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.

384. Carter’s Is Back In Town - Year Of The Dragon Collaboration With Lap Fai Lee & Carter’s Eighteen Experience.

 

  My first opportunity to dine at Carter’s’s (late of Moseley) new pop-up at 103 Colmore Row, in Club 18 on the eighteenth floor, came soon after the lovely restaurant opened (on 11 February 204) when Brad Carter staged a collaboration with the highly regarded Birmingham chef Lap-Fai Lee to celebrate the Chinese New Year which in this case was the Year of the Dragon.

  Prior to being taken to the long shared table, I had the chance to wonder around the large outdoor balcony area with the city all lit up in the winter evening darkness and fireworks exploding in the direction of Chinatown. What a view.

  The meal starting with tasty and quite solid lobster prawn crackers with an excellent shrimp tartare which served in the role of a dip. Then ‘Mouthwatering chicken’ as a starter followed by one of my favourite dishes, the fiercely tasty and beautifully executed ‘Paté en croute Chinois’.

   Next was ‘Orkney scallop Fish fragrant’ - a well-executed preparation of Orkney scallop - and afterwards I purred with pleasure at ‘Dragons beard carbonara’, which I doubt is a regular visitor to a standard Chinese restaurant table - it was a lovely play on carbonara with well-cooked noodles to render it vaguely Oriental but given full-bodied flavour by its punchy cheese element and cheeky slices of crispy bacon. 

  The main course - ‘Drunken phoenix’ substituted Anjou pigeon, cooked in sweet wine, for mythical beast and was very successful, accompanied as it was with a spot on bowl of rice.

  A mega-hit was the Mandarin and longan black sesame whippy icecream which would prove to be the ideal way to shuffle off this mortal coil were one to be totally submerged in a vat of it. The dessert proper -‘Dragon’s egg’ looked spectacular but gave more pleasure to my eyes than to my taste buds. Finally a ‘Smiley bao’ was boxed up to take home though it was not as light fluffy as I would have liked and wasn’t all that enjoyable.

  So, an enjoyable evening, the dishes a little variable in the pleasure they brought with them but I was glad to have been there for the experience and to see Carter’s back in Birmingham.

   Shortly afterwards I had the pleasure of returning to Carter’s to enjoy dinner as the ‘18 Experience’ which Brad Carter was offering in this remarkable venue. I arrived in town in the late afternoon and walked through the Cathedral churchyard with the gathering evening gradually ushering in the dark but 103 Colmore Row looked impressive as it loomed over its more elderly fellow buildings. On arriving at my destination I was greeted in the main lobby of the building, as I had been on my first visit to the venue, and set on my way to the eighteenth floor. Holly Carter was there to welcome her guests and in her inimitable way make them feel at home in this chic, bright, modern setting. The sky was now grey and the wind was cold and so I did not venture out on to the balcony this time around. Instead, straight to the table and a fine Margarita.

    Three splendid amuses gueules were served while I took in the spacious restaurant. This was the early evening dinner and, rather surprisingly, there was only one other diner, who travelled from Warwick for the experience, to join me at the long table. Several other food lovers were due to come along to the later session. This absence of fellow diners rather subdued the atmosphere but no matter, it was the food I was there for. After a fine Margarita on to the meal proper.

  Firstly accurately cooked truffled Orkney scallop and then razor clams of a nice texture though perhaps a little short in number to appreciate them fully, served with pepper dukes which was unremarkable. Next, a Carter’s signature dish - his full-bodied Birmingham soup 2021, a glistening consommé with beautifully tender pieces of turnip and carrot, several degrees more sophisticated than the original invented by Matthew Boulton to serve the hungry poor of Birmingham at the end of the 18th century, topped off with a crispy tuile in the style of the outside decor of the modern Birmingham central library. A very fine dish. 

  The highlight of the meal was undoubtedly Carter’s ‘Newlyn Hake <240m>’ (the 240m alludes to the height at which the fish was cooked). The fish was perfectly cooked and the sauce delicious. There were little explosions of Exmoor caviar and trout roe which made the texture exquisite and exciting. I thought indeed I was sure, though apparently erroneously, I could taste tarragon in this gorgeous dish - the best fish dish I had had for some time - but I was told that the sauce embraced dill, a more likely suspect I admit. This dish will assuredly be one of my food highlights of the year.

  After that, the meat course - beautifully presented and tender pasture-fed beef - had a lot to live up to. It was served with an excellent, rich punchy sauce though the beef itself did not quite have the full bodied flavour I hoped for. It was accompanied by well cooked leeks but the dish looked more thrilling than the was the depth of flavour it delivered.

  It had been a good meal with an intermediate dish of mascarpone ice cream and the flavour of sea buckthorn delivering a lot of pleasure.The dessert however was not a success being titled ‘Yorkshire rhubarb <red brick>’. This was a rhubarb flavoured mousse on a sable with the pattern of a red brick wall , typical of West Midlands traditional buildings, on top and rhubarb powder scattered over it. It took me a long time to recognise the flavour of rhubarb - it needed to be a lot more punchy and what the dish needed most of all was … rhubarb, the stalks properly poached and of perfect texture. Sadly this was not the case. More a triumph of style over substance.

  However, at the end all was well with a serving of a gorgeous chocolate mignardise. Gorgeous to look at, gorgeous to eat.

  Carter’s will continue to operate from this room with a view until the end of April when the brand will begin to offer home meals similar to those that were sold during the lockdowns. Then in the autumn a new restaurant - a first floor brasserie with a ground floor bar - will be opened in a building further along Colmore Row opening on to St Phillip’s Place and across the road from the Grand Hotel. Birmingham gastronomy never sleeps. 

Rating:-🌞🌞.