166. In Stratford Another Sad Farewell - To The Scullery.

 

  And this is how it happened. Lucy The Labrador and I were back in Stratford and I wanted to have another happy evening enjoying Chef Andrew Edwards’ wonderful food (see Blog 80) which he has been serving since 2014 in his charming little restaurant in Greenhill Street, No 33 The Scullery. I took a quick look at Tripadviser to see what the latest vox populi had to say about this darling little place only to discover that it had completely disappeared from the listings. Alarmed, I scurried through the internet trying to find out what was happening and discovered that it had been rebranded, and it seemed reasonable to me to tie it more to Shakespeare, as Prospero. I thought that was a clever move by Mr Edwards, putting the days of the lockdown behind the restaurant, except that a well established brand had disappeared which could hurt trade and, as I was to discover, the rebranding had not been carried out by Andrew Edwards.

  There was a bit of a do trying to get a reservation - one day none were available, the following day, thinking I would just check, there was no problem securing a reservation at my preferred time. 

 On the arranged day I arrived at 7PM expecting the restaurant to be quite busy but in actuality only one other table was taken. I received a pleasant greeting from a charming lady I recalled from a previous visit and was seated at a table of my choice noting as I did that though the restaurant had been rebranded the decor at least was unchanged what with its Jack Vettriano prints and quotes about dining and food.

  I was asked if I wished to order a drink. I asked for a Cotswold Gin and tonic but was told that the restaurant only sold Gordon’s plus one or two of its flavoured gins. I assumed it was reasonable to limit the options when a period of financial upheaval has taken place and pragmatically chose rhubarb and ginger flavoured Gordon’s which was pretty unpleasant. The menu had been drastically pared back as well. The ‘Specials’ blackboard had disappeared and there were only 4 choices for each course on the menu, though one of the starters and one of the main courses were not available, a state of affairs for which the very nice front of house lady apologised. But I was glad was that some of The Scullery’s great dishes did still feature on the list of dishes. And I went for their previously excellent scallop starter and the stone bass main course which had previously been quite fabulous there.

  The scallops, very well priced, were a great pleasure, perfectly cooked and with a joyous sweetness that I had not experienced in other more expensive restaurants recently. The presentation was a little odd with the scallops themselves looking very pretty with again perfectly prepared samphire a delicious liquor sitting in a shell but the shell itself balanced somewhat inelegantly on a plate with an apt but lonely-looking rasher of bacon and three peaks of inapt mashed sweet potato. The shells themselves would have been much the preferable with perhaps little cubes of bacon or pancetta added to the scallops in them.

  The stone bass main course, cooked extremely well and so delightfully simply, served attractively with mussels and summer vegetables, was delicious and was not far from being as good as the first stone bass I had at The Scullery some years ago and which was so exquisite that it remains a happy memory with me. A dish to give great pleasure and again very reasonably priced. 

  I was curious to know about the rebranding and I discovered that Andrew Edwards had sold the restaurant - I was sad to hear it - and a new unidentified chef had prepared the meal. I suspect the new chef had worked there before as the dishes could all be described if works of art as “After Edwards”. The new chef had obviously been an attentive pupil. More alarming was the revelation that the new owner had also taken over other local businesses - a pub was named which in my perusal of Tripadviser had recently attracted a lot of adverse comments - and the alarm bells began to ring that this sweet little local restaurant had fallen into the hands of a profit-first merchant, hence the reduced menus and drinks options. Stratford has far too many so-so bistros in Sheep Street all owned by the same proprietor without the loss of The Scullery. We will see what develops. Meanwhile it has to be noted that though there were few diners food was very slow coming out of the kitchen. Perhaps the new chef is finding his or her feet given that the Prospero opened only last week.

  I chose one of the three desserts on offer - a vast and not attractively presented Eton Mess. To be fair I enjoyed the ice cream element for sure but it seemed that a single finely chopped-up strawberry had found its way into the dish. This was an interesting if inaccurate twist on the term ‘Fine dining’.

  I departed Prospero having broadly enjoyed my meal but feeling wistful and anxious. I hope this pleasing little restaurant can maintain the standards and principles established by Andrew Edwards when he first opened it. The food there has given much pleasure over the years. And so I say to No 33 The Scullery, “Now cracks a noble heart - Good night sweet Prince. May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest”.

Andrew Edwards of No 33 The Scullery.

 Meanwhile there is some optimism to be felt in Stratford - I hear that the Mercure Shakespeare Hotel, previously home to a mediocre Marco Pierre White New York-style restaurant which in an unseemly fashion replaced Shakespeare with White, is unlikely to be replaced by another branded chain restaurant but instead will have its own in-house restaurant and, fingers crossed, possibly a good one. The Falcon has The Woodsman, and look how successful that is, so there may be hope of something good materialising at the historic Shakespeare.

80. Scullery And Shakespeare.

With the West Midlands turned into a giant lake as the result of the incessant rain and resultant flooding, it was pleasing to find that Stratford-upon-Avon at least was only mildly affected with a fairly minor bursting of its banks by the Avon as it flowed through the town near the Royal Shakespeare Theatre and Holy Trinity Church where Shakespeare’s mortal remains lie at rest.

  The thing about Stratford is that it is a one industry town and that industry is Shakespeare. If anything goes wrong Shakespeare-wise then everyone there suffers. The disastrous decision by the Royal Shakespeare Theatre to feature endlessly on its main stage a pretty naff musical about a boy who wants to wear a dress and turn up to school in it has, so I am told, had a negative effect on some of the good restaurants in the town. It seems that the play, aimed at families with teenagers, is not attracting the usual people who visit the Royal Shakespeare Theatre and those it is attracting - its target audience - are more likely to end up in a cheapish pizza joint (though nothing is cheap in Stratford) than a good quality restaurant.  So it seems that the winter season has not been a kind one to some of Stratford’s restaurants. 

  Some probably have advantages in this situation - Salt, despite its glum waiting staff, has a Michelin star to attract the punters though when I walked past it one evening a couple of weeks ago it didn’t really look as though trade was booming, The Woodsman has the benefits of being situated in an upmarket hotel with a potentially captive clientele and also has the lure to the curious of being a fairly recently opened restaurant which has been feted by some professional critics and No 9 Church Street seems to have a loyal band of older local diners who turn up there from time to time though the thought of setting out to go there on dark wet evenings as we have had in recent weeks may act as a disincentive despite no matter how enjoyable the food served there might be. Then there are the cloned bistros on Sheep Street, close to the theatre and hotels, which have menus which hold more promise than they deliver and are well set up for passing trade.

  Then there is No 33 The Scullery, a dear little restaurant loved by Tripadvisors but ignored by Michelin and The Good Food Guide though the food there is really rather good. Situated on Greenhill Street, rather unpromisingly next door to a launderette, it doesn’t benefit to any degree from passing trade unlike the establishments of Sheep Street. But it does benefit from its justified Tripadvisor popularity and, I should think, local word of mouth.

  Small and narrow, it was opened by chef Andrew Edwards and his business partner Carl Pritchard towards the end of 2014 in the same spot vacated by Moro, a well thought of Italian restaurant which relocated to elsewhere in Stratford. I dined there quite often in its early days when things were rather quieter than now and you could have a little chat with chef about your opinion about his dishes at the end of your meal. The Stratford dining scene was quite different then - no Salt, no Woodsman, all the Sheep Street clones, some not very good Asian restaurants and some chains - just No 9 Church Street to tickle up one’s appetite. Andrew Edwards’ new little restaurant was a bright light newly lit for Stratford diners - he revealed himself to be a chef who could produce extremely enjoyable dishes with high quality, locally sourced ingredients without silly, flashy blobs and streaks scattered around the plate and substituting better cuts of meat for the prevailing and ubiquitous pork belly and cheeks of ox or pig. In short the arrival of No 33 The Scullery in Stratford was a step forward for this town where there’s a fair bit of money floating around and where one would expect that the locals would appreciate an alternative high quality food emporium.

   It isn’t a place where you feel you need very much more than the exceptionally fresh and delicious food prepared admirably expertly by Edwards but the restaurant is bright and cheerful, the serving team pleasant and helpful and the drinks are rather good. It was soon after The Scullery was opened that I discovered the sheer joy of Cotswold Gin from south Warwickshire and debuting in The Scullery and it’s still there along with, I see, Stratford gin. But back to the food. The point about the place is that Andrew Edwards is a really good cook. He knows how to produce excellent fish dishes without needing to immerse them in water baths and his meat is perfectly cooked by methods used by cooks rather than celebrity chefs. 

  He does have a habit of being rather inflexible and probably unseasonal with the vegetables he serves with his dishes; I have made the mange tout a particular enemy of mine over the years and that particular entity does seem to appear on his plates of food at any time of the year but, unlike so many restaurants, he does actually seem to realise that having some vegetables accompanying a meal is a good thing. It’s a particularly good thing if you’re not paying £5 for a small pot of mashed potatoes with a bit of garlic and bacon added to it, even if it’s delicious, as is the case in another Stratford restaurant. I’m sorry to say that I don’t entirely go along with him on how cooked a vegetable should be; some of his vegetables are a little al dente for my taste.

  Andrew Edwards has maintained an excellent standard of the food presented at No 33 since the restaurant opened. I say that because I have recently visited there again. A joyous evening.

  I had a starter of a wonderfully delicious warm goat’s cheese and beetroot tartlet with balsamic glaze sitting on some very pleasant leaves. The pastry was fine and nicely thin and perfectly crispy. Goat’s cheese can be an unpleasant little number when it wants to be but this tartlet with the sweetness of the beetroot made the cheese that rode on its back excruciatingly moreish. A great little dish.

  It’s hard to have any credibility as a food lover if one can not wax lyrical about game. I often fail dreadfully on that score. But seeing what was on offer on the No 33 The Scullery ‘Specials’ board drove me with great anticipation to plunge deep into the world of game - I chose exquisitely cooked medallions of venison served with a truly fabulous bitter chocolate and port sauce with slices of small  sautéed potatoes which soaked up deliciously some of the sauce making them little taste bombs of pleasure. The picture below shows that there was a nice green and orange selection of vegetables also claiming a place on the plate but among them you can see a wicked not-too-little mange tout pushing its way into the foreground of the pretty still life. The venison was generously portioned and looked and tasted magnificent but the addition of the sauce really made it a dish to savour and remember. 

  For pudding a very edible salted caramel cheesecake with a few squirts of raspberry coulis and an amusing little texture on top in the form a few bits of pop corn.

  Hopefully the Royal Shakespeare Theatre will get over all the current silliness going on there at the moment about trying to address every concern that its liberal elite thinks that a good liberal member of society should have and give back Shakespeare to its punters and bring them all out to support the town’s only industry and ensure that great little restaurants like No 33 The Scullery and other businesses in the town don’t suffer because of the policies of the theatre’s increasingly loopy artistic production elite.

46. Gin From The Cotswolds. Where else?

  The White Knight household had a joyous arrival this morning. A package was delivered much to my surprise as it contained items which I had forgotten that I'd ordered just before Christmas. Tearing away the packaging I revealed 2 delightful bottles of special gins from the Cotswold Distillery situated towards the southern-most tip of the Warwickshire countryside at Stourton near Shipston-on-Stour.

  My first experience of Cotswolds Gin must have been soon after the Distillery was opened in 2014.

I was having dinner at the excellent No 33 The Scullery in Stratford-upon-Avon and I spotted the bottle of Cotswolds Gin on the shelf of the tiny bar in the very narrow little restaurant which itself had only recently opened. I couldn't resist trying it with the recommended accompaniment of Fevertree tonic as it was produced in a local Warwickshire Distillery and my first experience of the flavour is savoured to this day. That Christmas everyone I knew was given a bottle of Cotswold Gin as their present and my present to myself was two bottles which I viewed as being well-deserved. Since that happy time of discovery Cotswolds Distillery has expanded into making whiskys and specialist gins.

  An early specialist gin was 1616 which is said to pay homage to William Shakespeare and to be the distillery's interpretation of what gins would have been like in Shakespeare's time when gins were largely made in Holland. I remember buying a bottle which had newly arrived in the impressive little wine and spirit merchant's shop on Henley Street in Stratford, Vinology, which is situated close by Shakespeare's birthplace and which the very helpful owner admitted he had not yet had chance to sample himself and so he could not really tell me his impression of it. I splashed out on a bottle of it anyway and first sampled it with friends who were visiting me prior to going out to Purnell's for my birthday dinner. 

  I really should have read the instructions as 1616 certainly is not a gin and tonic gin, made as we are told by historic methods using a combination pure wheat spirit, distilled malt wines and gin botanicals including juniper, coriander, angelica, orange peel, cassia, nutmeg and allspice. The spirit is distilled in red wine casks and diluted to 46% strength. If I had read the instructions I would have known that this drink would have been best served by itself on ice or with ginger or ginger beer. Still, a memorable drink from Cotswald's Distillery.

  And so to the package which arrived today with the two new Cotswolds Gins safely wrapped but rapidly unwrapped. The first bottle was Baharat which is said to be a tribute to those inhabitants of the Cotswolds area who lived in Georgian and Victorian times and who set out from their Midlands homes to travel the world and bring back  various treasures and flavours from their journeys.

  Baharat is produced by adding a combination of middle eastern spices to juniper and wheat spirit, the spices including cumin, coriander, chilli, cardamom, clove, black pepper and sweet citrus oil. It is recommended to be drunk (this time I read the instructions) as a gin and tonic garnished with a slice of orange peel perhaps half dipped in chilli flakes or with ginger ale in place of the tonic. Mmmm ...

  The second bottle contained Cotswolds Ginger Gin which contains Cotswolds Dry Gin casked for 3 months and then sweet Valencia orange peel is added to the matured gin with candied root ginger which soak in the gin for several weeks. Final sweetening is carried out with the addition of honey and the whole is diluted to 46% for bottling. Recommendations for serving suggested that it is best served as it is or on ice or with a few drops of Angostura Bitters or with warmed apple juice. Again, mmmmm .....

  With this little collection in the gin cabinet it looks like being a rather comfortable winter. And all of it made in the west midlands.