524. Trillium And Namaste England Revisited

  It is not fair to judge anything on first acquaintance but I often find that first impressions are rarely far off the mark. I was not, shall we say, overly impressed by the food served on my opening minute’s visit to Glynn Purnell’s Trillium, though others visiting a few days after me were jumping in the air with exhilaration after their first meals in this glitzy, sparkling, energetic and expensive dining establishment.

  However, I had made reservations for a second visit the following week and the question was to be whether or not I was going to appreciate the food more than previously.

  I started off with the Trillium cocktail which had not been available the previous week. It was pleasant enough though in the future I would opt for something less sweet.

 I had resolved to order less food on this second visit as I had ordered far too much for me to handle the previous week. I ordered two snacks and no starters and once more enjoyed the extra large gougère (the menu still has the accent over the first e pointing in the wrong direction) and, this time, the battered potato scallop which, though rather lightweight, brought with it pleasure and a hint of Aktar Islam’s sophisticated aloo tuk..

  It was all very busy but the staff had time to chat passingly and the service was fine save that the food was coming out, as in the first week, a little cooler than one might have hoped. It was difficult to see why. It all came to a head with a dish of otherwise very good confit leeks which I had ordered for my main course of braised shoulder of lamb and which were almost inedibly cold. When I mentioned this, apologies were made and a very much better hot dish of leeks was quickly served but at these sort of prices, food should be being served hot. With so many distinguished chefs in the kitchen and with the high prices, Trillium must do better. No simple errors like that should happen at any time. I’m sure that placing cold sour cream on the leeks does not help them to retain a reasonable temperature. The lamb itself was excellent and a big improvement on the pork chop I had had the previous week. The meat was succulent and delightfully tender but best of all it tasted like lamb (this is not the case in a lot of restaurants) - perhaps because it was hogget - and its being matched with mint - the two always making the ideal combination (though you can add some redcurrant if you like and a sprig of rosemary). I thoroughly enjoyed my main apart from the misstart with the cold leeks and my confidence in this new restaurant was starting to build.

 

  For dessert I opted again for the very passable zabaglione made joyous by the two accompanying beignets and topped it all off with a very, very quaffable Old Fashioned.

  This was a distinct improvement compared with the opening day. In between my two visits, a gourmand friend whom I sometimes suspect of having a Stockholm Syndrome as regards restaurateurs, had pronounced that he’d had a very good meal centred on the £55 Creedy Carver duck dish and the photographs certainly looked very good but man can not live by duck alone and I remain to be convinced that apart from Trillium being the spot to be seen at, it lives up to expectations, and its prices.

Rating:- 🌛🌛🌛🌛.

17 December 2025.

  After all the glitz and bustle of Trillium, I paid another visit to a recently reopened Namaste England in West Heath. It really is a lovely place, sadly far too quiet but I hope that is just because I chose to dine there early lunchtime midweek, its decor bright with colourful elephants painted on the walls and a Christmas tree to bring seasonal pleasure; with a short and enticing menu which has a marked emphasis on vegetarian dishes while not proscribing meat and poultry. It’s all nicely presented but has a charming home-cooked and rustic air to it all. I like going there.

  This time I started with a pistachio lassi - very good - and then, as on my previous occasion, ordered the nice little onion bhajis which were perfectly spicy and matched by a nice yogurt dip though they were a little dark and looked as though they had been fried for longer than they should have been.

  As my main, this time I had the chicken biryani which was served nicely but there was no pastry cover over the biryani. The rice was well cooked and the little chipmunks of chicken incorporated in it were moist and pleasant. The rice was a little oily and I could not help wondering if this had been a stir fried pilau with added chicken rather than a steamed true biryani. The fried onion slices scattered on the top were also burnt and did not look good. It was certainly a very generous portion but after a number of mouthfuls I grew a little tired and bored with it and asked for the remainder to be boxed up for me to have for summer. Despite its faults the dish was aromatic and tasty and pleasant enough.

  Once again I had the excellent homemade pistachio kulfi served beautifully in a pretty little dish and thoroughly enjoyed it.

  This is a lovely place where a decent enough meal can be had. The prices are remarkably low (I paid about £27 for the three courses plus lassi and service which was added at just 5%). Tge service was, as before, charming. I hope that it succeeds.

Rating:- 🌛🌛🌛.

23 December 2025.

517. Namaste England.

 

  I described a visit to the West Heath located Namaste England back in May 2025 (Blog 484) and reported that I had found it to be a pleasant experience. Very shortly after dining there it closed without warning (trade did appear to be rather slow) but, with something of a flurry, it reopened on 11 November with a little flurry of advertising on social media.

  I was therefore interested to make a return visit and found that the owners had clearly had a rethink including opening for lunch (which suits me very much) and adding much more colour to the place with garlands of flowers hanging from the windows, more pictures and a lovely mural featuring a pair of elephants along one of the walls. Service was charming and genuine and the food cooked it seemed by a different chef - a lady keen to receive feedback - was excellent .

  I have no pretensions when it comes to south Asian food - I do not seek out “authenticity” as so many who claimed to know about the subject used to do in the past and determinedly gave the cold shoulder to anything that wasn’t eaten with fingers nor was was served “on the bone”. I like nice tasty food, nowadays less spicy than I may once have chosen to eat, nicely presented and if possible with elements of the sweet and the sour. 

  The food at Namaste England did have the ring of authenticity to it, I thought, but was readily appealable to a western plalte. It was very well prepared but had a refined rusticity to it.

  To start I had a very good lassi and four really exquisite little onion bhajis - tasty and with a crispy exterior - served with soothing raita. Very enjoyable. My main was a fine meaty lamb rogan Josh with just the right amount of heat in it. It looked tempting and lived up to its appearance.i had a reasonable buttered naan with it.

  Then, for dessert, came a real gem - a delicious homemade pistachio kulfi served in a pretty lidded dish. Lots of south Asian restaurants serve bought-in kulfis but this was the real McCoy - absolutely top notch. It is worth returning to the restaurant for the kulfi alone.

  Here we have it then, a fine little suburban restaurant which is just a little different from many such dining establishments, serving good food where the diner notches up a very modest bill. If this were located in Stirchley tge hipsters would be pouring in already.

Rating:- 🌛🌛🌛🌛

13 November 2025.

484. Namaste England, West Heath.

 

  Stirchley and Kings Heath are fashionable and Bohemian in a calculated, scruffy sort of way; Harborne, no more attractive than a suburban high street might be expected to be but looking plainly prosperous from just looking at its well-heeled denizens and Edgbaston, all regency and nicely spoken and populated by the less common of Birmingham’s wealthy citizens such as the nouveau riche of Four Oaks or Solihull.  There’s the Jewellery Quarter, populated by the Bohemian middle aged and elderly with a lot of money to spend and then there are all those ghastly flats scattered around Ladywood and the innermost city where the well off young will pay a packet to live in boxes but have easy access to bars and restaurants and possibly the view of a canal and a bit of status imbued by the location of their accommodation.

  Then there’s a different city - that where the less well off live generally comfortably in far less overpriced housing sometimes with extensive gardens, the fresh air blowing briskly from the neighbouring countryside. I think particularly of south west Birmingham, on the edge of Worcestershire, where Longbridge has risen from the ashes of Herbert Austin’s now long closed motor factory to supply the locals whose families have lived in the area since the 1950s and 1960s and never felt the need to move elsewhere with a neo-brutalist town centre with a Marks and Spencer’s - far better than the store in town - and Herbert’s Yard, the site where street food salesmen bring their food for the locals to enjoy and for hipsters from Harborne to visit and praise and feel uncomfortable about because they are surrounded by so many non-diverse common people whom they view as having very little food knowledge.

West Heath is part of the city ward which includes Longbridge - until 1911 it was not part of Birmingham but home to farmers, agricultural workers and nailers and it really only began to grow in the 1950’s when the monstrous Manzoni devised a plan to rehouse thousands of poor inner city dwellers on new estates there which swept away the countryside and inflicted concrete and multi-storey flats on what had once been farmland and beauty. At the heart of this most rural suburb the original small village remained and still does - a sort of downmarket Barnt Green. And even there on the edge, green fields and grazing cattle, soaring buzzards and wild roe deer, and public footpaths that head off across the countryside, the residents like to eat out and from time to time a new restaurant springs up.

And, a couple of months ago, this did indeed happen - a new Indian-style restaurant,  Namaste England,  opened in West Heath village in the small shopping area in Alvechurch Road. I visited it very early on a Thursday evening at 5PM which turned out to be a little too early as I was the only diner at that time and the atmosphere was, er, flat.

  The advantage of the location and the restaurant’s large window was that the place felt spacious and light and appealing, unlike some of the boutique dining establishments in Stirchley for instance which are dark and crowded. There was a nice bar, not obviously heavily laden with a choice of drinks but actually quite appropriate for this particular restaurant. I did not particularly crave any alcohol but instead ordered a tasty, soothing mango lassi which was nicely presented and so enjoyable that I had a second later in the meal.

  There was a good choice of dishes featured on the menu but not so many as one might find on a good old Indian restaurant menu and this was quite pleasing, I thought. For starters I chose the nicely crispy pani puri served with a well judged spicy tamarind sauce and spiced water with puffed rice. This was excellent. The presentation was very pleasing and the dish itself had an air of rusticity about it, like home cooking.

  I then opted for a very fair priced ‘Chef’s special thali’ which again conjured up the homely rusticity of the first course. At just over ten pounds it’s hard to expect too much but this seemed very fair. The dish highlighted Malvani cuisine from Maharashstra, the chef being from Mumbai, and there was a very real air of authenticity about it. There was a spicy small bowl of chicken curry with the chicken being served on the bone. This was a problem as it seemed there was more bone than meat but what chicken there was was moist and tasty. There was a separate bowl containing a curry sauce which seemed to be a rather thin broth but it soaked up the rice which came with the meal and the bread was also of use in the eating of it. Other accompaniments included a pappadom, slices of onion and a mango pickle about as aggressively sour as one would want it to be.

  There was no need to order a dessert as the thali came with an excellent gulab jamun which was not oversweet having not been doused in syrup and was therefore not horribly sickly as this dessert may often be.

I enjoyed my first visit to this delightful restaurant which still has some way to go in its development but it’s good to see Birmingham’s less fashionable suburbs serving as home to some interesting and stylistically less familiar dining establishments especially when they avoid a clichéd image and strive to bring a different approach to what by now has become a tired south Asian cuisine. I left the restaurant feeling that if it had been located on Stirchley’s high street then it would already be another hipster niche favourite.

Rating:- 🌛🌛.

29 May 2025.