat next to a table of excruciatingly loud mid-twenty year old men whose conversations were carried out by what could only be described as shouting with respite only being obtained when they paused, which they frequently did, to pose for ‘selfies’. 

  Diners, especially those from the middle class which feels empowered to use foul and filthy language on social media about anyone who does not share their outlook on life, live self-righteously and sanctimoniously, are relatively well-educated but are often vaguely thick and foolish, adept at manipulative behaviour, seem to be running riot even in fine restaurants. Apart from the question of loud speech there is the question of dressing to dine.

  I found it hard to believe that male diners at Adam’s restaurant thought it appropriate to turn up to dine in shorts when I ate there one evening a few weeks ago on a not particularly warm night. What was the staff to do? Adam’s is not a cheap burger joint and diners should be expected to respect the nature of the restaurant and fellow diners. I really don’t want to have the sight of hairy male legs inflicted on me while I’m dealing with my mackerel ceviche. 

  It’s all about middle class entitlement. This is the section of society that allows its children to rampage around other diners in dining establishments which have embraced the concept of child-friendly restaurants. They speak to their brats in ways designed to broadcast to those unfortunate enough to be around them that they have very bright and forward children. If only they would understand that no-one finds their children to be any where as charming or as interesting as they think they are (though there is usually some old middle class biddy sitting somewhere nearby ready to engage the horrors in a silly question and answer conversation). Advice to restaurateurs - don’t be child friendly (unless you sell burgers and hand out free plastic toys) - be dog friendly instead - dogs cause far fewer problems, are much better behaved and are far less likely to spread disease than human brats do.

  The worst gastronomic product of the new socialist middle class is the blogger/self-proclaimed food expert -  usually aged in the range 25 to 49. These are self-publicists, rapidly approaching, or having already arrived at, a feeling of lost youth and who are unsuccessful in a career that is useful to society. They think that chefs and important restaurant figures love them whereas they are in fact rather disdainful of these sad people, often alcoholics, but humour them just in case a potential diner does take notice of a negative review sparked off by any perceived slight they receive in a restaurant. Notably these people are never offered a job as a food reviewer for a respectable organ of any type and they haunt the internet tweeting like there’s no tomorrow. By the time they arrive at fifty they have run to seed looking prematurely aged, have established alcoholism but have been unsuccessful in overcoming their insecurities and have developed even more severe personality traits than they had one or two decades before.

  Earlier this year, I was dining in a restaurant belonging to a celebrity chef and had the dubious honour of witnessing one of these ‘influencers’ - a woman - preening herself over an expensive plate of fish and chips and self-consciously drawing attention to herself. I had no idea who she was but was interested that chef himself brought her meal out to her - I’m not entirely sure that he wasn’t taking the mickey - but I searched around the internet and found that this individual - her literary skills clearly somewhat limited - had recorded her day visiting this particular restaurant and I was pleased to have identified this particular diner though I have long since forgotten her identity and I doubt that I would recognise her again. Oh, how  short are those fifteen minutes of fame.

  It is remarkable to me that these middle class, so casual, so self-aware, so self-entitled diners are spending hundreds of pounds on consuming expensive meals out while proclaiming the financial distress of the country. It seems that the government they blame for the financial disturbances has not been so disastrous for them. 

  I dislike dining in the presence of the smug diner or the diner who doesn’t understand the privilege they are experiencing when dining out in fine restaurants or why they should have a little consideration for their fellow diners - not just those at their table -  in keeping the sound of their voices down to a level where everyone else is not having to hear their conversations and braying laughter. I dislike the way those who feel self-entitlement are wholly indifferent to those around them. 

  I wonder what old Nathaniel Newnham-Davis would have made of it all? - “Tut tut. None of that sort of behaviour in my day, yer know”.

  By the way, on the day of writing this, I record that it’s Escoffier’s birthday (28 October 1846 - 12 February 1935). Happy birthday to a giant of gastronomy and a failed fraudster.