519. Banquets In Hotels - Middling At Best.

 

  Humans like - or perhaps do not like but have to - get together in large numbers over a meal for numerous and various reasons. I myself sometimes and more often than I wish have to - I have to spend money to dine with others, many of whom I don’t know (and some I can’t bear) -  sometimes large numbers of them, but I have to do it for various reasons. I may not want to but I pull myself together, gird up my loins and trek off to some hotel or the other usually in Birmingham’s city centre to shake hands with people I don’t recognise and sit down to what usually amounts to a mediocre to middling and occasionally awful series of three plates of, er, food. I rarely enjoy it. It’s not my scene. It’s not that I can not make small talk but sometimes it’s just such an effort. And often you have no idea beforehand by whom you will be sitting.

   I think of a dinner where every time I began a conversation with a chap next to me he would instantly break off to deal with another text that had landed on his mobile phone or alternatively he would see some important figure whom he thought could further his career and he would leap up, mid-conversation, and accost the esteemed figure and introduce himself. 

  I think of a dinner (well, more than one actually) where I was seated next to a garrulous fellow who wanted to tell me endlessly - and I mean endlessly - about the development of AI). For a while I thought he was talking about artificial insemination as opposed to artificial intelligence which did not help. Anyway I entered a sort of trancelike state and shut out his gabbling though he did not seem to notice and just ploughed on and I worried about how long this purgatory was going to last as I was keen not to leave the dog alone too long.

  And the really awful thing about large dining gatherings is one sees just how awfully many people eat. Dining etiquette died a long time ago, sacrificed to casualness and hipsterity,  and what we have now is a population whose eating habits stretch from the barely acceptable to the utterly revolting. I find it’s best not to look as some diners will easily put one off one’s food.

  And so to the food. Diversity is much lauded in England. Well, that may well be right, but it has made organising what to eat at a banquet, a remarkably difficult task. There are very few meats one can risk serving; beef is out if there are Hindus present, pork obviously a no-no if Muslim or Jewish guests are participating in the event, leaving lamb (which may be too expensive to serve to a collection of diners who may have variable amounts of wealth) or goat, which may not appeal to traditional English diners, or, obviously, poultry. Chicken would clearly be the primary choice, turkey may be viewed as seasonal, or perhaps something a little more exotic such as Guinea fowl. Fish probably would not win many votes among the alpha males who feel they must eat meat, though normally that would be a steak but that would be impractical in a banquet. If it were to be fish, then salmon would have a very high chance of being uninteresting and dull; sea bass is all the rage but it would it would not be well received by those men who like a nice slab of meat on their plate.

  Religion and cultures make the choosing of what to put on as a main course difficult enough before the challenges laid down by those who choose to be vegetarian or worse still vegan, those who have genuinely serious, life-threatening allergies, and those who do not like a particular ingredient and put it down to them being sensitive or even allergic to that ingredient. What a headache it all is for organisers and chefs.The advantage of serving a vegetarian alternative to the carnivorous main is that the vegetarian dish can be the dish on offer to those from various religious and cultural backgrounds. One rather fashionable dish is the vegetarian counter to beef Wellington - vegetable Wellington - and on balance that sounds just the right dish to serve as an alternative to meat - an extra bit of effort put in to remind the diner of a classic British dish and to enable the vegetarian not to feel neglected.

  So. I was dining at the Park Regis hotel at Five Ways in the company of about eighty people What would we be served and how good would it be? The dining room is at the top of the building on the 16th floor and there is a spectacular view of the city beneath it, the large dining area was smart and modern, the tables nicely laid and the staff efficient, smartly turned out, and polite. Who could ask for anything more? Well, of course we must not forget the food. I had dined before at the Park Regis when it had set up a chaotic Indian style restaurant, the Indus, in the restaurant where, I suspected, breakfast was served in the morning. It was one of the worst dining experiences I have had in the city either before or since. Hopefully, the meal in this rather more attractive and glamorous setting would be a considerable improvement on the defunct Hindus restaurant. It could hardly have been worse.

  The meal was pretty straightforward, appropriately lacking in ambition but decent enough. The word ‘middling’ comes to mind and the feeling that anything different should not have been expected. This is  not a criticism of the chef or the hotel, merely a statement of what one’s expectations should be when dining simultaneously with a group of such numbers.

  To start I chose pressed ham hock terrine which was splendidly bland which is also a reasonable description of the accompanying pickled shallots and ‘smooth pea mayonnaise’. There was the inevitable pea shoot garnish as we have come to expect.

  The main course was served rusticly and was made up of a supreme of chicken which was very satisfactory with the chicken being well cooked, only very slightly over, though not particularly exploding with flavour. There was a joyless (though described in the menu as ‘vibrant’) stalk of uncharismatic pak choi, a vegetable which God invented on one of his off days, reasonably well cooked carrot and middling but far from the worst I’ve been served mashed potato and a chicken gravy which did nothing to enhance the dish. There was no oomph to the dish, nothing to lift it from the average. Perhaps we got what we were paying for. Some stuffing with a bit of zinginess might have helped. This dish was decent enough but delivered little pleasure.

 The dessert was reasonably enjoyable - a William pear tart - the pear was soft and the pastry quite pleasant and the menu stated that it was served with a chocolate ganache (it wasn’t), a ginger crumble which I assume was the stuff on top of the tart though it was unrecognisable as having a crumble texture  and the flavour of ginger I found to be undetectable. There was a pink smear across the plate and a remarkably unseasonable half strawberry.

  This was a thoroughly edible meal though it brought nothing with it to excite the diner. It was certainly better than that served recently to me at a ‘banquet’ at the Hotel du Vin but these ‘banquet’ meals where large numbers are catered for are generally depressing affairs. Rule - if someone wants you to go one of these functions then find a reason to say no. Unless of course the quality of the food is of no concern to you.

Rating:- 🌛🌛.

21 November 2025.

261. Indus at Park Regis Hotel.

  

 Waterstones is an irritating shop. The Birmingham multi-storey branch has, of course, a very good range of books to choose from and to peruse reasonably peacefully but every time I visit it seems to be becoming more of a coffee house as the area devoted to displaying books is gradually subsumed by chairs and tables where nice middle class socialists can sit and get a free read and generally muck up a book I might want to buy while lingering  over the single mug of capuccino they purchased two and half hours ago. 

  The coffee emporium component of the shop has now spread out to render the food book section, where I like to search out editions telling the story of eating out, an isolated island which to get to one has to clamber over bearded senescent Corbyn-lookalikes reading opportunistically an available free newspaper or grim professional mothers from Moseley or Harborne letting their three or four accompanying children run riot while occasionally trying to answer the kids’ precocious questions on gender fluidity, the classification of flying dinosaurs or what was really involved in hanging, drawing and quartering.

  But let us not sink too far into reflections on the usefulness of the modern English middle-class, well-educated but not necessarily any good at anything, and instead reflect that per ardua ad altem I did indeed manage to negotiate the barriers of Waterstones coffee area and find my way to the Food section bookshelves. For once there were a few items that took my fancy, including a couple of wafer-thin volumes, one possibly ‘signed by the author’, by that supremely middle class socialist useful for nothing more than writing fine restaurant reviews (and apparently also making music) which would have ensured that he would have been aboard the fourth and final spaceship carrying the remains of mankind abandoning a doomed earth in the final part of Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.

  So it was that I got my hands on My Dining Hell, such an attractively thin tome that I was unable to resist beginning to read it immediately, and hence, halting only for quite frequent guffaws, I plunged on through the book reading about Rayner’s very worst dining experiences usually in a London dining establishments which, given the prices asked in restaurants there, should have been a lot better.

  It isn’t a good idea to be a restaurant to be visited by someone who likes and is expecting good food on the day that the diner has read My Dining Hell if you are not going to live up to expectations and the Indus in the Park Regis Hotel, at the far end of Broad Street near Five Ways was the dining establishment fated to fall foul of such a diner empowered by the little pink book which rendered to the reader the Thoughts of Jay.

  The Park Regis Hotel itself is an exquisitely confusingly designed building with the reception being located on the fourth floor and the restaurant seeming to occupy the same space as that area in which hotel guests seem likely to be breakfasting - in short, a flawlessly off-putting cafeteria. When I had finally worked out how to access the ‘restaurant’ I presented myself to a woman who seemed surprised to see me even though I had arrived on time in the early evening, one and half hours after the restaurant’s advertised opening time. There were no other diners though it was admittedly quite early in the evening, albeit a Friday. After some conferring with the manager I was directed to a table with comfortable enough chairs and was able to look around at this soulless area little different from an airport cafeteria on a the day of a long advertised airport workers’ strike.

  However the front of house staff were moderately pleasant, a cocktail - a quite reasonable pina colada - was ordered and the menu, slightly grubby and dog-eared and mildly greasy, or was it just waxy?, was presented. An extraordinary document, the likes of which have probably not been seen in a south Asian restaurant before. There was a choice of a fair number of starters which on the look of it seemed surprisingly expensive but the choice of mains was bizarrely inadequate - one seafood, one chicken, one lamb with no choice of sauces plus some vegetarian dishes. This was not looking promising.

  I could not bring myself to order any of the starters purely on the basis of their price - if I had thought they were going to be worth it I might have dipped my toe in the water - but I did order poppadoms and pickles which were not modestly priced - £4. I was served a number of poppadom shards and three little pots of the ‘pickles’ - a really unpleasant mint and coriander yogurt dip, a microscopic quantity of really horrible tomato and onion pickle (what a relief the amount served had not been greater) and a more generous helping of ‘home-made’ reasonable-tasting mango chutney (though the menu did not identify in whose ‘home’ the chutney had been made but of course we must assume this all to be true even though the chutney seemed to have no qualities to distinguish it from something which had originated in a supermarket).

  My main dish made a fairly rapid appearance on the scene. I had a chosen shahi qasbaar murgh (£16) to be consumed with tandoori butter naan (a robust £4). The glistening, reddish-brown curry looked perfectly reasonable in its metal bowl, the tandoori chicken was very nicely cooked - perfectly moist and tasty - though the sauce did not really better many of the sauces on offer at neighbourhood south Asian establishments sold at a fraction of the price. The naan was a good consistency and would have been very enjoyable had there not been a little more burning on it than was tolerable - I really don’t enjoy the flavour of charcoal. I had indicated that I rather fancied a mango lassi after I had finished my cocktail but no-one came to ask me about it when my glass was drained so the restaurant lost that small amount of business. No-one asked me if I wanted any water but some was delivered to the table when I asked about it and it came nicely chilled.

  I thought a sweet dessert might help to cleanse my mouth of the flavour of charcoal. The thing which winged its way to the table was a calamity. I had chosen pistachio ice cream with pecan nut brittle and other random elements including a caramel sauce. This was a real mess and almost entirely inedible. The ice cream was spread out across the middle of the dish centring itself on two inelegant misshapen mounds and was made up of ice cream stuffed with crushed pistachio bits which really had a very unhappy texture and an even worse flavour. The nut brittle was rock hard and far too threatening to the continuing existence of my teeth for me to have more than a tentative first nibble before abandoning the whole as a lost cause. The dessert did however have four sweet small half-strawberries lying on the plate with the rest of it and they were very pleasing though it was a pity that the stuff that shared the plate with them was truly awful.

  By the time this nightmare was over two or three couples had sat down to dine in this depressing, characterless dining room. One couple had ordered the immense ‘Indus non-vegetarian platter for two’ of starters priced at £35 and this actually looked rather good and they polished it off and did not seem displeased with it so it is possible that there is something at Indus in which it is worth indulging.

  For me however, the bill coming to over £46 (1 drink, 1 main, 1 naan, 1 dessert) this was one of the worst meals I have had and stumped up good money for, in a long time. The hotel’s management has opened a restaurant advertised as a dining establishment of quality but its pretensions are far in advance of what it delivers - the atmosphere is awful and the food does not live up to the prices chance. I fear that I shall not visit the banks of this particular Indus again at any time in the future.

Rating - 0.

250. The Downfall Of The Hotel Restaurant.

 

  I was mildly amused when reading between the lines, as a great between the lines reader, and also not being averse to occasional schadenfreude, to read a recent Blog of a middle aged Birmingham food blogger, termed in these modern times - an influencer - with an apparent self image of being a sophisticated 17 year-old who takes pride in being invited to notable restaurants whilst being generally inebriated, that the writer seemed not to have been invited to an opening of a new hotel restaurant here in Birmingham. Rather bitterly he wrote that he was, “curious to try it” but that a friend had already informed him that what was served was “just a curry….”.

  I look forward to our influencer’s own impression of the recently opened Indus restaurant at the Park Regis hotel. The Influencer refers cynically to the restaurant’s by-line, “inspired by a love of India” and makes a comment about the way chefs who are brought to the UK from abroad are employed to produce dishes of little significance which hardly reflect any love of anywhere. Which may or may not be the case. However I do feel an inclination to visit this new restaurant out of curiosity and also with the history of dining in the city in mind.

  In the latter part of the 19th century and first decades of the twentieth the smart restaurants in which to eat were located in hotels. In earlier times those who ate away from home dined in religious institutions, then inns, taverns, coffee houses and clubs. Even before the French Revolution, as we know, Mathurin Roze de Chantoiseau opened the first modern restaurant in Paris around 1765 or 1766,  Le Grand Véfour was opened by Antoine Aubertot as the Café de Chartres in the Palais Royale in 1784 and as French aristocrats were dispossessed or even done away with by the revolutionaries, their domestic staff, including their talented cooks, needed new employment and the development of restaurants grew as these workers took up jobs in them. In 1786 the Provost of Paris issued a decree giving restaurants official status and in the same year Antoine Beauvilliers opened the magnificently luxurious La Grande Taverne de Londres in Paris.

  In 1815 Marie-Antonin Câreme, whose career started in pâtisserie, came to London to work as chef to the Prince Regent. There he published the first of his books which would lead to the domination of English dining by French grande cuisine as the culinary style served in dining establishments of quality in England throughout the rest of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

  By the end of the nineteenth century Nathaniel Newnham-Davis, an early English food critic (see Blog 151), was regularly referring to dinners eaten in the fine restaurants located in London’s notable hotels and firstly at the Savoy and then at the Ritz, L’Escoffier was entrenching French cuisine as the mainstay of English dining out for decades to come. 

  In provincial Birmingham, restaurants located in the city’s smarter hotels were often the places of choice to dine out in style. Even when English dining out had moved on through the period of rationing during the Second World War and socialist austerity which followed it, the era of the post-rationing culinary nadir and the rise of Mediterranean and then south Asian cuisine, good quality hotel restaurants often provided the most likely places to find good British food. Thus in the first red Michelin Guide Great Britain And Ireland Guidebook published in 1974, three of the seven listed Birmingham area restaurants were located in hotels most notable of which was the Burlington Hotel near New Street Station. The Burlington was listed by Michelin from 1974 until 1979.

  The Plough And Harrow’s restaurant had a Michelin listing from 1987 to 1990 and at the time many would have said it was the best place to dine in the city. Not surprisingly perhaps the Head Chef between 1987 and 1990 was none other than Andreas Antona who went on to open the Michelin-starred Simpsons in Kenilworth, moving it later to Edgbaston where it retained its Michelin star (see Blog 249). Chef Andy Waters also worked at The Plough and Harrow before going on to work with Antona at Simpsons. The pictures below depict the hotel itself and a visit from the then distinguished Lord Mayor of Birmingham, Randal Brew, in 2007.

  

  Perhaps the most successful of all was the restaurant of the Swallow Hotel, (now The Marriott), called Sir Edward Elgar which was probably as close as it possibly could have been to being Birmingham’s first Michelin-starred restaurant. This restaurant was listed by Michelin from 1991 to 2002 and during that time in May 1998, its Chef de Cuisine, Jonathan Harrison, was given the role of preparing the menu for the world leaders attending the G8 Summit when it was held in Birmingham. The meal was served in the Pavilion of the Botanical Gardens. Harrison left his job at The Swallow in 1999 but during his time there, in 1993, he was awarded the Roux Diners Scholarship. Prior to that, his predecessor, Idris Caldora, had been runner-up in the National Chef of the Year awards. Sir Edward Elgar restaurant was listed by The Good Food Guide rather late in the 2001 edition and in doing so added to Birmingham’s then total of 7 restaurants mentioned by the Guide as one of the two highest scorers, the other being another hotel restaurant - Number 282 At The Hyatt which received a Michelin listing for just one year only in 2001. It’s worth noting that there was also a second restaurant at The Swallow, more relaxed, cheaper and smaller, bistro called Langtry’s.

More recent photographs of Jonathan Harrison and Idris Caldora -

  It may be said therefore that Birmingham’s hotels played an important role in providing sites for good quality dining for many decades up until the beginning of the 21st century when dining out began to change dramatically as chefs and restaurateurs chose to open their own restaurants without ties to a hotel (though in London of course the great hotels are still homes to highly regarded restaurants). As the most talented chefs began to work in dedicated restaurants so they were not available to work in and maintain the highest standards in hotel restaurants and so hotels became far less important as places to dine out unless they served as convenient in-house places to eat for resident guests.

  The steady decline of the provision of food in hotels in Birmingham in the last twenty years is sad in many ways. Looking at some of the previous great names it seems that food is now just an afterthought to be provided for the peckish resident rather than the lover of gastronomy. The now Best Western Plough and Harrow gives this advice - “For lunch and dinner guests can order from Deliveroo and consume it on the premises in one of the lounges, bars, guest room or al fresco! Hotel will provide crockery, cutlery & condiments upon request” How the mighty have fallen.

  The once towering (literally and metaphorically) Swallow (Marriott) offers a range of burgers, nachos, ‘chips n’ dips’, fish and chips, steak and so on. I don’t expect that the Chef from there will be organising the food for the banquet the next time the G8 drop in on Birmingham.

  I dined at Isaac’s in The Grand Hotel yesterday evening. The dishes were reasonable with pleasing choices and the atmosphere and setting make dining there a worthwhile experience. I enjoyed myself but I still think that The Grand needs a grand restaurant with fine dishes rather than, or perhaps as well as, the fries and steaks and burgers of Isaac’s.

  My starter was spicy and enjoyable - Florida cocktail with meaty chunks of lobster and crayfish and shocks of heat and citrus and the bitterness of chicory. Very good and quite clever.

  Then very pleasingly baked halibut - again meaty, tasty and well seasoned. This was served with cheering little clams, caviar and saffron sauce with Provençale vegetables which again were well cooked but I should have liked some pervading garlic and more powerful tomato flavours running through them.

In place of a formal dessert I thoroughly enjoyed a ‘shake’ (milkshake) peanut butter ice cream with lots of honeyed peanuts in it. Great fun and very tasty. 

  It was a very enjoyable meal and Isaac’s is now an important part of The Grand and there’s some excellent cooking going on there but I’d love to eat something in a room which recalls the hotel’s Victorian origins both in decor, atmosphere and cuisine.

  As for the Influencer’s thoughts, at the head of this piece, on a new hotel restaurant, Indus, which may or may not have some quality, the knowledge that it exists tells me that I should at least give it a try.