545. A Burger On 4 July.

 

  It was 4 July and therefore it was the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence by the rebel British colonials in North America. On a recently issued postage stamp, the United States Post Office identified the burger as a modern American icon. This seems reasonable enough.

  Therefore I thought I really should eat a good quality hamburger, as we used to call them, on the occasion of this notable anniversary. I’m not a fan of the burger. You can pay a lot of money for some of them and leave the table feeling very disappointed. After all they’re just meat pressed together on a bun and jazzed up with various ingredients and glamourised by the people who are prepared to pay to eat them - middle-aged hipsters who think they know a lot about food and think street food is cool. It isn’t - cool - it’s overpriced, served in horrible containers with useless wooden utensils in uncomfortable, often cold locations.

  That said, I was determined to have a hamburger on this special date and living near Longbridge, it did seem likely that I would get a very edible burger at Herbert’s Yard (which has gradually been improved since it first opened) without too much travelling being involved. Every time I have visited there, there has been a stall or a wagon selling hamburgers so I was somewhat surprised, and mildly irritated, when I arrived there, on 4 July in particular, to find there were indeed no purveyors of burgers on site. Herbert’s Yard on Independence Day was definitely not selling burgers. Harrumph!

   I have a sense of occasion and my mind raced to try to think of an alternative source of quality hamburger. I could call a Uber and head for the Wildmoor Oak Inn not too far away. There was bound to be a good burger there but I was lacking the drive to do so. Then I resolved to have my burger and eat it by buying and sampling Marks and Spencer’s burgers - they should be good and the shop and food hall was just a short distance away, across the car park.

  And that is how I found myself sitting in my garden on the terrace eating an excellently cooked, very nicely tasting M & S burger, with a subtly flavoured coronation coleslaw (M &S) and caramelised onions (rather good even if I say so myself), all on an appealingly sweet and fresh brioche bun (M & S again), served with a very well cooked, pleasingly sweet and large corn on the cob, generously buttered. Oh! AI added the tiny US flag flying from a cocktail stick. 

  The dog sat close by enjoying the tidbits which she managed to scrounge and a glass of Pimms No 1 rounded off a fine meal wherein I discovered that I could enjoy a hamburger after all, if it was done just right and on the right occasion. And for dessert, a slice of M & S Sicilian lemon cheesecake with cream - the lemon curd on top was nicely sharp and packed full of as much zing as one could hope for. No doubt about it, some of these M & S products really are very good.

Home cooked 4 July .

Rating:- 🌞🌞🌞 (well, I cooked it didn’t I?)

521. Afternoon Tea And Street Food.

 

  By using the term ‘dining out’, I usually think of two meals, either lunch or dinner. Generally now however ‘dining out’ has extended itself in the casual culture of middle-class hipsters who presently seem to be about the only people who can afford to eat out in their frequently grubby little enclaves in trendy suburbs to anytime-of-the-day street food, expensive burgers and costly pizzas and ‘dirty fries’. Much of this stuff is over regarded by a social group which over regards itself in parallel but there are some purveyors of street food products which do indeed show a passion for their products and consequently bring great pleasure to those who consume them.

  ‘Dining out’ may now also encompass breakfasts & the ‘all-day breakfast’ has long been elevated from its greasy spoon origins to being partaken of in more rarified establishments and ‘afternoon teas’ are now immensely popular particularly with ladies who previously lunched but now settle for a teapot, a scone (whether or not the jam or perhaps the cream is layered on it first is up to them in this casual society - for me the only correct format is scone, butter, jam and cream (call it a Warwickshire tea if you like), sandwiches and dainty little cakes and, if they can get away with it, and long before the sun is below the yardarm, a glass of Prosecco. Why they are called Afternoon teas is perplexing as they are often not consumed at teatime but sometimes as early as 1PM which is silly. I have seen a fatuous article trying to explain the difference between afternoon tea and high tea but I remain to be convinced.

  So we have it - ‘dining out’ - what is it? Lunch and dinner and now also anytime Street food, anytime breakfast and afternoon tea which lasts from just after lunch to just before dinner. 

  Here are some of my recent new-style dining out experiences which I thoroughly enjoyed - 

Breakfast -

  On another stay at the Hotel du Vin in Stratford upon Avon I chose to eat breakfast at the hotel as I have done several times before. This of course was breakfast not all day breakfast. The Hotel du Vin in Stratford really does serve very good breakfasts. I always feel that the scrambled egg is key to judging the breakfast. Oh yes! And the humble slice of black pudding. The perfect scrambled egg is a rare and fabulous beast.mi like it butterfly and mildly baveuse. The HDV chefs so often succeed in sending out a very fine scrambled egg. On this occasion the scrambled egg was excellent though not perfect but well deserving of a 7.5 out of 10. As regards the black pudding, most hotels overcook it and the contents are dry and flag in the mouth. The HdV usually avoids this and retains a little moisture in its cooked pudding which makes it all very edible. On this occasion, the pudding was not wholly perfect but well deserving of a 7.5 out 10. I will just add that the tomato was excellent - sweet and juicy, the mushroom ver pleasing being moist and firm, the sausage tasty but the bacon somewhat overcooked and tending towards the mildly leathery.

The previous evening I had enjoyed a dinner of truly delicious, mildly spiced cauliflower soup and a well-cooked confit duck. This was a very pleasurable pre-theatre dinner before setting off for the Royal Shakespeare Theatre’s Other Place to see a clever production of Macbeth set in a splendidly authentic-looking working men’s club in 1970s Glasgow where Duncan is a gang boss and Macbeth one of his thuggish lieutenants.

Rating:- 🌛🌛🌛🌛

  And so to Afternoon Tea. 

  Kiss Me Cupcakes is a coffee and cake shop, now only open occasionally, in Alvechurch Road in West Heath. The owner is Mary Ashman, a skilled baker, whose main work is making attractive and spectacular occasion cakes which are bespoke in design and cleverly made and extraordinarily appealing. Whenever Mary is holding a special event - in this case a Christmas-themed afternoon tea - I try to go along and not only support a valiant local small business but also to simply enjoy myself. The exquisite, wood-panelled sitting area, full of atmosphere drawn from its eclectic, homely furniture and old ceramics such as Royal Albert tea cups, saucers and teapots, is immensely relaxing and dog friendly and no place seems a better spot to find a chilled-out black Labrador lounging in the hope of sharing in the food served than there at Kiss Me Cupcakes.

  The tea does not have the pretensions of that which is served at, say, The Grand Hotel. But Mary serves it all very nicely. Neat little sandwiches - seasonal turkey and cranberry, smoked salmon and cream cheese and cheese with a delightful sweet chutney. Mary’s scones served with whipped cream and strawberry jam are light and moist, as fresh as anything newly baked (which of course is precisely what they are) and a great pleasure to languidly consume whilst sitting in one of KMC’s very, very comfortable armchairs. There’s a toothsome mince tartlet, just as sweet as you need it to be, and the lightest of fairy cakes beautifully decorated in the style of a Christmas wreath. The meringue with raspberries and passion fruit seeds , is unimpeachable - crispy outside, gooily gorgeous inside and there’s a fine chocolate brownie as well as the cinnamon hit of a gingerbread man to round everything off. This is fine value for £19 which of course includes tea - I was served two pots of Tea Pigs tea and enjoyed the quality of it. 

  Rating:- 🌛🌛🌛🌛.

5 December 2015.

And food, a street food lunch.

  Another facility not far from my home is Herbert's Yard in Longbridge where the immaculate Greidy’s has been the outstanding stall over autumn and into winter. I had a lunch there on a cold grey day and was warmed very pleasurably by my Greidy’s sriracha Thai chicken strips, quite hot to be honest, but full of flavour from the sewer sriracha sauce. The tender, moist chicken strips were served with a necessary and excellent salad and some very well cooked, instantly addictive salted chips and Inconcluded that this was one of those dishes tgat everyone should eat at least once before they die.

Rating:- 🌛🌛🌛🌛.

 I had chosen all the above dishes wisely. Breakfasts/afternoon teas/street food. Yes, I think they are part of the dining out scene (when done well) in this age when men can’t be bothered to shave, scruffy is fashionable and going to work is an occasional day out.

  

472. South West Birmingham And North East Worcestershire.

 

Kings Norton from Bilberry Hill by JRR Tolkien, 8 July 1913.

  To the south and west of the city, Birmingham gradually dissolves into Worcestershire. New Frankley becomes Old Frankley, Rednal becomes Lickey End, West Heath tails off to Hopwood, Kings Norton to Wythall and Rubery to, er, Rubery. In short, suburban Birmingham becomes (mainly) rural Bromsgrove with the Lickey Hills looking down on the surrounding countryside from where JRR Tolkien painted a watercolour on Bilberry Hill looking away towards Kings Norton, the then city distant and brooding, its industry every day threatening to encroach on and overwhelm the agricultural, green lands across the border. 

  In those southwest suburbs when Tolkien was living in Rednal, Herbert Austin was busy establishing his motor car factory at Longbridge and the Cadbury family had established their chocolate factory and had built a model village in which their workers might live very pleasantly unless they wished to consume alcohol which was banned within the boundaries of Bournville village by the Quaker Cadburys.

  Southwest Birmingham is barely recognisable as what we think of as Modern Birmingham. The population is dominated by white people, many of whom arrived there in the nineteen fifties and sixties as the old buildings of the inner city were demolished, in contrast to the population of much of the inner city. It is a mixture of former council estates (many of the houses on those estates were bought by their tenants when Margaret Thatcher introduced the right to buy) and upmarket houses where savvy members of the Birmingham middle class live in houses priced at a fraction of the cost of a similar home in the north of the city at Sutton Coldfield. The residents have all the advantages of living in the city while being close to rural landscapes, just a short walk from home in many cases, as well as cheaper housing. And now those residents of south west Birmingham also have the benefit of being close to some pleasing eateries.

  Recently I had lunch at Kafenion facing Bournville green. It is a busy, sizeable, shabby chic, rustic establishment full, when I went, of the sort of affluent middle class women in early middle age who make up the dominant species in well off-but-socialist Bournville (long gone are the female factory workers who now live in council houses towards the edges of the city). They either had their infants with them, the sort born to ‘elderly primips’, or were luxuriating in their children’s absence at school. It was like a scene from the hilarious BBC comedy, Amandaland. The image of Ladies who lunch has evolved to this new generation of Women who do coffee - with their intensively worked on casual image and their devotion to their mobile phones with much scrolling and texting going on in between the exchange of gossip and oneupwomanship. This certainly is a city of diversity.

    My dining companion, a frequent visitor to Kafenion, and I, who had never eaten there before, were soon settled and studying the paper menu and the blackboard which also listed the dishes on offer. The cuisine is Anglicised Greek or just plain English (with perhaps a little unEnglish spice added). This, in theory, was to be a light lunch and I was very drawn to the spicy (I was warned that it was very spicy by at least a brace of serving staff) curried butternut squash soup which was not only hot in the spicy sense but extremely hot in the temperature meaning of the word. It was very good and the spiciness was not just easily tolerable but also very enjoyable.To accompany the soup I ordered a bowl of excellent chips - crispy outside and soft and digestible inside and made interestingly pleasurable by being sprinkled with sage. There were also a couple of slices of toasted sourdough to mop up the soup.

  My lunch companion ordered an old favourite of hers - Turkish eggs - well poached and spicy and served with an appealing flatbread and she reported that they were very good.

I will have no hesitation to visit Kafenion again when the opportunity arises.

26 March 2025.

Rating:- 🌛🌛🌛.

  In the past twelve to eighteen months, north Worcestershire has gained the excruciatingly excellent Wildmoor Oak Inn (see Blog 454) and in Barnt Green, Andrew Sheridan and his Open Restaurants Group who already have the Michelin-listed Black and Green on the  main street through the village, have opened Cofton on the Green across the road from Black and Green. 

  This is similar to Kafenion in many ways - it acts as a bar for locals and diners with reservations for Black and Green who are waiting for the restaurant to open and serves all-day breakfasts and, an odd pairing, a variety of homemade pizzas. The clientele is similar to that of Kafenion though probably even more well-heeled as Barnt Green is exceedingly affluent (mere mortals in south Birmingham refer to it wondrously as the place where “the footballers live”).

  Regardless, when I and the same lunch companion with whom I visited Kafenion, pitched up at Cofton on the Green, we noted that it was busy, not very sizeable but with outdoors seating, shabby chic, rustic and full of the same sort of clientele as those we encountered in Kafenion, only this being a Saturday, they also had their gaggle of offspring with them though this did not prevent them from paying intense attention to their mobile phones and allowing their next generation to make feral noises or wander around while chewing on some sort of healthy option piece of carbohydrate or the other.

  A young woman, somewhat inarticulate, dropped off a pair of menus at our table and we agreed outr choices and waited for one of the several staff standing at the bar to come and take our order. Eventually, after some minutes, the penny dropped on all sides, and it was revealed to us that one must order at the bar and that way one’s interest in any particular would be registered and in time brought to the table.

  I had a cocktail and we both failed to resist ordering the all day breakfast though I was pulled towards trying one of the pizzas on offer as I suspected they were probably rather good. The breakfast/brunch was very good even at 1.30PM. By the time it reached us, most of the feral children had moved on with their mobile phone-clutching parents and there was only one table left occupied by three women-who-do-coffee  whose cackling was only barely above the level of tolerance. These factors made for a more relaxing lunch than we might otherwise have hoped for half an hour previous.

  These were fine ingredients. The Lashfords sausage, of very good size, was delicious and nicely cooked though the fried egg was cooked so that there was no runniness in the yolk whatsoever. The bacon and hash brown were very tasty but the highlight was the black pudding even if it came at an added price. The cooking of the pudding was perfect, helped, no doubt, by the pudding having plenty of fat in it; it had a  moist but firm texture - too often black pudding is overcooked and cloyingly dry. The twist to this Full English breakfast was that it was served not with toast (which made a truly pleasant change) but with the exoticism of middle eastern flatbread which was also very good. I should not forget to mention that the chopped mushrooms were also delicious and some of the tastiest I have eaten for a long time.

  The choice of dessert is limited and amusingly quirky - a variety of doughnuts - my lunch companion chose the lemon meringue doughnut and said that she enjoyed it. I thought that a milk shake might make a nice way to end the meal and opted for the alluring Malteser flavoured variety. I was disappointed with it - the flavour of chocolate masked the flavour of malt and the milk shake was not anywhere cold enough. 

  My companion and I had enjoyed our visit to Cofton on the Green and again, like Kafenion, I should be happy to return perhaps next time to sample one of the pizzas though a repeat of the Full English, especially if the chef can reproduce the excellent cooking of the black pudding and the mushrooms, would also be very tempting. 

  Cofton on the Green is dog friendly which makes much more sense than letting in a load of feral middle class children spreading which ever virus they have just picked up at school or nursery.

Rating:- 🌛🌛.

12 April 2025.

  In addition to Black and Green in Barnt Green (Blogs 250 and 285), south west Birmingham dwellers also have the opportunity of selecting their choice of fast food at the popular Herbert’s Yard in Longbridge (Blog 201) and the fleshpots of Stirchley and, now trending, Cotteridge which are both just a few minutes away.

394. Politics, Film Noir And Shakespeare. (Part 1).

 

  A busy week of local politics, another visit to The Wilderness with a twist and ending with the annual Shakespeare Birthday Lunch in Stratford Upon Avon. What exciting lives we old blokes live.

 Monday. My first visit to the Hockley Social Club, the fast food and events venue on the edge of the Jewellery Quarter which replaced the iconic Digbeth Dining Club and is a mothership to Herbert’s Yard in Longbridge. It is altogether more inviting than Herbert’s Yard in that it’s warm and spacious and reasonably comfortable, none of which adjectives can be applied to the large, wooden barn in the south west of the city where I live (well, I suppose Herbert’s Yard is spacious - I must be accurate in my reporting). It’s shabby and struggling to be hipster-chic and, I suppose, cool (I am still not sure if that word continues to be used by those in the know) and seems ideally suited to the local population of comfortably off hipsters who inhabit the overpriced flats in the nearby Jewellery Quarter.

   In previous Blogs I have expressed a lack of enthusiasm for street food. There should be a context for street food. Ideally it should be eaten in the street, be it on a warm, barmy evening in a bustling south east or southern Asian city or as a gratifying scoff at some event here in England, be it a fair or a football match or a concert or somewhere else where crowds meet and are feeling a collective peckishness. Street food is almost by definition not something to be eaten in a heated, dimly lit building with tables and chairs and the paraphernalia of cosy modern British hipster living. Street food should also be reasonably priced and not sold at the bloated prices many of our street food traders charges. The prices alone exclude a lot of the population and reinforce this as a dining scene for negroni-swigging, well-off, self-satisfied hipsters who will not visibly blanch when they receive notice of the massive increase in their council tax charges. Well, everyone is entitled to their own environment and the Hockley Social Club, with its mock working class name, is an ideal venue for the Jewellery Quarter socialist with nothing useful to do.

 The Mayoral hustings debate was fascinating with the sitting candidate and present mayor, Andy Street (only fair therefore that I should eat some street food while there), able to demonstrate everything he had done for the region and his plans for the future in a straight forward way while his socialist opponent with a whining, wheedling, sometimes almost inaudible, voice failed to give a straight answer even once but from time to time would suddenly squeak loudly at something Mr Street was saying and then smirk at a tiny cabal of his supporters to his right though his embarrassing ejaculations were something the Hockey Social Club sound system found alarming and incapable of dealing with without assaulting the audience’s hearing.

  The subject of what the Mayor could do for the local hospitality industry was raised by the founder of the Digbeth Dining Club, Jack Brabant, and neither had much in practical terms that they could seriously put forward at this stage - Mayor Street answered the question honestly and directly while the sheep next to him wittered on for a couple of minutes with no useful result. This was the pattern of the evening and unless one were a socialist fanatic, a fair neutral observer would have scored an overwhelming victory to Mayor Street. It will be interesting to see if the ordinary regional voter, removed from the comforts of the hipster lifestyle, will support Mayor Street. I do hope so - his opponent has the charisma of an over grilled snail (not that there were any escargots on sale at the Hockley Social Club) which enables me to segue into the food.

  Only two stalls were open -  giving a choice of ‘jerk’ fried  chicken and, er, ‘jerk’ fried chicken. It was disappointing that Dan Lee’s east Asian food stall was not selling its wares that evening - I am keen to see just what he has on offer. I chose the ‘Mango box’ from Only Jerkin’ Fried Chicken priced at £14. This offered 4 strips of nicely flavoured, crispy coated, pleasingly moist and well cooked chicken together with a very edible coleslaw and agreeable sweet potato chips which, like the chicken, were well cooked. 

  But this was fried chicken with a mildly spicy taste. Had I missed something? My Caribbean food knowledge is. I’ll be the first to acknowledge, very limited though I think the repertoire needed to present Caribbean-style is fairly limited. But shouldn’t this chicken have some punch to it? Shouldn’t I have been hit by the bite of spice and the tang of smoke? Well, I wasn’t. This was just deep fried chicken, not grilled, not barbecued, cautiously spiced - ideal for the audience it was being served to, I suppose. Where was the adventure in it?

  What else can one say? Fried chicken is everywhere. I eat it rarely and would not go out of my way to do so though Greidy’s fried chicken which I’ve had a couple of times at Herbert’s Yard is particularly enjoyable. As for Only Jerkin, it reminded me of the Labour Mayor candidate - quite nice but otherwise unremarkable.

Rating:- 🌛.

  

250. Black And Green, Barnt Green.

  Barnt Green, a quiet little village just over the city border from Rednal on the way to Bromsgrove in north Worcestershire, home to some seriously well-off people, “it’s where the footballers live” (I’m not sure precisely which footballers), and now home to chef Andrew Sheridan’s latest culinary business venture, Black And Green, which serves a five or six course tasting menu.

  This sounds like a clever move. Southwest Birmingham and northWorcestershire can seem a long way from the city centre of Birmingham, especially if public transport is used (as we are all told to do) when contemplating eating out, especially in the evening, and Barnt Green seems the place to take the plunge. 

  Longbridge too, though sitting at the edge of the ‘deprived’ constituency of Northfield, might pay dividends for any food entrepreneur willing to take a risk on opening an upmarket restaurant in the new ‘town centre’, risen like a phoenix from the flames of Herbert Austin’s motor car industry, as comfortably off middle class socialist hipsters (a 2020s version of Champagne socialists),  start moving (they already have) to the ward of Longbridge West Heath where property can be bought at a fraction of the price they might have to pay in their natural nesting grounds of Moseley, Kings Heath and, latterly, the ultra-cool Stirchley. Longbridge town centre, with its fresh air blowing off the Lickeys, and its ever increasing facilities such as Herbert’s Yard, home to a working class suburban version of Digbeth Dining Club, might yet be home to a sort of Carters of Longbridge.

  But back to Barnt Green. Andrew Sheridan opened his new restaurant on 9 June 2022 to run in parallel with his triptych of Craft, About 8 and Divide all in the International Conference Centre in town. It has been said that the aim is to serve “more accessible” food than that at 8 which, in honesty, I find to be thoroughly accessible if perhaps rather more rich than my elderly digestive system can cope with. Having said that, now I am on regular proton pump inhibitors it’s possible than the glorious dishes served at 8 are no longer too rich and I should return soon to investigate the wonders of modern medicine and the glories of Craft dining. In the meantime, the food served at Black and Green was available to remind me of Sheridan’s culinary expertise.

   The mission of B & G’s seasonal tasting menu is to offer “a modern interpretation of British flavours, centred around local ingredients of the highest quality from micro-suppliers and neighbours”. So did B & G fulfil its brief?

  I rather think it did. The restaurant is modern with the usual chic decor using a palette of rather dark colours as we have come to expect. It is small and the claustrophobic may not like it but there are some clever touches such as little spots at the edge of the table from which a jacket may be hung and the lighting is quite satisfactory. The tables are small, a necessity I suspect because of the restaurant’s size, and the seating could be a little more comfortable but on the whole the restaurant was well designed though I was somewhat mystified as to why my place setting was laid so that I was looking away from the  open kitchen and hence I could not watch the proceedings. Then again the restaurant has only been open a week so perhaps subtleties such as this had not yet occurred to the front of house staff.

  Service was very efficient and friendly if a little fussy with the items on the table being rearranged several times more, I thought, for a rather obsessional neatness than for practical reasons (perhaps entities such as Michelin demand such behaviour). But the food is all.

  The amuses gueules were cleverly conceived. No fussiness here just good down-to-earth indulgences - a delightful little cheesy tart and a delicious oyster (chef, you are spoiling us) and some very edible olives. Along with these came excellent soda bread with my favourite ampersand butter. A Hendricks and tonic and a glass of English sparkling wine, the first indulgence of the flight, and I was happily submerged in the pleasure of the meal.  

  This was a true ‘tasting’ menu with the quantities on the plates being adequate to inform the diner of the chef’s abilities without being overwhelming though now I think about it, a little more pork might have been enjoyable. On to the gorgeous slice of A5 wagyu beef beautifully matched by what was described on the menu as a root tarter (I’m not sure if this was a rather obscure play on words or a spelling error but there was a very fine tartare under the slice of meat).

 

  One of the highlights was a scallop ceviche which looked particularly pretty and was delicious with the flavour of coconut soothingly and refreshingly matched up with the scallop and accompanying caviar and texture of pickled cucumber. A great dish. Next pleasing pork loin and rib - very tasty - with a delightful parsley and broccoli purée. The dessert had the admirable flavour of kalamansi, a citrus fruit said to be half way between orange and lime, though for me more orange than anything. This was paired so well with a chocolate mousse that I feel it is time for Terry’s to start producing a Chocolate kalamansi to rival its Chocolate orange.

  The final course was a good straightforward selection of three tasty cheeses served with a little chunk of fruit bread which was not quite adequate in amount for the amount of cheese.

  Andrew Sheridan, who came out to deliver the dishes to, and to speak to, the little select group of diners gathered in his new enterprise, has brought a promisingly fine restaurant to an area sorely in need of somewhere special to eat, which the people of southwest Birmingham and north Worcestershire have long been awaiting. Good move.

 Though perhaps not served in great quantities per plate, there were luxury ingredients in the meal - scallops, wagyu, caviar - which made it all seem rather special and very sensibly priced. Another good move.

  And finally, in case the reader is wondering, on a personal note, my proton pump inhibitor is working 100% efficiently.

    There are many restaurant awards in The United Kingdom every year now. It is pleasing for the Chefs and restaurants which are recognised by them. But it seems that some chefs are now more likely to be found at an awards ceremony than in their own kitchens. True, the latest Awards extravaganza, the grandiosely-named Estrella Restaurant of the Year, was held on a Monday evening when most restaurants are closed but it is beginning to look as though chefs are following in the footsteps of university academics who spend all their time at various national or international (which they prefer obviously) conferences lecturing to the same audiences on the same subjects but just in different places, the more exotic the better.

  The outcome of these awards is all very predictable with London restaurants and chefs being awarded the lion’s share of the plaudits with our own excellent West Midlands restaurants being poorly represented. Thus in the top 100, only two West Midlands restaurants are featured - congratulations to Brad Carter’s Carters of Moseley at number 80 and Aktar Islam’s Opheem at number 88 - while 59 London restaurants appear in the top 100 list, seven of the top ten being located in London. What nonsense.

201. Peruvian Street Food in Longbridge.

 

  I have expressed in previous Blogs my lack of excitement when faced with the threat of having to consume Street Food. I have had one or two overpriced stinkers in my time and all eaten uncomfortably seated on some stray street bench somewhere or the other with a gale whipping around me, drizzle in the air and the dog looking utterly miserable.

  Digbeth Dining Club made consuming street food in Birmingham somewhat more comfortable and, more importantly, cool, (or whatever word is now used to denote cool) and eventually sent out little satellites on a regular basis so that street food was not just confined to the inner city (by which I mean Digbeth and, lattetly, the Jewellery Quarter) but also suburban neighbourhoods and notably distant, near-rural Longbridge. 

  On 19 November 2021 St Modwen, the company which redeveloped Longbridge, with Digbeth Dining Club, opened Herbert’s Yard, named after Herbert Austin who founded the Longbridge motor factory, to house diners buying street food from stalls set up by regular stall holders of Digbeth Dining Club. There are dozens of tables which from the first day attracted hundreds of people local to south west Birmingham and northern Worcestershire - families, the young, the old and … their dogs. At last - street food at Longbridge in dry, spacious, wind-free surroundings (and Longbridge can be so wondrously windy that any denizen of Digbeth would believe that they had been transported to another planet by gastronomic aliens). 

  South west Birmingham has no restaurant to thrill the gourmand and so Friday, Saturday and Sunday at Herbert’s Yard is an opportunity not to be missed with approximately six Digbeth Dining Club stall holders turning up every week to sell their wares; the vendors changing every week. On the opening day I ate Taiwanese style with a delicious spicy jackfruit bao and in contrast then turned my attention to a hot dog but the size of the ‘jumbo’ sausage’ was far too excessive for my taste and Lucy The Labrador came to my aid and polished it off. The accompanying crispy onions were also no substitute for sweet gently fried onions which are traditional accompaniments with hot dog - sometimes change is not always for the better.

  I was unable to revisit Herbert’s Yard for a couple of weeks being away in Ludlow and Lichfield dining very well as previously reported. However on a return visit I was delighted to find that there was a stall there named Chakanita, run by those behind the Michelin-plated Chakana Peruvian-style restaurant situated in Moseley (and which was recently gushingly reviewed by Jay Rayner in a swooning ecstasy after visiting Chakana). There was no competition for my interest this week. It had to be Chakanita. It had to be Peruvian. After all, how often can you eat food prepared by a Michelin-listed establishment in these distant outer reaches of the city?

  We must remember that this was street food, prepared on relatively primitive cooking devices in a wooden shack. Not a smart Michelin-listed, food critic-pleasing, restaurant in a wealthy, Champagne- socialist, inner suburb of the city. I had long viewed Chakana as a restaurant I really must visit but I have an aversion to Moseley which I find hard to overcome and I still had not summoned up the moral fortitude to head to Moseley to enable me to eat at Chakana. But here was Chakana, or its smaller wayward sibling at least, plying its trade in modest Longbridge. 

 I chose a chicken tomale with an excellent, fresh spicy salsa which proved to be very edible indeed. The chicken was nicely cooked and the slickness was perfect. The pork in a blue corn bun - not a lot to say about it except that it gave a lot of pleasure.

  These few minutes of pleasure at Herbert’s Yard were the spur I needed and when I returned home I reserved a table at Chakana for a few days time. It was time to overcome my Moseleyphobia and set off to see if I could also experience Jay Rayner’s ecstasy at Birmingham’s mothership of Peruvian cuisine. The excitement of anticipation is growing already.