This was the first of Kibou’s two soft launch days. The restaurant which serves Japanese-style food is a branch of a chain which trades elsewhere in good, well-off socialist locales in London, Cheltenham, Bristol, Cambridge, Oxford and Solihull (well-off but decidedly non-socialist). Hence, opening in Temple Row in the very centre of Birmingham which presently can’t make up its mind whether it’s politics is fascist extreme left (Green) or fascist extreme right (Reform) or just decently moderate (Conservative), Kibou is dealing with a new sort of dining public.
I arrived an hour into the first service. It is an impressive establishment - its size extended since the last on site resident business closed and now serves 208 covers. The decor is colourful and exciting and on this first day the front of house staff were charming, enthusiastic in a quiet way and very welcoming.
I was seated downstairs which has its own bar and I ordered a Singapore sling to start while my excellent waitress placed before me some crunchy wasabi nibbles which hit the right spot. I looked around me at my fellow diners - at the nearest table the types I had expected - a middle class, hipster, male gay couple who looked like they had escaped from Kings Heath for the day. But as the dining room began to fill there was a surprising change as the rest of the diners appeared to be from a different class - a nouvelle bourgeoisie - a working class with loads of money - plumbers, plasterers, scaffolders, builders - people, who unlike the old socialist soft middle class - health workers, university types, teachers, those linked with the arts - do physical work which, though despised by the vieille bourgeoisie, rake in the cash and aren’t embarrassed to flash it - and that appears to now extend to dining out on exotic cuisines. The nouvelle bourgeoisie - to a man - were dressed - nay, uniformed - in expensive hoodies, sports bottoms, back-to-front baseball caps (often not taken off while eating) and trainers. Unlike the hipster vieille bourgeoisie, they looked clean and decent allowing for the sheer horribleness of contemporary casual fashion and their beards were trimmed more neatly than those of the Stirchley/Kings Heath/Moseley hipsters.
I was surprised by how many children had been brought along by the members of the nouvelle bourgeoisie to eat Japanese fare - surely it would not appeal to the enfants who had been brought along to Kibou. I asked my waitress about this phenomenon. Kibou, she told me, had a special children’s menu to interest les enfants of the ‘working people’ (as politicians now like to call the former working class) and she showed one to me and I noticed katsu curry to be among the dishes on offer to the pups and kittens (the menu also included puzzles for them to solve which I suppose might distract them from running amok in the restaurant as the entitled wealthy old middle class always seem to feel is quite permissible for their nicely spoken little darlings to do so). Well, English society has moved on, and diners must put up with marauding, bored children while eating despite paying a very high price to do so.
But enough of social commentary. What about the food which is the reason I was there? I have eaten Japanese food quite a few times now but my knowledge of the cuisine is scanty and my attitude to it would probably be considered to be naïve by those who know themselves to be experts. My problem is that I am too old to learn a new language and continue to fail to remember just what each dish is when I see it on a menu - -ase this and -ake that - and no matter what you say, Japan and Japanese things are remarkably alien to the English especially the old English like me. I once spent a few days in Japan - in Kyoto and Tokyo - and ate the food and saw the scenes and rode aboard public transport and ambled along the streets and I did indeed find it both alien and in some ways similar to England.
After all the English and the Japanese are both island peoples, previously imperial, polite (once upon a time in England, still in Japan) and nestled in our own traditions. Our islands both sit at about the same northern latitude and we both feel superior to those who live on our neighbouring continents (or at least the English once did but the all pervading though now fading nouvelle culture de la gauche has for the present at least ensured we feel inferior to everyone). The French long made us feel inferior in our cuisine - for two centuries at least even though their greatest chefs had to come to England to really make their mark - Escoffier at the Savoy and then the Ritz Carlton for instance and Soyer innovating the kitchen at the Reform Club, Ude at Crockford’s and even Carème who worked for George IV though for a very short time - and I suppose now in the post-Modern British era, when Japanese ingredients play such an important role in English dishes and Japanese restaurants serving Japanese-style food are springing up all over the place, the question arises as to whether English cuisine is now once more subordinated to a foreign style of food - Japanese and whether or not English food is inferior to Japanese, as British roast beef and pies were once considered inferior to French casseroles, sauces and patisserie.
So the children of English working people, the offspring of George the Plumber and Harry the Plasterer, modern-day mechanicals, are lunching at Japanese restaurants on katsu curry, as exciting and interesting to them as Birds Eye fish fingers were to children of my generation. Where’s all that going to lead?
Anyway, as I said, back to the food. This was a large menu and some of the dishes as described seemed rather large for a single diner but after some discussion with the waitress, who was very professional and helpful and politely friendly, it was agreed that I would order a cold dish and a hot dish. The cold dish was a quite large platter of sushi - eight pieces of duck and cucumber uramaki (in which the nori is on the outside, wrapped around the rice) with avocado, fresh ginger and, if one chose to use it, the pleasantly scathing assault of wasabi. This was thoroughly enjoyable, the duck perhaps was a little bland but brought with it the nice meaty texture an old Englishman might like (and did like) and the nori was full of maritime flavour.
My hot dish was a platter of steamed and pan-fried gyoza filled with tasty pork mince served with a dipping sauce. This was so tasty I wolfed it down and felt I really should have another savoury dish which took the form of tempura prawns (ebi) which I again enjoyed very much. Perhaps the prawns were not bursting with the unique flavour of prawns but the tempura was excellent - delicate and crispy and the crustaceans were happily accompanied by a tasty sriracha mayonnaise.
10 October 2026.
Rating:- 🌛🌛🌛🌛
