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.

164. Colmore Sojourn.

 High summer. Those who love to watch football were experiencing growing excitement that the English national team would win the Euro 2020 Championships (Hope springs eternal) and Lucy The Labrador and I had reservations to stay at the Grand Hotel in Colmore Row/Church Street once more.

  There was a bit of a crisis there as a number of the hotel staff had been pinged by the NHS COVID-19 mobile phone application to warn them that they had been in contact with someone who had tested positive for the viral infection and were therefore ‘self-isolating’. This resulted in Isaac’s, the hotel’s New York-style restaurant, being closed for dinner during our stay which was unfortunate as I had hoped to give it another try after experiencing some disappointment on my first visit.

  I had a reservation for myself at About 8 (see previous Blog) for the first evening of my stay at The Grand but, being determined to make the most of my stay at that very splendid hotel, I passed a happy half hour in the hotel’s Madeleine bar, soothing myself with an Antique Negroni, and luxuriating in the atmosphere. So pleasurable was this that I ensured that I repeated this self-indulgence throughout my stay at the hotel and tried out the food on offer there.

  For lunch I chose nothing more complicated or less luxurious than the lobster roll - not absolutely spectacular, but thoroughly enjoyable with little pieces of lobster bathed in an appealing seafood sauce and lettuce all contained beautifully in a delicious brioche.

  For one lunch, I ordered The Grand’s charcuterie and cheese platter. The waiter, mistakenly as it turned out, thought that it would not be an adequate amount of food to satiate my appetite and so I also ordered ‘King oyster mushroom calamari’ which despite mentioning two types of seafood in its title took the form of mushroom rings perfectly deep fried in breadcrumbs with aioli. I was not completely convinced by the texture but it was all very edible. The charcuterie platter was as much as I needed and included tasty venison salami, Bayonnes ham and a dreamy parfait with a choice of cheeses - I had Berkswell, Comté and an enjoyable, creamy ewe’s cheese. The platter was very nicely served with little slices of pleasantly chewy baguette with a fine butter.

  For supper one evening, after a slightly disappointing lunch at nearby Purnell’s, I had the excellent fish goujons served with a delicious tartare sauce and blackened lime. These were three meaty generously-sized goujons, like a superior mini- fish and chips without the chips though I did have the ‘hash browns’ (small portions of potato terrine with blobs of brown sauce riding on them) as an accompaniment so it was almost like fish and chips.

  I adore Madeleine. What a very real pleasure it is to sink into the comfort of its deeply luxurious sofas and gape at the magnificence of its looming ceilings, spectacular lighting and cathedral-like windows. In its entirety it is an art work sitting in the middle of Colmore Row, as much the centre of Birmingham as ancient New Street (Brummagem’s own oxymoron) and Chamberlain’s Corporation Street or the ever-changing, usually for the worse, Bull Ring. Long may the new Grand flourish if viruses, clean air zones, incompetent city councils and home working allow it to do so. And long too may it continue to serve its fabulous breakfasts in Isaac’s restaurant with its staff that make you glad to be starting the day.

  The Full English breakfast already tried out and highlighted in Blog 150, I moved on to sampling the delightful American-style pancakes with a generous portion of berry compôte and slices of orange and a very happy maple syrup. Conclusion - a great pleasure which must be repeated. 

  Again the restaurant staff are wonderful, I was offered sausages to take back to my room where Lucy The Labrador, rapidly becoming a hotel celebrity, was waiting for any treat that might come her way. Mr Peter Kienast, the immaculately dressed and distinguished-looking hotel general manager, in the restaurant to speak to the breakfasting guests, himself suggested Lucy have a sausage sent to her and how could one refuse such an offer from such a gentleman? Lucy would never have forgiven me if I had declined the offer.

  As already mentioned I had lunch one day at another of the Colmore District’s great hospitality entities - Purnell’s just a couple of minutes away from The Grand. This remains my favourite restaurant in the city, it’s just absolutely spot on - the right sort of atmosphere, staff who know precisely how to attend to their customers and of course great food, sometimes witty and original and always precise and admirable. A few dishes sometimes are a little wide of the mark but there is rarely anything to moan about. Well, up to now at any rate.

  I chose the 5 course lunch menu. This offered as usual the very moreish edible charcoal, black potatoes with chorizo dip, a half-sized Purnell’s chip and some impeccably light and tasty pain de campagne. Then a first starter the details of which I have forgotten though I seem to recall it included in it, almost inevitably, little pieces of heritage tomato covered over by a fairly flavourless tuile, the dish made pretty with little blue flowers and the all pervading nasturtium leaf. Next the second starter of a bijou-sized piece of grilled mackerel, tasty enough, on a slice of Jersey Royal potato with herbs and radish. It was a forgettable dish though once more, very pretty and decorative.

  I was starting to feel uneasy about this meal. With all the financial rigours of the last 18 months, was Purnell’s able to produce a lunch for £55 that was worth bothering about? Maybe it’s worth paying more and have more expensive ingredients rather than pretty little plates with undistinguished elements. All would be revealed.

  The hilariously titled Fish de Jour course brought us …skate. Well cooked but a flimsy and somewhat inconsequential fish when stood against the pleasures that the world of fish has to offer. The fish was served with some bumptious and meaty mussels and a St Austell mussel chowder which brought a smile to the face but I asked myself, was it really worth bothering with a small piece of skate?

  And then, at last, something with a bit of body to it - an attractive ballotine  of chicken, served stuffed with delicious but powerfully flavoured truffle and with undercooked broccoli sprig, tapenade and to crown it all, cep purée. The chicken, a little dry, was overwhelmed by the triple whammy of cep, olive and truffle - it never stood a chance. This was autumn in July. What was Chef up to?

  

Dessert brought with it a pleasant sablé biscuit with Parma violets ice cream and various fussy little bits to provide texture and extra tastes though at the end of the day it was just an excellent biscuit and ice cream.

  Oh dear. I was not in a particularly grumpy mood that day and just being in Purnell’s had made me a happy man but I could not really get to grips with this meal. I am happy to pay more for a meal with more significant elements but please don’t make me have an enormous multi-course tasting menu which overwhelms my ability to consume it to ensure that I get high status food ingredients in the dishes I have. If a special meal can not be produced in a restaurant on a tight budget, and anyone with brains and knowledge of what’s been happening in recent history might understand that, then it’s best to ask people to pay more and push the boat out for something really special. 

  These are hard times for the wonderful people who work in the hospitality industry; staff are hard to find, everything is uncertain, financial pressures must be intolerable. We consumers must be patient and ride out the storm with those who work hard to deliver a service to us and continue to support them while the ‘new normal’ is being achieved. I think prices are going to rise and and old favourites will be lost.

  Purnell’s Bistro has closed for good sadly and will be replaced by a more rural establishment but Purnell’s, I’m told, is here to stay, though I note its 15 year lease expires next year. 

  Meanwhile, the restaurant in Brindley Place, Maribel, has shut for good and the site is being advertised for someone contemplating opening a new restaurant there. I liked Maribel but feel that it was not in the right place, it just could not attract enough customers or at least that’s how it seemed whenever I visited there, whether it was called Edmund’s or something else. I fear for whoever thinks that it will be a good idea to take the site on to open yet another incarnation of a fine restaurant there.

86. Pulperia Fails To Open As Planned. Lunch At Maribel Instead.

  Not so much Buenos Aires as Venice. At least that’s what you’d think when you first see the building in Brindley Place in which Aktar Islam’s much awaited and much hyped, newly opened Argentine restaurant, Pulperia, is located.

  I had a reservation to give it a try and so I duly turned up a few minutes before the appointed hour only to be told that due to problems food was not being served for lunch at present. The restaurant manager had tried to get hold of me but the message seemed not to have arrived. Well it all looked very nice but I shall have to wait for another day to give the food a try. The entrance itself is very swish and classy-looking. What a great location.

  But there I was. I’d braved the public transport wincing every time someone on the train or tram gave a cough and I had meticulously tried to avoid touching anything where infected hands may have been first but my Coronavirus-threatened journey seemed to have been all in vain,

.Then I remembered that just across the square was that very decent restaurant Maribel formerly Edmund’s and then Edmunds Bistro de Luxe (see Blogs 59 and 81). It wasn’t busy and I was given a table. The decor style looks as chic as it did on my visit there last year but the choice of carpet colour was plainly disastrous as it shows up the multiple marks of a wet and muddy winter and leaves the poor carpet screaming, “Clean me!”. The lunchtime menu represents very good value and gives a remarkably good amount of choice.

  It’s easy to take the bread for granted but I loved the little sweetish beer and malt loaf with yeast butter. It went down very nicely with my Hendricks and Schweppes tonic. There’s nothing wrong with Schweppes’ products even though Fever Tree has risen to trendy popularity for the present.

  To the starter. I chose ‘pork, langoustine, ginger’. A pleasing dish was served - well-cooked pork belly (I know I never miss the opportunity to complain about being served yet another dish of pork belly but this was tasty and nicely coloured and completely lacking the anaemic pallor that is bestowed on anything that’s been lying around in a water bath for an hour or two) with some tasty little langoustines and an excellent bisque with some apt slices of leek.The spices placed it all in south east Asia which is never a bad place for food to hail from.

  The main course was an amiable piece of halibut tasting just as it should on a bed of puy lentils which are usually pretty horrible things but here worked very well, little tasty florets of grilled cauliflower and a champagne sauce. A fine little dish.

  Finally to the dessert of a crispy wafer-thin pastry with balls of apple, apple ice cream, little dots of a parsnip-flavoured cream (very good) and underneath it all Calvados-soaked golden raisins adding to the pleasure of the dish.

  It is 6 months or so since the young Head Chef, Harvey Perttola, took over the reins of Maribal from  the hoary, now-retired Richard Turner and he has established a good solid menu of pleasing well-cooked food. Maribel is not the best-situated quality restaurant in the city centre area. It’s a distance from the main hub of the city though now that the tram travels up to Centenary Square it is more easily arrived at by public transport. There’s a lot of competition in the immediate area with a number of chain restaurants and the pending opening of Pulperia places another quality restaurant within a few yards of it. Also on the way back to the tram stop there’s the lure of Craft Dining Room. 

  Everywhere you look there’s growing competition for quality restaurants in Birmingham and we may be on the point of seeing people stop going out to dine as the Coronavirus epidemic starts to bite. Spring is just starting. I wonder which restaurants will be around when autumn is drawing to a close here in Birmingham and the West Midlands. The Michelin Star 2021 revelation ceremony will take place on 19 October 2020 at the Camden Roundhouse (in London naturally) (there will also be a separate Bib Gourmand ceremony for the first time at a venue yet to be announced) and one wonders which of the 2020 winners will still be in business if the virus outbreak really takes grip. We must wait and see.

  On the way to the tram stop from my lunch at Maribel I did indeed pass Craft Dining Room and took the opportunity to photograph its dining pods. Interesting I think. 

59. Recently Opened, Renewed Or Closed.

   In the warm summer weather of mid-July it seemed a good idea to troop off to one of Birmingham’s newest most-talked-about restaurants which trades particularly on its pretty location in Sutton Park - the previous Boathouse restaurant now reopened and named The Bracebridge. The new restaurant had been opened by Chef owners, the brothers Steven and Scott Lewis who trained under Michel Roux Jr at Le Gavroche and previously had been students at the Birmingham College Of Food with stints also at Quaglinos and Tante Clair between them.

  The food, when served, seemed remarkably unphotogenic so I gave my camera a rest and as all three of us thought that the gazpacho was a good idea on a hot day it seemed a pity that we all found it to be rather bitter and not all that pleasant. The other courses we found to be more pleasant but hardly memorable and we summed our experience up as not being Fine Dining but priced to be Fine Dining - the food really is quite expensive doubtless because of the restaurant’s location in well-heeled Sutton Coldfield. This was a generally disappointing experience but the location was pleasant enough.

A companion and I lunched at Maribel soon after the end of the one year Richard Turner era and thoroughly enjoyed sampling the food prepared by the restaurant’s new Head Chef, 24 year old Harvey Perttola who had been working there under Turner for some months and previously had worked at Opus as a chef de partie under David Colcombe before going on to work at Swinfen Hall in Lichfield and at Hampton Manor in Hampton-in-Arden when it received its Michelin star.

  Maribel is said to now have a new ‘more relaxed’ approach to Fine Dining and my companion and I certainly felt very comfortable in the bright, pleasant dining room. I thoroughly enjoyed my starter of asparagus and as a main course, deliciously moist poussin with a perfectly cooked carrot on a bed of spicy dhal. After we had eaten Chef came out to hear our reaction to his efforts and he was very personable and pleasingly enthusiastic. It contrasted somewhat with the previous Head Chef who more than once I spotted with his head around the kitchen door seeming to glare at his customers rather unnervingly. The absence of Richard Turner’s stare certainly helped to make the restaurant atmosphere somewhat more relaxed.

  Maribel should find its way into the guides to dining out in Birmingham as they are published as the latter part of the year goes by.

   The event to unveil this year’s Michelin awards which precedes the publication of the Michelin Guide will be held this year on 7 October at an as yet undisclosed venue.

 In Birmingham, as elsewhere, restaurants come and go. I wasn’t surprised to read an article in the 6 June edition of the Birmingham Post that Harden’s recommended Tom’s Kitchen, founded by celebrity chef Tom Aikens and situated in The Mailbox, had just closed only 2 years after it had opened. It just wasn’t special enough and when I lunched there, just the once, I had the feeling of sitting in a giant works canteen though the food which was said to be ‘British comfort food classics in a relaxed and informal brasserie setting’ was perfectly tolerable - I recall having a crab cake with an inadequate amount of crab flavour which was further suppressed by an incompatible taste of mint, a generously sized, tasty pork chop with black pudding and very acceptable crepes served filled with a rather good marmalade. As I said, all very edible but not mind-blowing and when it comes to comfort food the diner does not really wish to find it sold at un-comfort-able prices.

  A couple of nice pictures taken during lunch at Purnell’s at the end of May posted here purely because the dishes gave me so much pleasure, the trifle was about as good as a trifle could hope to be. It isn’t surprising that Purnell’s has survived for 11 years when lesser establishments have gone to the wall:-

  Moving on quickly to Noel’s Restaurant which opened in June 2019 close to the Mailbox and with a canal view its home page describes it as “a modern restaurant and bar boasting high-end dining and an inspired cocktail menu to be enjoyed in an opulent and relaxed setting. Our chefs offer creative cuisine using fresh ingredients inspired by the Mediterranean. Noel’s ambition is to be the best charcoal fired grill in Birmingham, offering a range of specially sourced fine cuts from master butcher Aubrey Allen. Our pasta and ravioli is made fresh every morning by our artisan pasta makers and dressed with beautifully paired sauces”. 

  Given all that perhaps it was a mistake for myself and my two companions to choose fish dishes. Yes, it was certainly a mistake. I started off with a pleasant-looking prawn and avocado salad served in an old fashioned martini glass. The sauce had a minimum of flavour and the dish was edible but little more. By the end I felt like I was just going through the motions so as not to waste any food. The main course was worse - I chose sea bass (depicted below) which was ruthlessly overcooked - the skin was rubbery and not crispy and the fish was dry. It was satisfactorily seasoned - a point I make so as not to be wholly negative. Nothing else on the plate was memorable and additionally charged side dishes were an unnecessary expense and added nothing to the meal. The dessert on the other hand was excellent - a delicious tiramisu. My companions both had starters of spicy prawns which they found to be very average and their monkfish main courses were again over cooked with the fish being rubbery and the whole lacking in flavour. One described the main course as “horrible”.

  The service was excellent and we had a delicious reasonably priced wine which, along with the tiramisu, was the best part of the meal.

  I have not found any backstory to the restaurant and I do not think there is a named chef. I do not know who is ‘Noel’. The restaurant is pleasant and bright and we may have had a much better opinion of the place if there were evidence that it employed a chef who knows how to cook fish. I fear that the long-term future of this restaurant is far from certain.

30. Lunch At Maribel.

  In Blog 22 I mentioned how much I and my dining companions enjoyed the 7 course dinner at the recently opened Maribel in Brindley Place which is the restaurant where Richard Turner has chosen to continue his career after closing his own restaurant in Harborne at the beginning of the year.

  What a great relief he did decide to continue to delight the diners of Birmingham with his impeccable cooking which can be appreciated as much through his brilliantly good value £30 lunch as through his longer lasting multi-course meals. In fact the dishes available for the set lunch are to be found in his longer menus and in themselves showcase very nicely Turner's cooking. Each dish is enormously and profoundly tasty - no chef could be expected to do any better in providing wondrous flavours in a meal.

  The dishes prove by themselves that Richard Turner is a truly great chef who knows not just how to cook excellent food but always adds something over and above what would be expected in flavour and deliciousness.

  Starter - Heritage tomatoes with goats cheese and an exemplary tomato pressé with as powerful and scintillating a flavour as any tomato could render up to the human feeding on it. The stuff that dreams are made of. Preceded by 4 excellent to fabulous appetisers - the forever memorable 36 month aged gruyère gougère (a meal consisting entirely of these taste bombs would make one a happy person), the almost as immensely enjoyable smoked eel with horseradish, apple and nasturtium, the pleasurable raw scallop with wasabi, cucumber and oyster leaf and finally the very happy poached quail egg with anchovy, chicken and Berkswell cheese served on a small cos lettuce leaf all followed by a generous slice of sour dough bread with yeast butter.

  Main course - I do not usually choose veal but that was the main course prescribed on the lunch menu. And very fine it was too served with an excellent sweetbread, profoundly tasting veal tongue and a lovely little kidney. I'm not an offal man and I would not have opted to have these little savouries but if I must have offal, even the finest, then this is how you can get me to eat it. Alongside the main veal dish a little dish of veal hotpot was served which was again immensely tasty though I did have a tiny splinter of bone in one of my pieces of meat.

  Dessert - Much to my great pleasure the prescribed pudding was the wonderful dish of Mara des bois strawberries with meringue and gorgeous rice pudding lurking like a temptress in the base of the dessert.

  The petit four which accompanied the coffee was the immensely pleasurable mini-cornet indulgence containing a beetroot sorbet with a raspberry cream. A different type of petit four but up there among the best as a delight to accompany the coffee.

  Clearly Maribel is offering superb good value with its lunchtime menu and a couple of hours of great pleasure to boot. Such is the excellent value of the meal that the lack of choice for the set menu is perfectly understandable but I wish that there was a choice from 2 different dishes for the main course at least. Nevertheless Birmingham cuisine marches on with Richard Turner piloting Maribel among the highest fliers for diners in the city.

  

22. London: 50, West Midlands: 1.

  In the recently announced Estrella National Restaurant Awards a bunch of critics put their heads together and chose what are, in their humble opinions, the 100 best restaurants in Britain.

  We won't be too surprised to find that they rated 50 of their choice to be restaurants located in London. Nor will we be too surprised that these doyens of gastronomic criticism rated only one West Midlands restaurant - Carter's Of Moseley - good enough to feature in the top 100 list and then in a rather lowly number 66 position though this single West Midlands representative is sufficient for the ever-optimistic Birmingham Post to claim that Brad Carter 'has helped put the Second City centre-stage again' which seems just a little unjustified.

  I don't think that this has anything to do with the quality of our great restaurants but it is more a consequence of the blinkered viewpoint of London-based, elitist critics who, in the words of Giles Coren, view us as 'One eyes'.

  What a waste of time these lists are. And what a shame that the Birmingham Post gives publicity to them though I suppose Brad Carter is glad of the mention.

  The Post points out that this is Carter's return to this particular list - in 2016 his restaurant was placed at number 91 and then was absent from the list in 2017. Meanwhile Adam's was at number 52 last year and Simpson's was at 91 but both have been dropped completely from the 2018 list.

  The post quotes the organisers of the list as saying, "From Michelin-starred dining rooms with tasting menus to casual neighbourhood bistros and steakhouses, the awards are a celebration of places in the U.K. that make eating out a true pleasure." Although they don't add the obvious qualification which states, "providing they're in London or the Home Counties".

  Meanwhile, I am delighted to report that Maribel, where Richard Turner is head chef, has opened in Brindley Place and some friends and I had the magnificent 7 course dinner there 2 or 3 weeks ago. The new decor is very chic and the excellent front of house staff who served us previously when the restaurant was Edmund's fit in nicely in their new stylish get up. Turner has designed a wonderful menu, much of it beyond criticism, with some splendidly delicious dishes which look good, as shown below, and taste even better. Turner certainly seems to be on form with this new venture.