441. The Wilderness Collaboration With Konjö.

   I dined at The Wilderness where a meal was being served by Alex Claridge and Marius Gedminas in collaboration with the Head Chef from Konjö - more fully, Konjö Robatayaki Kitchen - Joel, a Chef originally from Wolverhampton but now employed at the sister restaurant of Jöro in Sheffield (see Blog 41, 27 October 2018). Könjo has been described as a a”Scandi-Japanese mash-up with a mouthful of Jöro’s favourite ingredients, street food style”. Could that be a fusion one step too far? It was time to find out.

  The meal took the form of several courses of ‘snacks’ preceded by ‘bread’ and followed by a main course which was centred on quail with several other elements accompanying it.

  The opening bread - a beautifully textured focaccia, gorgeously unctuous with sesame oil and accompanied by kimchi relish and gochujang honey butter - was a very good start and the subsequent snacks gave much pleasure - a fabulous, crispy, again delightfully unctious, beef fat hash brown lifted to celestial heights by a sashimi of tuna belly nestling on it and intermediate texture provided by corn XO and all complemented by the precisely chosen flavour of yuzu..

  Then another highly successful, crispy ‘tostada’ with a prawn head mayonnaise and the citrus of finger lime. The next starter took the form of a pleasingly light bao filled with exquisite beef tartare, a combination of Könjo’s McBao and The Wilderness’ Unhappy Meal which took the informed diner back to Claridge’s battle to keep his restaurant alive during the period of the pandemic. A memorable play on street food from both restaurants.

  Then, a distinctly recognisable dish from ADC/The Wilderness - the sublime dish of hamachi with sliced green olive and jalapeño. To close the starters section there was subtle, delightful barbecued Cornish mackerel in a fig hot sauce with a side dish of a steamed and fried hot bun with zingy kimchi butter. Yes very, very good.

  This would have been perfectly adequate but the main course was still to come and when it did, though the various ingredients were pleasing, the whole was very much a dog’s dinner of disparate plates. The dish was centred on a poor little half quail coated in heavily cooked nam prik pao paste, its little pieces of meat hard to cut off.  There were some pleasingly crispy smoked fermented salt and pepper roast potatoes, the texture of which was enjoyable but the flavour of which I found to be less pleasing. There was a little dish of garlic aioli for which I could find no use - it did not seem to fit in with anything else that had been brought to the table - and some mango nam jim  alongside the little bird which looked pretty but for me was not quite the right accompaniment. The plate of green salad seemed equally out of place. I thought the quail needed warm accompaniments not all these cold elements. For me the whole just did not work. It was as though everything plus the kitchen sink had been mobilised and barely any of it seemed appropriate.

  I made little impression on the multielemental main course but enjoyed my unusual dessert, some of which was recognisable from ADC, of toasted jasmine rice ice cream served with an optimally citric calamansi curd and the fun of puffed pawa rice, reassuring caramelised aerated white chocolate and the freshness of kaffir lime.

  Many individual elements of the meal had been very enjoyable but as a whole it seemed incoherent with too many disparate dishes. The main was a hotchpotch. I am not too sure about Nordic-Japanese fusion. It may well indeed be a fusion too far. But, as always with Alex Claridge, this was an interesting and at times challenging meal. Who wants dull food?

  The previous evening was passed in Stratford upon Avon. Prior to attending the Royal Shakespeare Company’s latest production at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre - Othello (easily the best production I have seen there for several years with no gimmicky casting, men playing men, fine mature actors declaiming magnificently, no racial confusions, splendid period costumes and excellent direction) - I had eaten another very good early evening dinner at the Hotel Du Vin, where I was staying the night.

  To kick off I had a very fine Boulevardier, its subtle bitterness a tease to the appetite. Then a starter of a spot on chicken liver parfait which had an excellent texture, its richness nicely cut through by the accompanying plum and figgy chutney (I would have liked a bigger portion of this) which was served with two remarkably large slabs of toasted buttery brioche.

  For the main, I chose pan-fried cod served with lentils, winter root vegetables and cavalo nero. This was very a fine dish - the cod was cooked perfectly, the flesh white, glinting and perfectly yielding, the lentils were perhaps a little too numerous for my taste but they were very nicely cooked, tender but still with body and their flavour enhanced the earthy pleasure of the winter vegetables. The deep fried cavalo gave a cheeky, happy crunchy texture which no-one could complain about. A fine dish indeed.

    I needed a simple dessert. I was not in the mood for crème brûlée and opted for a simple dish of vanilla ice cream. I should be more ambitious with my choice of desserts but I do not need too much after my main course and my tastes in dessert are somewhat limited. So ice cream it was.

  The Bistro du Vin really is very good. 

Rating:- 🌛🌛🌛🌛.

29 October.

41. Does Sheffield's Jöro Point The Way?

  To return to the main subject of Blog 39, I add a few extra thoughts about where is the future of dining out going to place us fairly soon? This week I visited Sheffield, not in the brief of this Blog for sure, but I was able to dine at what might be viewed as a cutting edge restaurant in that city which has been notorious for its poor gastronomic reputation over the past 30 years or so.

  My dining companion and I set out for Jöro (which is apparently Old Norse for 'earth') and were quite impressed when we arrived at a very stylish little restaurant housed in the Krynki shipping container development which seemed like just the right place for what we thought of as a rather adventurous place to dine.

  The restaurant states that its philosophy is based on a blend of influence from Nordic regions and Japan which they have nick-named 'Scandi-Jap-Mashup', the New Nordic Kitchen. Hmmm. The focus is on creating minimum fuss and producing delicious food using the best obtainable ingredients especially from local sources.

  Chef Luke French opened Jöro with his fiancée Stacey in December 2016 having worked for a short period as a youngster at Daniel Clifford's Midsummer House in Cambridge from whence he fled feeling overwhelmed by the place and then travelled around and worked in Asia and then worked in Sheffield for several years before trying out Jöro as a pop-up restaurant in the city. The chef most admired by Luke French is Paul Cunningham (a photograph of him occupies a prominent place in the restaurant), an English chef who holds two Michelin stars at his restaurant, Henne Kirkeby Kro, in Denmark. Presumably this foregoing paragraph explains the 'Scandi-Jap-Mashup' served up in Jöro. This is very interesting as one can not help but wonder if British exit from the European Union may result in young British chefs doing less of this international travelling especially on the European continent with the result that we see a contraction of foreign influence, especially European, on the future direction of British cuisine.

  A fixed 9 or 11 course Tasting menu is all that is served at Jöro and the menu may vary nightly. The home page of Jöro's website leads with the phrase, 'A meal built of many small plates'. Whether that concept actually works is sometimes questionable. A menu similar to that served to my dining companion and myself is depicted below. Some of the 'small plates' were indeed small gems. The mackerel with yuzu and coastal herbs, depicted at the head of the Blog was wondrously fresh and marine and the blue cheese and onion dish was delicious.

  In the middle of the meal things got a little out of hand. A small piece of duck, with an enjoyable, crunchy coating with plum sauce was really no better and less satisfying than a trip to a reasonable Chinese restaurant would have brought to the diner and immediately afterwards was, and to be honest it was a lovely piece of belly pork, another dish with a classic Chinese restaurant sauce - plum - which made me wonder why I hadn't just gone out 'for a Chinese'. The lowest point came next with a vaguely unpleasant dish containing charred broccoli and another brassica and not a lot else. I've made this point before (see Blog 5) - a plate of a single vegetable does not a course make and usually they're not very enjoyable. Please Chefs, serve your vegetables with something else.

  The meal as a whole was very good allowing for these false steps and it all represented tremendously good value. I'm not really convinced that we need to combine Scandinavian and Japanese food but it makes a change. I'd be very happy if Jöro upped sticks and settled down here in Birmingham and I could go there more often. As he matures I expect that Chef will swerve away from serving a plate full of brassicas and straight Chinese restaurant steals; some of the dishes worked very well and I would be happy to eat them again. But the brassicas - oh dear, a shiver goes down my back every time I think of the dish.

  O, I must go back again if only to have another piece of Chef's Ginger Miso fudge served as a petit four with the coffee.

  So perhaps we are still heading in the direction of using the freshest and most immediately available ingredients with less theatre both on the plate and in the restaurant but served in unusual and original forms and in chic, original environments. Refreshing dishes with a cleanness to them even though they may not always work.

  Jöro was awarded a Michelin Bib in the 2019 edition and the 2019 Good Food Guide rated it as having a 'cooking score' of 5 which, improbably, is just one less than Purnell's which I think says more about the underscoring of Purnell's than it does about the overscoring of Jöro.