132. Dinner At The Grand, 1937 Style.

 

  The dog and I are planning a grand re-entry into society when the restrictions associated with this current lockdown, endured as it is through a miserable, grey spring - the spring flowers are there but the sun makes only rare appearances, the skies are the colour of battleships and the gusty winds are chill - and as soon as we may, we will be off for a very civilised few days staying at Fishmore Hall in Ludlow returning for a birthday weekend dining or lunching with the appropriate number of dear old friends on successive days at Opheem, Purnell’s and Simpsons. Prior to that in late April, as outdoor dining becomes possible, it’s off to the Craft for dining around the fire pit. Reserved already too is lunch at The Wilderness  and the year, or what is left of it, lies spread ahead of us.

  The birthday weekend will not only be special because of where I shall be eating but also because of where I will be staying with my canine best friend - the finally refurbished and newly reopened (having closed in 2002) Grand Hotel in Colmore Circus. It’s wonderfully dog friendly and a splendidly short distance from Purnell’s and Opheem so there is no great amount of travelling to be done after an evening of gastronomic self-indulgence. And it does seem to me that staying at Birmingham’s great historic hotel as it reopens really should be quite exciting. Some of the publicity photographs seem to suggest that the hotel will once more be correctly named ‘The Grand’.

 

 In Blog 16 I wrote a piece about a banquet at The Grand in 1896, 17 years after the hotel first opened in 1879, after obtaining a menu for the event. And very grand it was too. Sadly I have still not come across anyone offering Nesselrode pudding, invented by Carrème himself in 1814, but one lives in hope.

   I have obtained another The Grand menu from a later age to give us an idea of what was ‘in’ in Birmingham cuisine in 1937, just two years before the start of the Second World War was to set back British cuisine for at least two generations. The menu with a pleasantly Art Deco illustration on the front cover of a smartly dressed waiter holding aloft a tray with two cocktail glasses and a blue bottle and colourful gay balloons and streamers is for the rather unlikely sounding Building Trades Exchange And Club dinner held on Monday 15 February 1937 so we might expect that the attendees were well off financially and probably middle class parvenus in the main with the money but not necessarily the tastes for 1930s fine dining. 

  So what were they served? The menu is headed Diner with one N though whether or not our builders thought it was a spelling mistake or appreciated the sophistication of having a menu in French even if they could not be sure what food was to be served to them, we may only guess.

Hors D’oeuvres riche Saumon fumé 

Consommé Brunoise Royale  Crème à la Reine

Saumon Poché  Sauce Hollandaise

                Concombre

Supréme de la Volaille Jeanette

Sorbet au Champagne Fine

Selle d’agneau rôti   Sauce menthe

         Petits pois au beurre

          Pommes nouvelles

Poire glacé Beatrice

      Mignardises

Dessert

Café Moka 

  We may conclude from this that one thing was for sure - the organising committee of the Building Trades Exchange and Clubs might have been prepared to have the menu in French but they were determined to stick with very British cuisine - smoked salmon, vegetable soup (albeit a classic Escoffier dish), poached salmon, jellied chicken (possibly a little more exotic than the rest of the menu for the 1930s English building company director), roast lamb with mint sauce, peas and new potatoes, a pear ice cream and petits fours.

  What stands out for me here is that soup, which we rarely receive in fine dining restaurants now, occupies its deserved place on the menu. Of course, the Roux Brothers insisted on always including soup in the menu when they opened Le Gavroche in 1967 (though now the next generation has taken over there I see no soup on any of its present day menus including its alluring Menu Exceptionnel) and then at the Waterfront Inn and I would rather like to see magical soups as courses again here in our Birmingham restaurants. One can see that our Japanese-, Peruvian- and Scandinavian-inspired young chefs might see soup as a thing of a bygone age but there’s room there for someone to revive a happy course in a modern idiom.

  Well, we will see what the post-COVID era brings with it and how our chefs have been using their time to evolve and enhance our local gastronomy. Meanwhile I look forward to my first stay at The Grand.

No soup for this gavroche.

98. London Restaurants Feeling The Heat Of COVID-19.

  As statues of 18th century slave owners which have stood for 200 years across Britain begin to disappear in the swell of the tide of protests against racism, one not necessarily foreseen outcome of the COVID-19 pandemic, so other symbols of privilege - ludicrously overpriced London restaurants are beginning to feel the heat. Much loved by London-centric Michelin, but already dumped by the 2019 The Fifty Best Restaurants in the World List, formerly prestigious London restaurants, previously delighted to squeeze wealthy international travellers and gastrotourists and the wealthy Londoner elite (now hiding away in their second or third or fourth or fifth home somewhere in Scotland or Cornwall or the Cotswolds) for every £50 note they can, are facing the end of their glory days.
  Thus the two Michelin-starred The Ledbury is now closed indefinitely as its Chef patron, Brett Graham, declared that it was impossible to keep the restaurant open because of the government’s social distancing measures and he has fired all his staff but is holding on to the lease for the present. the Ledbury hah held its two Michelin stars longer than any other restaurant in London apart from Le Gavroche and first opened about 15 years ago.
  Quite simply, London now has far, far too many restaurants. With international travel suspended it is clear that there are not enough local inhabitants to keep the thousands of restaurants in the capital alive over the next couple of years. And with the prices in so many of them being exorbitant the numbers of their potential clientele is minuscule. Furthermore those in the know are already ditching London in a big way. The latest Fifty Best Restaurants In The World list gave London the elbow when it placed only two of the city’s restaurants in the legendary Fifty - both in Shoreditch (The Clove Club and Lyle’s) with a taste for ‘Modern British’ cuisine, with Spanish or Nordic or Far Eastern influences rather than being derivative of the sort of stuff the French have long presented to the world as the (dubious) peak of gastronomy. Thus the likes of Dinner by Heston Blumenthal and The Ledbury were pitched from their top fifty places with the latter down to no. 68.

  Here in Birmingham the number of true Fine Dining restaurants, mostly serving exceptional food at realistic prices but undervalued by the London-loving Michelin, can be counted on the fingers of less than two hands. There should be enough local diners around wishing to enjoy the pleasures of Birmingham’s very special restaurants to enable the restaurants not only to reopen but to thrive and flourish. We have some exciting new chefs just waiting for the current crisis to finish to open their new restaurants and of course there are Birmingham’s great already well-established restaurants on the scene which their regular diners are just itching to get back to. Perhaps some of the promising young Midlands chefs who thought their future lay in a career in London will think of coming back to the West Midlands as the London restaurant scene begins to sink.
  It’s been an awful time and bad things aren’t over yet, but the Birmingham food scene could emerge enriched and hopefully better appreciated than it ever has been before. Giles Coren, who claims to have given up being a food critic, may after all find peace among the “One eyes” who enjoy West Midlands gastronomy. And the likely collapse of the London dining food scene gives impetus to the campaign of the quite excellent and pleasingly influential West Midlands mayor, Andy Street, to make the region the place where the hospitality industry kickstarts the economy again.