Having girded up my loins recently to visit Moseley with the extremely pleasing result that I had my first meal at Carter’s Of Moseley for an excessively long time, it was time, I decided, to finally head in the opposite direction to Harborne and set out for Harborne Kitchen. Both districts are home to the well-heeled and therefore, along with Edgbaston, the most likely suburban locations (though none of them are really all that far from the city centre) to be able to support expensive, highly rated restaurants (Harborne was formerly home to Turner’s - see Blogs 13 and 18) which is a description aptly applied to Harborne Kitchen and Carter’s Of Moseley.
Harborne Kitchen was opened in November 2016 by its Chef Patron, Jamie Desogus, who said at the time that the restaurant would be focusing on “precise modern British cooking”. He said that he had the inspiration for opening the restaurant while dining at The Clove Club in 2013, later awarded a Michelin star, which offered a “new style of unpretentious fine dining to foodies”. Desogus, who was born in Kidderminster, himself in the past had worked in the kitchens of Michelin-starred restaurants including Gordon Ramsay’s Petrus. Prior to opening Harborne Kitchen, Desogus was cofounder of the ‘pop-up’ restaurant in Harborne, the Butchers Social, which centred itself on serving chicken wings and The Harborne Kitchen was then opened in the old Walter Smith butcher’s shop (once so widespread in Birmingham) which had been the home of the Butchers Social. He had also previously worked in Turner’s for a period (how well I remember Richard Turner’s scowling face looking around at the diners in that restaurant as he stood on the dining room side of the door to the kitchen).
As a footnote to be returned to in the future, the Butcher’s Social under Chef Director Mike Bullard moved to Henley in Arden (in a building across the road from Cheal’s of Henley) in 2018 and reopened in 2021 at The Forest Hotel in Dorridge (the building in Henley in Arden now being taken over by Glynn Purnell for his new pub restaurant - The Mount - which is soon to open. The West Midlands culinary scene - forever evolving.
But back to The Harborne Kitchen. It was awarded a Michelin Plate in 2018 in the 2019 edition of the Michelin Guide when the restaurant was described as, “Modern British - Neighbourhood. This neighbourhood restaurant is surprisingly spacious - long and narrow, with an open kitchen at its heart; the tiles depicting a bull harking back to its butcher’s shop days. Modern dishes have a Scandic feel and feature some unusual combinations. The seats at the counter are a popular choice”. Now the present online guide summaries the restaurant as, “Deservedly loved by local diners, this contemporary neighbourhood restaurant serves a set menu of interesting modern dishes prepared using excellent ingredients. At its hub is an open kitchen, where you can watch the passionate team at work: the tiles bull is a throwback to its butcher’s shop days”. The tiles bull, a Hereford I think, is one of those sights worth seeing for a Birmingham diner - meaningful, historic art which few other Birmingham restaurants can lay a claim to having as part of their decor. The bull itself gives a visit to the restaurant a sense of occasion. In its way it’s as noteworthy and historic as the twee painting of the street urchin in Roux’s Le Gavroche in London.
But let’s launch into the food. After a pleasing welcome and a thoroughly delicious gingerbread-flavoured cocktail the amuse gueules came flying to the table one after another, “One, two, three, down the hatch, yum yum” to paraphrase Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited (but he was talking about Alexander cocktails not the fabulous little nibbles which were presented to me). From the word go it was obvious that the theme of the evening would be intense flavour. The first two little nibbles came mounted on crisps, first shockingly delicious Devonshire crab looking a little lost sitting in a scallop shell balanced on top of a large bowl of large pebbles (are pebbles, hay, edible soil and so on all getting to be a little passé now?, I wonder). Still I get the point, there’s the crab scrabbling over some seaside rocks.
Much easier to spot was a wondrous nibble of chicken parfait with glorious sweet incursions of white chocolate, a delight indeed. And then the final nibble, a fine little tartlet of River Wye smoked eel with the flavours of heritage tomato and subtle hints of horseradish. Sometimes I dream of a restaurant which serves a meal just made up of numerous amuses gueules and that it is located in the building next door to where I live. Perhaps such an entity exists in Paradise and these three appetisers are there on its menu.
Excellent bread, tasty and with perfectly crispy crusts, accompanied by an unusual and successful smoked yeast butter
Then pasta, Sicilian pasta to be exact in the form of a thoroughly enjoyable dish of malloreddus, mini-armadillos in a creamy, cheesy sauce with a fine covering of 60 month parmesan and truffle and looking like an old man’s beard and fabulously flavoured. And then a truly great dish, the Roscoff onion, a crispy onion-flavoured tuile sitting on a bed of deliciously puréed salt baked potato with blue cheese and all with a little moat of stupendous miso.
More intense flavour presented itself in the form of sweet seasoned shrimp and kohlrabi tartare with nasturtium leaves. This dish could not be improved on, it’s flavour again makes it a classic. Next, to a dish of beautifully cooked brill - what a noble fish it is with its lovely moist white flesh and a pleasant respite from the ubiquitous halibut - served with sea aster leaves which made a real contribution, and soy and ginger. I wondered at first, was it a little too salt-flavoured? and then decided it was not and that it was the mild ginger flavour that had given me my early doubt.
The meat course - a fine piece of venison, cooked exactly how I like it, on a bed of tasty Savoy cabbage enhanced classically with the flavour of bacon and served with roast sliced celeriac and a celeriac purée with a sprinkling of chocolate which made sense but really did not seem to do all that much for me. I did have reservations about this dish - the celeriac two ways. Both of the celeriac offerings were tasty, the purée intensely so, but I could have done with just one of them - perhaps the purée and the roast sliced celeriac substituted by earthy potato instead.
My least favourite dish was
Baron Bigod, which showcases the Suffolk-produced unpasteurised soft Brie-like cheese of that name. My paternal ancestors lived in Suffolk from some time in the 6th century up until the late 19th century and among my ancestors are the Bigods, the original in England being the first Earl of Norfolk, one of William The Bastard’s most loyal henchmen who came across with him from Normandy in 1066. So Baron Bigod cheese, the first batches of which were produced by Jonathan and Dulcie Crickmore in 2013, has a special place in my gourmand heart.
I do not usually have the (normally optional extra) cheese course with tasting menus - an old bloke’s stomach can only cope with so much - though I am a great cheese lover (it must be the sliver of Norman French in my genes) and it’s good to see a chef attempting to make the cheese course more interesting and using the intensely flavoured Baron Bigod as its centre piece. But the dish looked extremely inelegant and the presence of quince and amaranth though charmingly harking back to an older cuisine was not such a great success as one might have hoped. I think on the whole that the cheese course, if one is to have it, should mainly keep to its traditional format but perhaps a second visit to Harborne Kitchen and a second indulgence in Baron Bigod may convince me otherwise.
Then, great happiness. The ice cream trolley was wheeled up to the table in a great piece of restaurant theatre (perhaps not quite as dramatic as Birmingham-born Monsieur Joseph’s carving of the pressed duck at the Savoy - see Blog 146 - but great fun) and the pre-dessert was served - a delightful pairing of soothing bay leaf ice cream and scintillating mandarin sorbet served on a bed of crumbled polenta cake and with toasted almond. Another little gem.
I have no idea why it is (cocktails, wine perhaps?) but I frequently forget to photograph the final dessert and so the excruciatingly memorable “70% chocolate, coffee, Jerusalem artichoke” is visually unrecorded here. But no matter, its memorability is not really visual but its remarkably unpudding-like flavour and squidgy nature of the artichoke and the hyper-crunchy toffee tuile which actually all did come together to make an unusual and enjoyable dessert. Great stuff! A pair of miso caramel-filled sparkly lips rounded off an excellent meal which made me sure that though this was my first visit to The Harborne Kitchen since it opened six years ago, my next visit would be considerably sooner.
So, I had finally visited the complete 2021 list of Michelin-rated restaurants in Birmingham in the space of the past twelve months. All, admittedly, except Opus which of course has not been open in the past twelve months thanks to the depredations of COVID-19 and Birmingham City Council and its unending roadworks. What a great city Birmingham is, despite its Council, when it comes to dining out and gastronomy.
One final thought; I took the opportunity of my Harborne excursion to amble down the High Street to take a look at what had happened at the location of the previous Michelin star-awarded restaurant, the eponymous Turner’s to once more relive in my mind being scowled at by Richard Turner as he surveyed his contented diners from the door to the kitchen. There now is a pleasant looking Asian restaurant, Tiffin. I don’t expect I will ever get around to eating there, but who knows where the Michelin inspectors will visit and what idiosyncratic conclusions they will reach?
