188. Upstairs By Tom Shepherd.

 Tom Shepherd, who grew up in Birmingham and was Head Chef at Adam’s from 2017 to 2019 (see Blog 165), recently opened his first restaurant, Upstairs, in Lichfield. The name derives from the restaurant’s location which precisely is on the first floor above his father’s  jewellery shop. As well as working previously at Adam’s, Shepherd had in the past worked in the kitchens of Restaurant Sat Bains, in far-off Nottingham, with Michael Wignall as Senior sous chef at the two-starred Latymer restaurant in Pennyhill Park Hotel in Bagshot in Surrey and as sous chef at the Samling Hotel in Windermere. He is therefore a man who is not without credentials.

  His new restaurant is relatively small with 28 covers but it is planned that a roof terrace will be opened in 2022.

  In between his departure from Adam’s and the opening of Upstairs, Shepherd had been running Dine At Home which involved the delivery of a three course meal kit to customers’s homes with the contents of the kit changing on a weekly basis.

  And so, naturally, off to Lichfield I went.

  After days of black skies and almost incessant rain this was a fine, sunny, chill,  blue skyed sort of autumn day. Lichfield could not look finer. The three spired cathedral beside the river could not have looked more magnificent. Dr Johnson rested on his plinth and at a respectful distance Boswell looked out over the market place. In their time neither of them could have heard of Michelin stars but there were enough old inns in the town to have kept them comfortably satiated. 

    I found Shepherd’s father’s jewellery shop and the entrance - a flight of stairs of course - up to the restaurant. A clean, modern, fresh, bright, tasteful, pleasing dining room, a piece of work by the same designers who had provided the decor for Craft Dining Rooms, with an open kitchen. And that was not the only connection - Craft’s manager had moved jobs to work in Lichfield and an excellent job she was doing.

  I was tempted by the excellently priced lunchtime menu, not least because it included an alluring-sounding roast plaice but I felt I must not miss the opportunity to try as much as I could without overwhelming my elderly digestive system and so I chose to eat the dishes on the five course menu.

 

 After two pleasing amuse bouches which included an admirable red cabbage gazpacho aptly accompanied by a mild horseradish ice cream, it was down to business with a first course of a splendid and beautifully cooked scallop, as accurately prepared as we might expect from the former Head Chef of Adam’s, served on a bed of celeriac with dashi and little cubes of apple. The flavour of the scallop itself had me purring with pleasure.

  Then to my least favourite dish, not because it was not well executed but entirely because I dislike poached egg, Arlington White hen’s egg served with beetroot. The main course was made up of excellent quality aged sirloin - full of a wonderful flavour and cooked to perfection - accompanied by Sand carrots and thin slices of sweetly pickled carrot with a Sauce Robert (a brown mustard sauce). I grew a little tired as I ate the course of eating nothing but beef and carrot, as delicious as they may have been and would have like another element to the dish apart from the sauces to break up the monotony of carrot-beef-carrot-beef-ad inf. But it was a fine dish beyond doubt.

  

  Next the menu signalled Transition offering “Thai green curry” which I found to be a highly memorable dish for all the right reasons. Anything with lovely creamy rice pudding and mango is bound to score highly with me. It one of those things, like Purnell’s 10-10-10 egg surprise, that you always want to see on the menu. The dessert proper was a fine piece of patisserie, an excellent Paris Brest, which either needed a little more pear to counter the caramel or perhaps just less caramel.

  Given Tom Shepherd’s background perhaps it is not surprising that I thought that Upstairs was like An acorn of Adam’s’ falling a little way from the tree - Upstairs may have fewer covers and a smaller area but the decor is as smart, the service is pretty well perfect (happily a little more relaxed than Adam’s but pretty spot on with everyone dressed immaculately) and the fine dishes are accurate and well thought out. The place was full for lunch and everything seemed to be running as smoothly as any long established restaurant can manage. A great start. Could Lichfield be the new Ludlow?

  Meanwhile there have been developments in the kitchen at Adam’s. Kieron Stevens (see Blog 165), who took over from Tom Shepherd as Head Chef there in 2019, left the post on September 2021 to work as Executive Chef at the JM Socials restaurant group in Cheltenham. On 28 September 2021 it was announced that James Goodyear had been appointed to the post of Head Chef at Adam’s. Goodyear had previously been Head Chef at the Michelin-starred Hide restaurant in London and was a Young National Chef of the Year finalist in 2014. Goodyear described his style of cooking as “European modern fine dining” and has expressed the opinion that the new post gave him the opportunity to return to his roots.

165. Adams.

  Professional food critics and Tripadvisers all agree that Adams is the best restaurant in Birmingham and probably the whole of the West Midlands. Two out of three visits there in the past led me to conclude that that statement was probably not the case. Excellent in many ways but too many faults for my liking but who I am to be at odds with Tripadvisers and those that get paid for reviewing food? So, it was time to return and to discover how much I would enjoy lunch there after a break from visiting Waterloo Street.

  Adams as we know, started life as a pop-up in Bennett’s Hill before moving to Waterloo street. I visited the pop-up once and felt that while it was pretty good, it was not quite as exciting as I had been led to expect. Then a very fine lunch after its arrival in Waterloo Street and then something of a calamity on a  follow-up visit which involved a double jeopardy of an excessively salty dish (precisely what it was has been blotted out of my memory) and a dish which involved paying a large extra sum to have some tasteless lobster added to the dish involved with no gain at all to the pleasure the dish gave.

Kieron Stevens, Head Chef at Adam’s

 

Tom Shepherd, Head chef 2017-19

 

  I was consequently lacking any real will to return to Adam Stokes’ much admired (by almost the whole world) restaurant where the head chef is presently Kieron Stevens (he trained under David Everett Matthias at the once two-starred Le Champignon Sauvage, see Blog 160, and took over the role from Tom Shepherd in February 2019) but the time had come.

  The restaurant operates like a well-oiled military machine. The staff look smart, the decor is chic, the restaurant is spacious (apart, perhaps, for the bar area which was full when my lunch companion and I arrived meaning that we were led straight through to our table for our preprandial cocktails (I had a fine, sensibly priced and very quaffable negroni) and everyone goes about their work efficiently, politely and effectively. The pace of service is spot on, not stiff and not relaxed. Professional would be the apt adjective in any business that performs the way Adams does. But I thought it was all a little more clinical than I should have liked. I would have liked a little schmoozing to have crept in at some point during the meal. 

  The food was very accurate and impressive. The dishes were presented perfectly and gorgeously. We chose the £80 à la carte menu (really I don’t need 4 starters, 1 main course, 2 desserts and all the extras at lunch time which the tasting menu would have rendered up to me) and the dishes on offer were more attractive on paper than the cheaper lunch menu. But I think this range of menu choices is perfect and the price of the à la carte menu sensibly pitched to ensure that the meal served was not made up of the cheapest ingredients but food of higher quality. What’s the point of going to somewhere rather smart and being fed dishes made from the cheapest cuts of meat and species of fish just to offer a lunch at a cut price? If you’re somewhere grand then let’s have some grand ingredients treated lovingly by an accomplished chef.

 

I chose the starter of delicious lightly salted cod coated with ‘Thai green curry’ with an included side dish of lobster in a crunchy tempura batter with a pleasing satay sauce. A remarkably good dish which could hardly be bettered anywhere else in the city except it included one of my bêtes noirs - fairly tasteless scorched pak choi (the entire national stock of which should be bundled up and exported immediately to the Far East) included in the dish no doubt because of its link with the cuisine this dish recalls and because there was some texture provided by it.

  This starter had been preceded by some happily enjoyable little appetitisers including a cheeky cheesy little chou pastry, a little squid ink wrap enclosing sublime beef tartare with pickles and two of the most fabulously tasting mussels I have ever had the pleasure to put in my mouth floating on a verdant velouté.

  

  My lunch companion and I both opted for the very fine aged sirloin which I greatly enjoyed. It was a precisely cooked plate, the meat could not have been more spot on. The accompanying vegetables were enjoyable but if they had not been there the two slices of beef by themselves would have made for a lordly main course. Accuracy, precision, modern versions of painstakingly cooked classic dishes - I felt was finally getting the measure of Adams..

 

 A predessert based on pineapple was not so palate cleansing as one might have hoped for (nothing does the job like a briskly lemon-flavoured tidbit) and then on to my dessert proper - I had chosen wild strawberries with a violet sorbet - a gem - and a scattering of perfectly matching, crunchy pistachio - a fine summer dessert. I had missed the option of rum baba (hiding under the headline ‘Apricot’) on the menu but my dining companion pounced on it and judged it, with its accompanying almond elements, to be one of those great pleasures in life.

  It was all over bar the coffee and its accompanying petit fours - this time a macaroon with a chocolate filling and another chou pastry but this time sweet and hence providing a clever little symmetry to the whole meal.

  The visit to Adams had dispelled my previous doubts. It serves very fine food indeed. It has the air of being somewhere very special. It is very highly placed in the firmament of Midlands restaurants.

                                                         ______________________

When I was a child*, I partied like a child, I drank Harvey Wallbangers like a child, I was easily pleased like a child. When I became a man I gave up childish ways and entered the dark lands of much more serious cocktails. When I was an old man I frequently visited Purnell’s Bistro (in the company of other old men - don’t worry I never drank alone) and eventually the excellent head barman put Penicillin on the menu. Dark, warm, autumnal, comforting as only an old bloke can appreciate.

(* here a “child” is a young whippersnapper well above the legal age for consuming alcohol.)

  But Purnell’s Bistro is no more and I ask myself where can I get myself my next shot of Penicillin when I need it? Now I rather like the hedonistic luxury of Madeleine at The Grand. Actually I have cravings to be there from time to time, not, I assure you for the alcohol (though that is an added bonus) but for the sheer pleasure of being there. It really is very nice, a few negronis and antique negronis have passed my lips in that very pleasant environment and now I have gone one step further and entered the land of the Boulevardier and one further step has taken me to making this dark drink myself, Satanic in its deliciousness, positioned I’m sure somewhere strategic in one of the Circles of Hell, and rather pleased I am with my Frankenstein creation. I have not quaffed a Penicillin yet since the reopening but I’m quite happy sitting around with my Boulevardier and letting the tormented world sail on by.