295. Kray Tredwell-Ben Taylor Collaboration At Le Petit Bois.

 Taking pride of place at the head of this edition is a photograph of a gorgeous dish - possibly the most delicious I’ve had for ages - looking a little rustic but full of the most pleasing and happy flavours - a plate of wondrously moist and tender pork cheek Bourguignon with delightful duchess potatoes. This was a dish that memories are made of. It was the highlight of an extraordinary collaboration by two great Birmingham chefs - Kray Tredwell of 670 Grams cooking away from home at Le Petit Bois in Moseley where Ben Taylor was leading the home team. They are chefs of very contrasting styles and the outcome was an evening to remember.

  It really is so very nice at Le Petit Bois. It so comfortable and relaxed and yet the service is very good. I started off with a splendidly refreshingly bitter Bicyclette cocktail and then the riders were out of the stalls. The amuses gueules were an absolute hit. They arrived with a tiny little croustade perched in the lid of a dish which when the lid was removed, revealed a very happily tasting savoury Paris Brest, the crust of the choux being beautifully crispy and the interior a combination of gorgeously salty blue cheese and sweet finely chopped grape. A witty and delicious start to the meal.

  Then another exhilarating dish of perfectly seared scallop with celeriac remoulade, apple and the very recognisable and very welcome bursts of truffle on this dark, damp winter evening. To follow was a poached egg yolk with more admirable flavours - little crumbs of crunchy toasted brioche, fois gras and more truffle. It was enjoyable but the egg yolk was overcooked and not runny when cut into and if it had been it may have raised the dish to another level.

  I have already commented on the ecstatic pleasure of the remarkable main course of slow braised pig’s cheek Bourguignon (undoubtedly Ben Taylor’s dish I should think) and so to the fish course which had all the hallmarks of having been prepared by Chef Treadwell. This was a piece of very finely poached pollock served with an exquisite vanilla beurre blanc, fragments of Jersey Royal (I would not have minded a little more potato even though I had also had some with the Bourguignon) and a nice helping of Oscietra caviar. The two main courses - the beef and the fish - both excellent - managed to demonstrate the contrast in the styles of the two chefs and this was also evident in the two desserts. Firstly there was a freshly warm small vanilla Madeleine (perhaps the vanilla flavour was a little too subtle) served with a cheeky vanilla crême fraiche made saucy with a helping of marmalade and then, to round off, a triumphantly gooey tart tatin with calvados caramel and a miso ice Kray (no doubt about which of the chefs made that, I think).

  The evening was further livened up by spotting (not hard, he was only two tables away) Birmingham’s most recent Masterchef The Professionals winner Dan Lee (now working alongside that competition’s previous winner, Stuart Deeley, at Smoke at Hampton Manor) who was one of the diners. So then, three notable Birmingham chefs in the same restaurant all at the same time.

  It was quite an evening.

  The day before,  I had lunched at Orelle with an acquaintance who had travelled from South Yorkshire for the sole purpose of the experience of dining at Orelle to taste the food and take in the view from the 24th floor. It was not a pleasant day and when we stepped out of the lift that had whisked skywards we found that the view had all but disappeared, obscured by fog surrounding the tower. Still there was always the food. As usual the place looked very smart as did the front of house staff and the service was very good; pleasingly, perhaps because only half the tables were taken, service was not rushed and I was able to sip and enjoy my Orelle Sour cocktail in a relaxed and unhurried fashion.

  As it was lunch a three course meal was on offer for an extremely reasonable sum of £42 and comparing the lunch menu with what was on offer from the à la carte choice I felt perfectly satisfied to order from the lunch menu. We were brought an excellent sourdough loaf to share between us and I very much enjoyed it, having as it did, a good crispy crust and a fine interior texture, the flavour of the sourdough being not as brutally strong as some sourdough bread can be. And how lovely to have bread at the start of the meal, available to nibble while the rest is being prepared rather than having it suddenly turn up as a ‘bread course’ almost half way through the meal as seems to be happening with increasing frequency.

  The starter was satisfactory - Saumon - on the menu it was described as “barbecued Loch Duart salmon, pickled kohlrabi, calamansi and sourdough. I thought that fish was very accurately cooked and was nicely complemented by the pickled kohlrabi but the calamansi was the wrong sort of citrus for this dish, bringing in some sweetness which I did not want. My lunch companion in contrast was very pleased with the dish and liked the flavour of the calamansi (a fruit was is obviously now very much in vogue).

  For the main course I chose a very good and pleasingly flavoured and textured ballotine of chicken served with roast parsnips which were not adequately cooked and pear which, while accepting that a chicken-pear combination is an established pairing, did not, for me at least, contribute positively to the dish. There was some exquisitely delicious and perfectly prepared pomme purée with Dijon mustard 

underneath it all and I could have quite gladly eaten with relish at least five times the amount of that element served to me.

  There was something inauthentic about the desserts; they had the air of something that had not been prepared in the kitchens but had been brought in to serve. I chose ‘calamansi’ (yes, calamansi again) described as “calamansi mousseline, strawberry and mint jelly.  Perhaps it was because I was eating from the £42 set menu (and that would be a good enough reason) but the desserts were served on a plate rather than being presented from the wonderful dessert trolley, a pleasing bit of theatre, which had manifested itself on previous visits to Orelle (I do hope it hasn’t disappeared into history after such a happy, if short life. My dessert was not good - I don’t recall being aware of strawberry or mint and the gel was decidedly citric and excessively sharply flavoured to the point of being unpleasant. The body of the dessert was uninteresting and the plate was covered in crumble, a tiresome modern device used by chefs to bring a crunchy texture without having to work to provide a fine crispy pastry. 

  In conclusion, and I will not use the obvious cliché, this meal was good in parts. As an experience it was enjoyable even though the weather was doing its best to thwart one important element of dining at Orelle - the view. Rating:- 🌛🌛🌛

  Michelin has announced that the 2023 edition of the Michelin Guide Great Britain And Northern Ireland will be launched at a live event on Monday 27 March. Already you can feel various chefs’ pulse rates starting to quicken.

  Meanwhile, the Michelin inspectors on one of their apparent rare visits to the West Midlands, have included the vegetarian restaurant, Land (see Blog 180) in its January 2023 Guide update.

  Dishes eaten at Land in September 2021 - 

289. Christmas in The Marches - Again.

 

 

  It was back to Fishmore Hall near Ludlow for Christmas again this year. It is a happy, quiet, elegant, friendly place to stay and with its ‘bistro’ area (in the cosy old sitting room) and the lovely Michelin-listed Forelles restaurant in the delightful conservatory with its view of Clee Hill in the distance there is much opportunity to eat some very good food, not least at Christmas when the programme offers generous amounts of fine food almost ceaselessly.

  Christmas lunch was everything I want it to be - there were four main course options but I was determined to stick to the tradition of turkey and found that served in Forelles to be a great pleasure accompanied as it was by all the trimmings except bread sauce. Sprouts I love but I’m a man who doesn’t like too much bite to them and these were a little underdone for my taste but the meal was a great pleasure, the gravy rich and unctious and sticky, the roast potatoes successful and of course the pigs in blankets and apricot and chestnut stuffing turned a fine Sunday lunch into a Christmas feast.

  As starter I had had a nice piece of gin-cured confit salmon served with a beetroot, caper and dill mayonnaise and for dessert I felt unable to deal with Christmas pudding but instead enjoyed a well-chosen selection of British and French cheeses. Christmas cheer indeed.

  I had a couple of meals in the bistro section of the hotel. This is very relaxed and diners can be accompanied there by their canine companions if they so wish. The dogs look perfectly placed lounging in front of the hearth of the fire that burns there and there are a number of pleasurable dishes served up there when one does not wish to undergo the process of dining in the more formal environment of Forelles itself.

  As a light meal I opted for the soup of the day on one occasion only to find that it was mushroom soup which normally is not to my taste. However the soup on this occasion was delicious as the mushroom had been combined with tarragon which made all the difference. The soup was served pleasingly with croutons and a little loaf.

  Another little pleasure to gobble down in the bistro are the ferociously delicious, hot and sticky gochujang chicken wings. I chose them as starters on each evening I ate in the ‘bistro’. They are a pleasure to live in the memory.

  Apart from my Christmas Day lunch I dined in Forelles a couple of times. On the first occasion I chose a smoked burrata starter which was prettily presented and included elements made up of peppers, courgette, tomato and aubergine which were all appropriate and livened the dish up nicely. The main course was again presented beautifully and was centred on some lovely partridge which was a little dry but very pleasingly accompanied by pear, kale and pearl barley. 

  Undoubtedly the highlight meal of my Christmas at Fishmore was the Boxing Day dinner in Forelles. This was an immaculate meal. It kicked off with an amuse gueule in the form of an outstanding blue cheese tart, very tasty and the pastry perfectly thin and crispy. Then an utterly impressive starter in the form of another pastry triumph - a gorgeous mini-beetroot tarte tatin with Yorkshire Fettle (a soft creamy cheese made from sheep’s milk), pumpkin seed and blackberry - unctiousness lay all around like the snow in the Good King Wenceslas carol. But this was only the forerunner, John the Baptist preparing the diner for what was next to come.

  The gift of Christmas was the fabulous main course of exquisitely cooked venison with salsify and a wondrous little offal tartlet of astonishing, full on flavour. This had proved to be a very happy Christmas coming to an end with the dessert - Forelles’ signature Baked Alaska reworked with sloe gin and served with slices of plum.

  Apart from eating, Lucy The Labrador and I had been out to see the Ludlow Hunt heading out of town and passing Fishmore on its route towards Downton Hall. She was a little taken aback as the well-ordered pack came racing by her. I had taken a couple of hours ambling around Ludlow itself on Christmas Eve and together we had some gentle walks on the pathways around Fishmore Hall when the weather allowed. Christmas in the Marches - again.

269. Good Food Guide Rates Birmingham As Most Exciting Food Destination.

 

  It seems to me that the relevance of the Michelin Guide to high quality dining out in England is declining exponentially. Its inspectors visit London and Home Counties restaurants which are convenient for them and elsewhere they go to nice places in the Cotswolds, or Lake District or, latterly, even the Peak District. But the conclusions they reach from their visits are arcane and repetitive and most of all … questionably outdated and unambitious. But still chefs are whipped up into pre-Award announcement frenzies. They shouldn’t be. Michelin doesn’t even bother to publish a book now and the ‘reviews’ on their websites are vague and often unhelpful, text being sacrificed for a glossy photograph.

  The Good Food Guide, on the other hand has had, and is still undergoing, a reboot which brings it firmly into the post-COVID 2020s. It was slow to get reviews on its internet pages but the number of listed restaurants is now snowballing and making the Guide a very useful tool when deciding where to go for a really good meal. Its inspectors are out and about in areas which the Michelin inspectors have not imagined in their worst nightmares but where real people live and where they to wish to dine well without driving out into the middle of a fairytale forest on a moonlit night in late autumn or, even worse, where they have to pay £300 to stay the night if they wish to drink alcohol because there are no local taxis operating late evening. 

  For historical reasons, and because of snob appeal and the indoctrination of chefs, the Michelin Guide will remain of interest for the foreseeable future but The Good Food Guide now seems to be the reliable place to go for useful, clearly defined advice on where to eat in England (and here in the West Midlands).

  As of 17 October 2022, The Good Food Guide now lists the following West Midlands restaurants - 

Grading (the symbols are my little intrusion to make the post more colourful)

                 Exceptional  - 🍗🍗🍗

                 Very good -    🍗🍗

                  Good -           🍗

West Midlands County -

The Wilderness - Birmingham 🍗🍗🍗

Grace And Savour  - Hampton In Arden 🍗🍗🍗

Carter’s Of Moseley  - Moseley, Birmingham - 🍗🍗🍗

Harborne Kitchen - Harborne, Birmingham - 🍗🍗🍗 

Purnell’s - Birmingham - 🍗🍗

Adam’s - Birmingham - 🍗🍗

Folium - Birmingham - 🍗🍗

Opheem - Birmingham - 🍗🍗

Peel’s - Hampton in Arden - 🍗🍗

Smoke - Hampton in Arden - 🍗🍗

Yikouchi At Chancer’s Cafe - Stirchley, Birmingham - 🍗🍗

670 Grams - Digbeth, Birmingham - 🍗

Chakana - Moseley, Birmingham - 🍗

Chapter - Harborne, Birmingham - 🍗 

Dishoom - Birmingham - 🍗

Land - Birmingham - 🍗

Tierra - Jewellery Quarter, Birmingham - 🍗

Tropea - Harborne, Birmingham - 🍗

The Oyster Club - Birmingham - 🍗

Eat Vietnam - Stirchley, Birmingham - 🍗

Yip in Bashu - Coventry - 🍗

Warwickshire -

Cheal’s Of Henley - Henley in Arden - 🍗🍗

The Cross At Kenilworth - Kenilworth - 🍗🍗

Salt - Stratford upon Avon - 🍗

Tailors - Warwick - 🍗

The Royal Oak - Whatcote - 🍗

Staffordshire -

Upstairs By Tom Shepherd - Lichfield - 🍗🍗🍗

The Boat - Lichfield - 🍗

Shropshire -

The Walrus - Shrewsbury - 🍗🍗

Forelles At Fishmore Hall - Ludlow - 🍗

Mortimers - Ludlow -  🍗

Old Downton Lodge - Ludlow - 🍗

Charlton Arms - Ludlow - 🍗

Sebastians - Oswestry - 🍗

Worcestershire -

Russell’s of Broadway - Broadway - 🍗

Herefordshire -

33 The Homend  - Ledbury - 🍗

The Cider Barn -  Penbridge - 🍗

The Kilpeck Inn - Kilpeck - 🍗

The Riverside Inn at Aymestrey - Aymestrey - 🍗

Gloucestershire -

Le Champignon Sauvage - Cheltenham - 🍗🍗

The Bell at Selsey - Selsey - 🍗

The Butcher’s Arms - Eldersfield - 🍗

The Woolpack Inn - Stroud - 🍗

  The West Midlands now has 43 listed restaurants with 17 located in Birmingham. There are a number of glaring omissions still - no Simpsons nor About 8 - and no visit yet to Whitchurch nor to Lunar in Stoke on Trent. No listing yet for The Woodsman in Stratford upon Avon and I would have thought a call in at Lamb’s Of Sheep Street might be considered worthwhile while in that town. In Worcestershire, there’s no mention of Pensons, and Solihull and Barnt Green now both have excellent restaurants to be visited. The Guide remains a work in progress in some ways but is catching up rapidly.

  Regardless, on the evening of 17 October, The Guide held its ceremony to announce Britain’s Top Twenty Restaurants for 2022 at the Groucho Club in Soho. I was delighted to have been invited to the event and before plunging into the remarkably noisy hubbub of a lot of food people closely packed and reaching out for generous amounts of free drinks and delicious canapés - including a fabulous sausage roll and a sea bream ceviche - I took a walk around Soho wandering down the streets which had been, and still were in some cases, home to some legendary restaurants.

  Once in the Groucho Club and having eventually deduced precisely which part of it the event was located in, I was delighted to see the familiar face of Alex Claridge and with him his partner and later, the legendary Sonal Clare and head chef Marius Gedminas - so obviously The Wilderness was to feature on the list of Twenty Most Exciting Restaurants - a very real achievement for a dining establishment which had not previously featured in the book’s listings.

  The place was buzzing - here was Richard Corrigan, there was the larger than life figure of Gareth Ward. Eventually upstepped the diminutive figure of the Guide’s Chief Editor, Elizabeth Carter, quietly spoken to announce who had won what.

  Firstly came the announcement of the year’s Most Exciting Dining Destination. Birmingham. The young chefs have made the place. And the city has benefitted from their genius, their hard work, their inventiveness, their dedication. Well done indeed. But less us not forget that the city’s shining dining scene was established fifteen to twenty years ago, in evolving stages, by the generation of the city’s great chefs and restaurateurs that has preceded those whom The Good Food Guide is highlighting in 2022.

  And so to the announcement of just which restaurants are deemed by the editors of the Good Food Guide to be “the most exciting in Britain”. Birmingham and the West Midlands got off to a great start with Carter’s of Moseley being placed at number 18, followed shortly afterwards by Grace And Savour. But where was The Wilderness? The countdown continued to number 11. So The Wilderness was in the top ten. And that was its placing - an immensely impressive number 10 - with those placed higher all already established in the gastronomic firmament. The winner was the three Michelin-starred L’Enclume and just behind it at number two was the acclaimed Ynyshir, so the as yet unstarred The Wilderness had scored a notable achievement to be in such gastronomic company. 

  The announcements were over. The achievers, some locked in comradely embraces were ready to party and it was time to leave. What an astonishing evening for dining out in the West Midlands and in Birmingham. The Good Food Guide editors see this, I think, as a gradual changing of the guard as the blisteringly good young chefs begin to become the centre of attention as their seniors start to fade. What it means is that when the established chefs do call it a day, Birmingham will still have a mesmerising dining scene recognised by the experts who advise people where to eat.

Richard Corrigan (or his back at least) at the Awards ceremony -

Gareth Ward of Ynyshir -

Alex Clare and Sonal Claridge of The Wilderness with their award - 

Brad Carter of Carter’s Of Moseley in a comradely embrace with Gareth Ward -