97. West Midlands Mayor Calls For Birmingham To Kick Start Hospitality Industry.

  Diners and food business owners remain full of expectation indulging in optimistic speculation about the imminent reopening of restaurants. Politicians are also keen to see the hospitality industry get restarted given that in the West Midlands alone 135000 jobs are provided by that industry and it contributes £12.6 billion per year to the local economy. Now the Birmingham Post reports that the notable West Midlands mayor, Andy Street, has called on the government to allow the region to become the first area in the country to reopen its public houses and restaurants, “This way, we can lead the way and help strike the right balance between safety and outputs, allowing other regions to follow suit. It’s important for the West Midlands to build on its unique heritage and distinctive strengths and seize the opportunity to reset, rebuild and reinvent our region, and come back even stronger”.

  I have my doubts. Being an old bloke, and much favoured by COVID-19 as potential prey, I don’t really want my first post-lock down fine dining meal to be my last. And COVID certainly has not gone away in these parts and it’s just as nasty and murderous as it was 3 months ago. Some Birmingham restaurants, Craft Dining Rooms and The Wilderness, are making reservations in anticipation of an early July starting gun being fired. They could be right and I have speculatively made bookings at both though for a little while after they open so somebody else can dip their toes in the water before I take the plunge and the table I have reserved at Craft Dining Rooms is outside.
  Craft Dining Rooms has indicated that it will put in a lot of measures to ensure that diners will be as safe as possible when it reopens its doors to them including temperature testing (of the diners not the food) and in the meantime has introduced a takeaway service with a very reasonably priced 2 two course meals for £40.

  Meanwhile Carter’s of Moseley, at the top of trendy people’s favourite Birmingham restaurant list, has been selling extravagant and extravagantly priced ingredients so that the well heeled socialists of Moseley and Harborne and the slightly less well heeled socialists of Kings Heath can cook their own Michelin-starred barbecues. Well done to Brad Carter for his good business sense.

  At The Wilderness Alex Claridge has been offering bespoke 3 hour-long home cooking lessons via the internet and has opened his reservation book to post-Lockdown customer-hopefuls (I’m one of them).

  And Kray Tredwell and Stuart Deeley have been giving a number of interviews about their plans for their new restaurants the openings of which have been necessarily delayed by COVID-19. Kray has a nice byline - Fancy Common Food by Kray Tredwell. Though he also has Modern Abstract Fine Dining from Kray Tredwell which is nicely intriguing.

  Finally we might note a recent Birmingham Post article which reported on an interview with Aktar Islam of the sublime Opheem who gave a gloomy prognosis for the future of Birmingham restaurants as a result of the COVID-19 problem especially as his new Pulperia had only just opened prior to the Lockdown with the result, one assumes, that it was bleeding money. Let’s hope he’s wrong. There are many determined chefs and restaurant owners in the West Midlands whose efforts in the last few weeks may have saved their businesses and our regional Dining scene. This is another chapter in the story of dining out in the West Midlands. Perhaps Andy Street’s intervention may tip the balance in their favour.

Pulperia has recently started a takeaway Sunday lunch service

70. Disappointment In The Wilderness At Star Result.

   Kray Treadwell, the young Brummie who latterly worked in Michael O’Hare’s Leeds restaurant The Man Behind The Curtain and made a notable impact in the 2019 Great British Menu BBC television programme, did some pop-up cooking at The Craft Dining Rooms in the International Convention Centre (ICC) in the city centre on 13 September 2019 and was due to repeat his appearance there on the coming Friday, 11 October 2019 but has now pulled out from the commitment. He made a similar no-show when he was due to cook with Alex Claridge at Nocturnal Animals in mid-July 2019. Both appearances were advertised to the public so we will all hope that an expected appearance in November will actually take place.

 Clearly feeling the need to express his feelings publically at having missed out on a Michelin star at last night’s awards ceremony Alex Claridge, Chef patron of The Wilderness, has sent out an e mail to his customers mentioning his and his staff’s profound disappointment and thanking his staff for their continued support and pledging to keep turning out fine food for his customers.

  The reasons for the award or non-award of a Michelin star are as mysterious as the Schleswig-Holstein question or the solution to the Brexit conundrum. Likely as much there is no solution. Stars mean a lot to a chef and quite rightly too and Claridge would probably be more likely to be awarded a star if his restaurant were in London, the Lake District or Dublin - places where the London-centric (plus a nice trip out-preference) inspectors want to be (not poor old Birmingham). But he can draw reassurance that at least he’s not in the Michelin-star deserts of Manchester or Liverpool. Let’s just hope that he keeps beavering away here in Birmingham and that his efforts are eventually recognised and rewarded by a passing Michelin inspector breaking his journey on the road from London to the Lake District.

51. GBM Returns But No Midlands Restaurant In Sight.

  The annual parade of expensive food prepared by upcoming and talented young chefs who work in expensive restaurants generally for the pleasuring of the more comfortably-off who deem themselves to be gastronomically sophisticated in their tastes, the BBC's television programme The Great British Menu, is back on our screens and despite my jaundiced opinion of it I can't help feeling quite pleased to be sitting down and watching it. Well it makes a change from the unending saga of Brexit.

  There's nothing new about this new season - the same tortured use of a theme for the final banquet - last year it set out to celebrate the 'heroes' of the National Health Service (no-one who worked in the organisation could be spoken of unless the mention of them was preceded by the use of the word 'hero'), such is the BBC's sickly patronising populism with which we have become all too familiar in recent years since the BBC took over from the Church Of England as the main formulator of British public opinion. This year the banquet at the end of the series will commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Abbey Road music studios which will enable the BBC to invite aging former popular music stars to serve as guest judges alongside Oliver Peyton who grows gaunter every year, Andi Oliver who once participated in a reggae band or perhaps a punk band, I can't quite remember which, and dear Old Matthew Fort, described as the Doyen of British food critique who fulfills the role of Grumpy Old Man quite splendidly and who has had delightful cat fights over the years with Oliver Peyton which have lifted the programme far more than any of the gastronomic creations featured on it.

  Apparently it's being made in Stratford-upon-Avon and it's therefore rather surprising that the makers of the programme couldn't be bothered to find even one competitor who works in a restaurant in the Midlands and East Anglia for the Central region heats. Still they couldn't be bothered to do that last year either so I suppose it's not such a surprise after all. The Central Region competing chefs are listed below:-

  Kray Treadwell is new to the competition and originates from Solihull but works as Head Chef at Michael O'Hare's ever-so-trendy Man Behind The Curtain in ever-so-trendy Leeds. The second competitor is Sabrina Gidda who is executive chef at AllBright, an all-woman club in, inevitably, London. She is given a second chance at winning a place at the Banquet kitchen by virtue of having connections with Wolverhampton. The third competing chef is the now terribly familiar Ryan Simpson-Trotman who is participating for the third time and is no doubt hopeful, like Theresa May and her numerous 'Meaningful votes' that third time, or perhaps fourth time, will be lucky for him. Or perhaps not. Anyway, his Midlands connections are tentative working as he does with his husband at Orwell's in Henley on Thames in Oxfordshire but having been brought up in Nuneaton.

  I couldn't resist picturing above a daubière which I came across on the internet and which is really rather a stylish vessel. It's used by the French to stew cheap meat. There's no doubting that even if most of the ingredients used by the French in their cuisine are rather disgusting and the results grossly overestimated they do have a chicness to the preparation of the stuff. Even when they're rioting which ofcourse they're doing rather a lot of at the moment they manage to do it in chic gilets jaunes which gives me the idea for what I might wear when I go to dine in a French restaurant next time.