275. Lulu Wild.

 

  Having consumed one or two East Asian meals recently under mildly bleak conditions in Stirchley, with its hipster and Bohemian pretensions and Spartan conditions evident all around me, I thought it was time to return to glitzy, exciting, rather noisy Lulu Wild in Brindley Place for a different style of East Asian restaurant and relive the pleasures I have experienced there before.

  In Stirchley, menus exist which recall the Victorian concept of the Ordinary where diners sat together eating a set meal decided upon by their hosts, the restaurateurs, for a reasonable but set price. They haven’t quite got there yet in Stirchley but they can’t be far off. In contrast, the Lulu Wild was adventurous and luxurious, colourful and promising. I can see how Stirchley diners may feel their that shabby suburban  experience is gastronomically tasteful - outwardly modest and becoming of unworldly socialists - while flashy, pulsating Lulu Wild must, by its glitziness, be an inferior option - Stirchley dining is to Jeremy Corbyn what Lulu Wild is to Boris Johnson. But there’s room for every style and I do like Lulu Wild’s style and find the food served there to be really very good.

  I started off with a generously sized scorcher of a Margarita - a masterful rendition of that particular cocktail - and was served my choice of steamed prawn and scallop won ton accompanied by a blistering chilli sauce. The won ton were perfectly cooked and, I thought, delicious. A great and light start to the meal.

  For the main, I felt I had to revisit the restaurant’s dish of Black cod served with asparagus, raw radish and a generously sized bowl of jasmine rice. The fish was cooked perfectly as was the accompanying grilled asparagus. The rice was just as one would want it to be. 

 It is best not to mention the dessert - mango pudding - which was made up of a lot crumble, a startlingly sweet mango sorbet, accompanied by a glass containing a mélange of ingredients including I expect, mango, but more notably, some gruesomely bitter chunks of grapefruit, which I expect were inserted in an ill-judged attempt to counter the supremely sweet sorbet but which in fact were far too great a contrast and too astringent to pair with everything else. The dessert was, in short, disastrous.

  Mango pudding aside, and let’s face it, ambitious and accomplished desserts are not a feature of Stirchley  East Asian restaurant menus to any degree, this meal at Lulu Wild was excellent.

  Walking back to The Grand Hotel on the mild mid-November evening, Christmas, it seemed, had arrived complete with big wheel, skating rink, other fairground rides and in Victoria Square, the dreaded, tiresome, tacky, well past its sell-by date German Christmas Fair. 

249. Black Cod.

 

  After a second visit to Lulu Wild in Brindley Place it’s hard not to conclude that this is one of my favourite restaurants in the city. Lunching with a companion, we were very rapidly made comfortable and at ease in this splendidly exciting modern East Asian restaurant with impeccable front of house service. I had previously visited the restaurant by myself and enjoyed enormously a range of dim sum and we therefore chose the Wild platter, eight different pieces of dim sum, randomly picking four pieces each and both of us enthusing about every mouthful.

  My companion was delighted with his delicious-looking prawn stir fry but I was overwhelmed by my astonishingly superbly cooked miso marinated black cod which was devised by the chef, Nobu Matsuhisa - it was not a second over or under - and thoroughly delicious. A luxurious pairing with accurately cooked asparagus made this one of my favourite, probably the favourite, fish dish of the year so far. We also enjoyed sharing a bowl of egg fried rice.

  For dessert I chose matcha and passion fruit sponge - an excellent light and tasty piece of pleasure - sitting on lime infused vanilla crumble and served with honey and raspberry compote and vanilla sorbet. It was a pleasing end to the meal especially consumed as it was with a paired Yozushu Kodakara (a liquor made with yuzu from Kodakara prefecture) with soda which was pleasingly refreshing.

  Lulu Wild is a fine restaurant based on my two visits there. Both the food and the service appear to be consistently excellent. It is currently on my list of favourite Birmingham restaurants. The Executive Chef is Malaysian-born Derrick Chen who worked previously at the Michelin-starred Hakkasan in London.

  Elsewhere in Brindley Place, it seems that the site of the former Michelin-listed Edmund’s where first Andy Waters and then Didier Philpott were head chefs and afterwards Maribel where Richard Turner was Head Chef for twelve months, and which has been closed since the start of the first lockdown is to become  an establishment called The Gorilla Cafe, “the place for lunch, brunch and bicycle repair”. I give it six months.

  Finally, after a visit to Birmingham  a few weeks ago by a Hollywood actor, Tom Cruise, who stayed at The Grand Hotel and famously had his terrifyingly expensive motor car pinched whilst it was parked outside the hotel and also visited Asha’s where, it is claimed, he thought the curry was so good he ordered, like Oliver Twist, a second helping, a second Hollywood film star, Johnny Depp, fresh from winning a £9 million court case against his former wife, stayed in the Grand on the same night as Lucy The Labrador and myself were there. Again, like Cruise, his hosts thought it appropriate to entertain him with ‘a curry’ and, it is reported, a restaurant on Broad Street, Varanasi, hosted him and his entourage at a cost of £50,000 with him leaving staff “a large tip”. Birmingham is certainly beginning to be the place to be seen.

  The staff at The Grand were very discreet about Depp’s presence at the hotel but I became aware of the hotel’s celebrity guest when we were leaving the building only to be greeted by a large group of Depp enthusiasts, mainly young women, waiting for anyone coming out of the building just in case it was their hero. The group told me for whom they were waiting and patted and fussed the dog. Previously I had thoroughly enjoyed my Full English Breakfast served in Isaac’s restaurant which is once again brought out fresh from the kitchen rather than being left for the customer to serve themself from a buffet. Each item on the plate was delicious except that the homemade ketchup was too acidic for my taste. The scrambled egg was particularly fine and the bacon and sausage were, er, grand.

240. Dim Sum At Lulu Wild.

 

    In the history of Birmingham Friday 6 May 2022 was a mildly important date as it was then that the votes were counted at the Utilita Arena in the Gas Street Basin area, the votes having been cast the day before in the 4 yearly elections for the city’s council. I had stood as a candidate in a ward where my party did not stand a chance (someone has referred to it as a socialist republic which it proved to be) but it had been an exciting morning watching as the vote counting went on and listening to, and passing on, rumours of how our various candidates were getting on.

  The day had started early and standing around keeping an eye on the counting was more tiring than it sounds and by late lunchtime, as I walked back to New Street station through Brindley Place, I was feeling decidedly peckish - no, actually I was really quite ravenous. The sensible idea of lunching somewhere in Brindley Place popped into my mind but where exactly? Well, Lulu Wild looked promising and I had been ‘fancying a Chinese’ for a while when I came to think about it. So I ventured in.

  The menu lured me into cocktails and dim sum. I thoroughly enjoyed my two cocktails and was delighted with the dim sum. It was one of those meals where I did a little contented purring during it and, quite unusually for me, ordered extra food. And purred again.

  Great pleasure was extracted from each of the supreme dim sum - one each of prawn dumpling with pomegranate, scallop shui mai with tobiko, chicken and vegetable dumpling and Shanghai vegetable and mushroom dumpling. Great pleasure equally sprang from the pan-fried dim sum - Shanghai pork and chive dumpling, pan-fried prawn dumpling, chicken and vegetable dumpling and Shanghai vegetable and mushroom dumpling. Then, as reported above, so consumed with the pleasure of it all was I that I had another plate of pan-fried dim sum. It was all a very enjoyable experience - excellent service, a colourful happy decor, comfortably relaxing atmosphere. Just what you want for an unplanned lunch or even a planned one for that matter. Now I’m at home again I have a renewed lust for the dim sum so a return soon is a necessity.

  For the record, Lulu Wild opened in Birmingham in September 2021.