462. Sunday Lunch At Simpsons.

 

  After a thrilling and delicious Sunday lunch the previous week at Stirchley’s Eat Vietnam’s collaboration with Dan Lee, I felt I was ready to be a little more sedate and classic at Simpsons which of course has recently been put up for sale by its owner and founder, the doyen of Birmingham and West Midlands dining, Andreas Antona. I had opted for the three course Sunday lunch - I had sirloin pave with Yorkshire pudding on my mind as the alluring beef Wellington was only available for couples to share, misere me.

  Simpsons does very good canapés and those served on this visit were delicious and I ate them alongside a white port and tonic. To be honest, the realisation came to me that I was gobbling them with all the pleasure a little gluttony brings with it. Well, I was sitting in a discrete corner being served, to my great pleasure, by Thomas Moore (not, as far as I know, related to his namesake who so displeased Henry VIII and thereby earned himself a sainthood though it took a few centuries for him to achieve that earthly reward). 

  Thomas had worked at an early stage in his career at the late Purnell’s and had been the chief server at one of my birthday dinners which I liked to hold there every year for close friends to have the opportunity to urge me to run life’s course for another twelve months. Thomas had been very impressive, virtually an infant prodigy in his knowledge and carrying out of his work front-of-house, and had been promoted at Purnell’s and worked there till the restaurant gasped its last breath. By then he was accomplished in the knowledge and service of wines, and as one door closed another opened. As Purnell’s was closing, so Simpsons’ esteemed sommelier, Gian Giancomo Stella, announced he was returning to Italy after seven years in his finely executed role in Edgbaston, and Thomas was appointed to succeed him and work with him as he familiarised himself with the job. 

  I was also pleased to hear about Adrien Garnier who been Restaurant Manager and Sommelier at Purnell’s - he had decided to return to France after Purnell’s closure but had kept in touch with Thomas and during the meal, Thomas texted Adrien to let him know I was dining at Simpsons and Adrien had replied with a message of good wishes. How very charming and kind.

Thomas Moore

Gian Giancomo Stella 

  

Adrien Garnier

The starter proper was a lovely lobster and prawn raviolo - nicely sized and the pasta well made - with tender salsify and robustly flavoured lobster and pepper sauce. This was an excellent dish. I was recently reading some food reviews by Jay Rayner, who eats well like so many metropolitan socialists who enjoy and can afford the good life (Raymond Postgate the founder of the Good Food Guide was also a notable socialist who made sure he ate the best of food), and who is the retiring food critic of The Observer, and a quote from his final missive for the Observer Food Monthly states, “Hyper-expensive foods are never about deliciousness; they are about status. Don’t bother with them”. 

  Well, firstly he does not define at which point ‘expensive’ food becomes ‘hyperexpensive’ food. To a 78 year old pensioner on £13000 per year income who has had their winter fuel allowance grabbed away by the recently elected Starmer Labour government which Rayner enthusiastically endorsed, I suspect that lobster and roast sirloin pavé (at a supplement price of £10 on top of £75 three course meal price) and passion fruit soufflé (further supplement of £10) are all ‘hyper-‘ rather than plain expensive. The champagne socialist may have an alternative definition. Regardless, I believe, that an expensive element which to the people increasingly neglected by the faux socialists now in power, would undoubtedly be ‘hyperexpensive’, lends something to the pleasure of a special meal which is something that one goes to restaurants like Simpsons to enjoy. The lobster was lovely and the sirloin excellent - tender, cooked to exactly my own preference, delicious and generously portioned.

  It’s a rule that one should listen to experts and then remember that they have their own axe to grind. I suppose, in fact I know, that Simpsons’ prices represent wonderfully good value compared with those of the London restaurants wherein Rayner would most often dine. His ‘hyperexpensive’ is not our ‘hyperexpensive’ and though Simpsons’ prices are not cheap, the quality and delightfulness of the dishes Luke Tipping delivers to diners there represents very good value. Long may it continue even after Andreas Antona has sold the business. 

  The slices of sirloin were served with a towering, crispy Yorkshire pudding and the tenderest, most gorgeously cooked and handsome-looking carrots I have been served in many a moon (others no doubt would have liked some bite to their’s but the undercooked carrot people have had their way for far too long and it’s good to see the kitchens of Simpsons leading the fight back). The roast potatoes again were the mostly accurately, perfectly cooked I have been served in recent memory and I enjoyed the shredded cabbage. The weakest element was the cauliflower with cheese sauce which needed more of the sauce, given that sauce was served, to give it more cheesy flavour though I wish there would be some restaurant or the other which would  serve the cauliflower denuded of any such covering so that diners could appreciate the flavour of cauliflower in all its unique naked flavour. The beef sauce was unctuous and delicious but I should have liked more heat in my horseradish sauce.

  Finally the dessert. I was not able to resist the prospect of the passion fruit soufflé though I longed almost equally to have my first rhubarb of the year which was one of the alternatives. The soufflé was impeccable and the ‘exotic sauce’ was dominated by mango and the chantilly cream innocuous though not really necessary. At the bottom of the dish, when the soufflé had all been scooped away, there was a distinct and not very pleasant bitterness from the sauce that lurked there which I think might have some alcohol element though I could not tell as I disliked it enough not to consume it. This was a pity but it did not ruin what had been a fine meal of a very high standard. I rounded off the meal with a post prandial After Eight cocktail and two delightful mignardises - a delightfully chewy macaron and a Madeleine which was the stuff that dreams are made on and I felt rather pleased with myself. Simpsons marches on. The doyen is still the doyen. 

Rating:-🌞🌞🌞.

16 February 2026.

403. Cuubo.

 

  On 24 June 2021, as the storm of the COVID-19 pandemic which had raged around both diners and those who served them in the hospitality industry, had at last settled and tentative bright sunlight was once more beginning to peep through the clouds of national anxiety, a young chef, Dan Sweet, who had trained at Birmingham’s University College and subsequently worked for more than three years at Simpsons, where so many careers have taken off to subsequent success, opened a fine dining-style ‘take away’-style establishment in the very well-heeled suburb of Harborne called Qbox. 

The interior of Qbox

  This proved to be very successful - Dan had wisely chosen the right location and the right audience, those who wanted to go to his culinary theatre as well as being able to afford to buy a metaphorical ticket for it, though, in truth, his food was very fairly priced. By 2023, the pandemic being largely forgotten except as something else to blame the government for, Sweet crowdfunded enough money to enable him to equip a full kitchen and dining room, titled Cuubo. 

  Soon after opening, he was blessed by a visit from a god descending from Olympus  - the socialist restaurant critic Jay Rayner of The Observer - who pronounced that Cuubo was “as exciting a new restaurant as” he had “encountered in a long while” although he had reservations about the crab risotto “Just to prove my critical faculties didn’t completely desert me”. Mildly for him, he stated, “there was a crab risotto that didn’t taste especially of crab” (a fault I find that happens with crab dishes far too often in even expensive and ‘fine’ restaurants. Chefs, use crab in a dish at your peril).

  Thus, trailing in the wake of the good food-loving, fine dining, socialist restaurant critic from the rarified and excruciatingly expensive culinary atmosphere of The Smoke (though to give Rayner his due, he does gird up his loins more often than most others to haul himself to the provinces and notably to Birmingham to report on our fine new restaurants (doubtless he’s champing at the bit to get to Rabbit in Stirchley) and indeed, now close to two decades ago, reported on Glynn Purnell’s first voyage into gastronomic distinction, Jessica’s (ahead of Matthew Fort by a head)), I myself found myself in a rainy Harborne High Street festooned as it is with a near excess of dining and coffee-imbibing establishments and wondering if it always rained in Harborne. The reservation, please note, had been made some time before our well-fed Olympian socialist writer had reported on his visit there.

  But enough of food critics, it’s the food that counts. The restaurant definitely looked smaller on the outside than it did on the inside - a reverse TARDIS effect - and while it’s true that it is quite small, it’s comfortable and the tables are not uncomfortably on top of each other. I had booked lunch for 1PM and the place was full as I arrived - populated mainly by elderly diners taking advantage of a three course lunch for £40. The restaurant was decorated brightly and anonymously, which in itself was not unwelcome as it conveyed newness and freshness and a canvass yet to be fully realised. The two front of house staff knew what they were doing, were appropriately friendly and were not at all perturbed by me changing my prebooked request for the lunch menu to the 7 course tasting menu (£75) although providing the premeal snacks was a problem which bothered me not at all since I was responsible for the last minute changes of heart.

  I was pleasingly sat by the pass and was able to watch Chef and his young sous chef going about their work calmly and smartly. And what a pleasure it all was.i was served some good sourdough bread and then was launched into the menu proper with a fresh, well flavoured dish of tasty heritage tomatoes served on sourdough. Summer was bursting out all over ignoring the ongoing onslaught of rain outside in Hungry Harborne. The dish reminded me that many of the dishes were to nod in the direction of Chef’s partial Italian heritage and the wines, well chosen, were also mainly Italian.

  Then a plate of very well cooked pork belly with crispy skin and mostly melted fat with smooth bacon cream split with nduja oil and accompanied by a fennel salad though it has to be said that the flavour of the fennel was a little too subtle. Pork belly does not rank highly in my list of favourite meat ingredients but this dish was considerably more enjoyable than most pork belly dishes I have been served elsewhere.

  Next, the crab risotto which had disappointed Zeus during his descent from Olympus and it has to be said that the old lightning hurler had a point - the flavour of crab was not as discernible as one would have hoped but the texture of the rice was spot on and the wafer thin slices of cauliflower gave texture to the dish. Still, crab should have been the centrepiece and, as Rayner wrote, it really was not.

 Next the main course - a fine, meaty, plump piece of very nicely cooked chicken with broccoletti (or friarelli) and a supreme sauce and a delicious little pile of mild wild garlic purée and a sliver of Iberico capping the chicken. An excellent dish.

  As an avoider of desserts, I was delighted with the charming vanilla and basil mille feuille paired with a blisteringly tasty strawberry sorbet. Given that Dan Sweet had spent three years between 2013 and 2016 at Birmingham’s University College working on a Diploma of Education in Baking and Pastry Arts and had been a baker and pastry chef it is little wonder perhaps that he was turning out a very admirable dessert.

  So, a very enjoyable lunch in Harborne at Cuubo. I shall have no hesitation in returning. Perhaps I will bump into another member of the Pantheon down from Olympus to see what wonders Dan Sweet is cooking up.

Rating:- 🌞.

392. Comings And Goings.

 

  In a tweet posted on 6 April Glynn Purnell confirmed that he had appointed two new Head Chefs at Purnell’s - the diarchy of Sam Luck and Tom Blakemore, two old stagers at the restaurant, who had worked as a duumvirate since the departure of former Head Chef, Luke Butcher at the end of December 2023.

The triumvirate at Purnell’s or is it a duumvirate?

  Exciting times for the Old Bloke as Dining Out In Birmingham & The West Midlands Then, Now & Next went to the printers yesterday. The book has over 220 pages detailing the relevant history of dining out which brought us to where we are now as diners in Birmingham and the wider area. 

  There’s everything from the Guild of the Holy Cross to Riverine Rabbit with stop offs in the age of Taverns, the French Revolution, the rise of the Clubs, the Escoffier Scandal at The Savoy, Hotel dining in the 19th and 20th centuries, the First and Second World Wars with the era of rationing and Attlee’s Age of Austerity, the rise of fast food, Elizabeth David’s promotion of Mediterranean food and Jane Grigson’s English food fightback, the rise of the modern Michelin Guide, the coming of nouvelle cuisine, gastronomy, gastropubs, food festivals, immigrant cuisine, the birth of Balti, the growing influence of television on dining out, the rise of fine dining in Birmingham and the golden age of Second City Dining as the city is glittered with Michelin stars, the COVID-pandemic and the energy crisis. Everything you need to know about how we got to how we dine out now round these parts.

  A review at the weekend in The Observer by Jay Rayner of the recently opened Cuubo in Harborne has gained a lot of local press attention.

 The twenty seater restaurant was opened in April 2024 by chef Dan Sweet who had previously served ‘fine dining’ takeaway meals from the same shop which was then called Qbox. Rayner expressed the view that the food, “bursts with huge flavours, big ideas and massive ambition” and declared that, “Dinner here was an introduction to a storming talent announcing itself to the world, one clever, delicious, well-priced dish at a time”. Rayner can be very florid in his praise, or otherwise, of a dining establishment and when he’s keen on somewhere, he’s very keen on that place but I have been meaning to make a reservation for Cuubo and Rayner’s molten enthusiasm for Dan Sweet’s cuisine spurred me on to negotiate the irritating reservation site and grab me a place in Cuubo for lunch in the near future.

Photograph of Dan Sweet from Birmingham Live:-

  The West Midlands dining out scene is certainly lively at present and contributing to all the activity is the news that the former Pensons at the Netherwood Estate at Tenbury Wells will reopen as Native at Pensons with Ivan Tisdall-Downes, described as an ethical chef, the new Head Chef partnered with Imogen Davis, whom he met while studying in Brighton. Tisdall-Downes was born in London and after starting off serving street food and staging pop-ups, opened Native with Davis at Neal’s Yard in Covent Garden and then moved to Borough Market and eventually worked at Brown’s in Mayfair.

  The emphasis of the food to be served at Native at Pensons will be a “sustainable, ultra-seasonal menu” and as we might expect will involve a lot of foraging and, less predictably, ‘street food’. Tisdall-Downes is described as having a signature dish of ‘wood pigeon kebab’ which may or may not be appealing depending on one’s taste for the bird. He appeared as a contestant in the 15th season of The Great British Menu.

Ivan Tisdall-Downes

  Finally, it has been announced as shown by this article in The Caterer, that Adam Bateman has left his post of Executive Chef at the Grand Hotel. Whether or not this will lead to a change in direction of the food served in Isaac’s restaurant remains to be seen. I have never felt that the New York-style cuisine really suited the place. It also really needed to raise its game in what was served given the price charged for food there. I wait to see who will be appointed to take over from Bateman.

294. Restaurant Guides - How many do we need?

  Harden’s restaurant guide published, in the last few days, its list of the ‘UK’s Best Restaurants 2023’. How useful an exercise has that proven to be? Harden’s’ opinions are given based on those from its readers which is rather similar to The Good Food Guide. Its readers on the whole, judging by their opinions which presumably are based on the restaurants wherein they have eaten, are comfortably off, conservative with a small ‘c’ and moderately tutored in fine dining. I have an acquaintance who submits his opinions to the editors fairly frequently - he is not a food lover but enjoys analysing each course and searching for something to moan about (or very rarely praise) - he also sees himself as an amateur art critic and enjoys dissecting the elements of a painting and commenting on them without enjoying the whole.

  Hence I wonder at the usefulness of a restaurant guide which relies on people such as my acquaintance or those who are self-selecting by their wealth, conservatism and moderate knowledge to pinpoint the leading restaurants in the country. I assume that most of the opinions expressed by those from this privileged group are also identifiable by place of residence of this group - London and its well heeled suburbs - and the places where they have second homes - the south west, the Lake District, Oxfordshire, the Cotswolds - plus a similar well-off population in Scotland, notably in Edinburgh. These people have very few qualifications, apart from wealth and location of home(s) to pronounce on what are the best restaurants in the United Kingdom but they do so and that is why the list is dominated by restaurants in the locations mentioned above.

  It is also, I suspect, why it is routine for the West Midlands to be poorly represented in Harden’s’ 100. This year we are genuinely congratulating our restaurants that have received a mention but at the same time must feel deflated that only four West Midlands restaurants appear on the list - Adam’s at number 17, Lumière in Cheltenham (number 21), Opheem (60) and The Wilderness at number 92. 

  Meanwhile, around the same time, an internet-based restaurant site, of which I was not even aware previously, called Squaremeal, which appears to have been in business since 1990, announced it too had prepared a list of the United Kingdom’s ‘100 Best Restaurants’ and the results were very different  from those of Harden’s’ list - many more West Midlands restaurants appeared on it. The site appears to be a restaurant and hotel booking site with an accompanying critique of the places bookable on it. 

  The Squaremeal list placed Grace and Savour at the very top of its list - number 1 - with other West Midlands following - Opheem (7), Pensons in Tenbury Wells (38), Lunar Stoke-on-Trent (43), Lumière (46), Carter’s of Moseley (51), The Wilderness (61), Adam’s (65), Purnell’s (72), The Old Butcher’s, Stow on the Wold (82), Chakana (97) and The Slaughters Manor House, Lower Slaughter (98). In the list there is finally recognition that the West Midlands is punching well above its weight when it comes to gastronomy. It does not recognise Cheal’s which is a glaring omission and in my opinion there is room for Folium on the list as well, not forgetting Andrew Sheridan’s remarkable 8, Upstairs by Tom Shepherd and Liam Dillon’s The Boat, both in Lichfield, Sheridan’s Black And Green in Barnt Green, Shrewsbury’s The Walrus and Hampton Manor’s other restaurant Smoke and Toffs in Solihull. The West Midlands could quite easily occupy at least 20% of a ‘UK Top 100’ list.

  What is clear is that guides and lists are not necessarily all that helpful. Where Harden’s can only find four WM restaurants  to place in its top one hundred, Squaremeal can find twelve and place one of them at the very peak of its list. Squaremeal seems the better judge, as The Good Food Guide identified Birmingham as the most exciting UK city in which to dine at the end of last year and placed three Birmingham restaurants in its top twenty ‘most exciting’ restaurants list. And over them all looms the Michelin Guide, its recognition the most craved by chefs. It is conservative, impenetrable, obscure and often its decisions are inexplicable and abstruse, more inconsistent than its editors would admit and ultimately for these reasons, of less value than it thinks it is. The Michelin Guide’s underlying French-style food bias remains though it may deny it - it has glued itself to the book for eternity - this may have snob appeal but it does not necessarily result in a British diner sitting at a table enjoying the often expensive food laid before him. 

  In contrast The Good Food Guide seems much more alive, more relevant, in step with taste but does seem in danger of being dragged away too far from the mainstream - listing hipster haunts, furnished in shabby style, uncomfortable, where good food is indeed served but with nothing else to make the meal a pleasure. 

  So when it comes to Guidebooks or websites - Caveat emptor. Take a pinch of salt when you’re reading them and doublely so when it comes to ‘Best restaurant’ lists. Consider who are the people who have rated the restaurants, are they shadowy elitist figures or an untutored vox populi or trendy self-loving influencers? Personally, I like a good newspaper reviewer; with regular reading of their articles, one knows their prejudices, their pleasures, their dislikes and with those in mind one can put their informed opinions in context and judge the validity of their opinions and consider how that match with one’s own.

  On the subject of which, I enjoyed a recent piece by Jay Rayner in The Guardian, a paper I otherwise can not bear to read, on the future of fine dining and, in particular, the horrors of the twenty plus course tasting menu which may bring one many delights but also an angor animi as the meal drags on, the hours pass and the realisation dawns that there are still another nine courses to ingest - it’s a bit like a direct flight from New Zealand - you’ve been in the air for sixteen hours and you realise that there’s still another eight to go before you touch down in dear old Blighty. 

  There was another piece recently by a writer for The Financial Times - Janan Ganesh, more a political writer than a food critic but apparently he has devoted the past year travelling around fine dining (haven’t we all?) and in it he gave his opinion on “what to look for in a restaurant”, presumably a restaurant of the Now, of where fine dining is going. He arrives at all sorts of depressing conclusions - “the neighbourhood must be hipster” (groan), the “view must be rubbish” (goodbye to the bib gourmand and no herds of wildebeest sweeping majestically past the window), “staff mustn’t ask if you’re enjoying your meal” (should they just scowl at you, perhaps? What about the size of their gratuity?), “champagne must come in a wine glass (the modern triumph of lack of substance over style) and “the kitchen must be unconfidential” (really I am there to eat and enjoy and not to watch men work no matter how nice modern head chefs are to their staff). Newnham-Davis is turning in his grave.

  Coincidently Mr Ganesh was dining at The Wilderness when I was there for dinner a couple of week’s ago, doubtless continuing his mission to dine. I suspect there’s a book planned at the end of it - well he is a journalist - and now we know that Birmingham should have a place in it. I revisited The Wilderness three or four nights ago. The Jewellery Quarter was very dark, damp and moderately misty, the streets virtually deserted and the little passageway at the end of which was the prettily-lit entrance to the restaurant, had all the feeling of a Brummie version of 1880s Whitechapel about it. No wonder then that the restaurant was not fully booked on this mid-winter evening. But the punters there were treated to a magnificent repast - basically the same ‘Future of Dining’ menu from which I had dined a couple of weeks before but brilliantly executed. The wagyu beef was immaculate and generously portioned on this occasion, and in the fish course, pollock had transformed very pleasingly into turbot. The petit fours were also different from two weeks before with a charming cow’s head fudge sitting prettily on the plate beside a yuzu jelly. Chef Marius Gedminas was in cracking form and after a slight wobble at the end of last year one evening, The Wilderness was unquestionably still up there among the stars.

‘Carrot 2023’ - 

Chicken broth with egg yolk and seaweed - 

Magnificent wagyu with a fine sauce -

Seared Anjou pigeon with foie gras-stuffed paratha - 

Petit fours - Cow’s head fudge and yuzu jelly - 

  There’s certainly a new future in store for a couple of West Midlands established chefs - Matt Cheal of Cheal’s of Henley is putting his final preparations in place for his new restaurant in Knowle and Nathan Eades, Yorkshire-born but raised in Bromsgrove, once a sous chef at Forelles in Fishmore Hall in Ludlow from which he operated a pop-up, Epi, firstly in Ludlow in 2012, then in Bromsgrove from 2013 with side trips to the Kitchen Garden in Kings Heath (January 2014) and then Head Chef at Simpsons (from 16 September 2015 succeeding, coincidently, Matt Cheal though it had previously been announced he was to be the Head Chef at St Andrew’s Hotel in Droitwich, and thence to the Wild Rabbit at Kingham, is to open his own pub restaurant, Halfway at Kineton.

  Worldwide, the biggest gastronomic event of the year was the announcement that René Redzepi is to close his multi-course, astronomically priced restaurant Noma in Copenhagen finding that since he started to pay his junior chefs a salary the restaurant’s financial model did not work. Famously, the restaurant has been judged by the cognoscenti to be the best in the world but was it after all, just a side branch in the evolution of dining out which eventually fizzles out? Regardless, let’s face it, I was never going to get there.

 

  Finally the grim news that the BBC’s Great British Menu returns to the nation’s television screens next week sadly with the same judges as last year, in particular the exquisitely irritating Ed Gamble who brings the BBC’s dumbing down to new previously unplumbed depths and that magnificent chef Tom Kerridge who dominates the other judges with his opinions. With the West Midlands in general, and Birmingham in particular, leading the country’s gastronomic scene, perhaps the programme’s producers might even feature chefs this year who actually work in West Midlands restaurants to represent the region. Oh, this year’s theme is a celebration of Paddington Bear and British animation so I suppose every chef will feel obliged to incorporate marmalade in their menus or strive to produce Anglo-Peruvian fusion dishes. Bring back Fort and Peyton.  Please.

    Finally, when staying in town, I am still enjoying taking Lucy The Labrador to breakfast in Wayland’s Yard in Bull Street. A rather delicious and very filling ‘Full English’ is on offer but I’m rather keen on the bacon bap, literally piles of well-cooked streaky bacon on a sweet bap, washed down by some of the café’s fine coffee. I like the amusing mural there, it has the air of this year’s Great British Menu theme about it.

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.